Wanderlust

So, Rabbi, I realized as I was flying to Italy that I was engaged in an age-old tradition, which is that Jews have always traveled. I would say if you go around the world, you’ll hear more Hebrew. And maybe it’s because I’m sensitized to it, but Israelis love to travel. Jews love to travel. And we are going to use the story of the quote unquote “spies” to explore what Jews do when they travel, what notes they take, what impact their impressions have, and how it fits into the context (of Jewish Identity). So, we’re going to look basically at our parsha through an absolutely new lens. Are you ready to go?

1:46 – AM:

I’m ready. This is exciting. I hope you’re not coming back with a bad report about Venice, Italy.

1:50 – GS:

No, no, we can’t do that. You know, I think I heard from Rabbi Riskin once when he said he was on a tour of the Louvre and a lady says, you know, I thought it was going to be a little bit nicer. And Rabbi Riskin says, the guide said back in a deep French accent, Madame, when you come to the Louvre, the Louvre is not on judgment, you are. (ed. He used this to explain how we should approach Torah study) So, who am I to judge Venice? But anyway, we are in Numbers 13, and the first part of it says, God spoke to Moses saying, the word that it uses in Hebrew is shalach lecha anashim, v’yitru, and they should “scout” the land of Canaan, which I am giving to the Israelite people, send one participant from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a chieftain among many. And then if we skip the whole list of those chieftains, those Nisi’im, and we get to 13: 16, (17) When Moses sent them to scout the land of Canaan, he said to them, “Go up there into the Negeb and on into the hill country, (18) and see what kind of country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? (19) Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? (20) Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not? And take pains to bring back some of the fruit of the land.”—Now it happened to be the season of the first ripe grapes. (21) They went up and scouted the land, from the wilderness of Zin to Rehob, at Lebo-hamath.  (22) They went up into the Negeb and came to Hebron, where lived Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the Anakites.—Now Hebron was founded seven years before Zoan of Egypt.— (23) They reached the wadi Eshcol, and there they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes—it had to be borne on a carrying frame by two of them—and some pomegranates and figs. (24) That place was named the wadi Eshcol because of the cluster that the Israelites cut down there. (25) At the end of forty days they returned from scouting the land.” So, believe it or not, Rabbi, we are going to focus on their trip, on what they did on that trip, and less on the aftermath and the impact, which is kind of novel for us, I would think, even for a typical treatment of the parsha. And as I said, in this treatment, it doesn’t mention the word spy. This parsha is normally referred to as parshat miraglim. You only get the reference to Meraglim, to secret agents, if you will, in Deuteronomy 1: 22-24. And where Moses repeats the story, it says, “Then all of you came to me and said, “Let us send agents ahead to reconnoiter the land for us and bring back word on the route we shall follow and the cities we shall come to.” (23) I approved of the plan, and so I selected from among you twelve participants, one representative from each tribe. (24) They made for the hill country, came to the wadi Eshcol, and spied it out.”   וַֽיְרַגְּל֖וּ אֹתָֽהּ   So I think it’s safe to say that when people heard that they are spies, as we talk about the Parshat Meraglim, that has a certain, I don’t no implication to it. It’s not a neutral term. All of a sudden, it’s a mission. All of a sudden, maybe they’re up to something that is cloak and dagger, it’s questionable. But in our parasha, I think it’s safe to say it doesn’t have that word in its vocabulary and the word that it does have, litur, really we’re going to talk about it a little bit. It really means to tour, which is a funny coincidence, and I think it only is a coincidence, that the Hebrew word for tour is similar in meaning and maybe even etymology to the English or French word for le tour, t-o-u-r, which also means to turn. But basically, we’re just talking about going and seeing the land, nothing nefarious, nothing surreptitious about it. I think there is a difference in the word choice. Would you agree?

6:48 – AM:

I would agree. And that’s a great word. And I mean, that’s one of those things that, you know, you go to Jewish day school and everybody knows that that, you know, that that oddity that the word Latour and the word tour mean the same thing. So that’s good to point out also.

7:02 – GS:

Now, one of the reasons that we’ve probably touched on this in the past, because I am such a fan of Tzitzit and Techelet and all of that stuff, that when you get to the subsequent chapters that follow this chapter of the spies… (37) ה׳ said to Moses as follows: (38) Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages; let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner. (39) That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all the commandments of ה׳ and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge.

וְלֹֽא־תָת֜וּרוּ אַחֲרֵ֤י לְבַבְכֶם֙ וְאַחֲרֵ֣י עֵֽינֵיכֶ֔ם אֲשֶׁר־אַתֶּ֥ם זֹנִ֖ים אַחֲרֵיהֶֽם

8:02 – GS:

So all of a sudden we do start to flush out a little bit of nuance, a little bit of maybe emotion to this simply touring. It talks about not following your heart, not turning from your way. Rashi there says the verb has the same meaning as his numbers 13, and they return from searching the land. So Rashi himself, following rabbinic tradition, makes the connection to our story of the scouts. You shall not search after your own heart, he says. The heart and the eyes are like the spies of the body. They act as its agents for sinning. The eye sees, the heart covets, and the body commits the sin, and that’s from Midrash Tanchuma, Shalach, the Talmud, Yerushalmi, it’s all over the place, but wow, it really makes a wonderful, wonderful connection between the Scouts and the historic impact the Scouts had on Jewish history and this sense of, on an individual level, following your eyes, maybe gazing where you shouldn’t. I called it wanderlust. But really there is a lust part of this wandering, this journeying. It’s a wonderful connection, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think that the editor, the author of our texts certainly put the two parshiot together for a reason.

9:39 – AM:

I think that’s right. I think that’s great. And I think that’s right. And, you know, the, the, right. The midrash isn make a big point of that, but yeah, it, in both cases, I mean, this is really the point you made in both cases. Latur is bad because like lo taturu, right. And then what the meraglim end up doing is bad.

9:58 – GS:

I mean, I didn’t have enough time to check this out. Sometimes you’re allowed to switch letters in words. Sur m’rah v’aseh tov (turn from evil and do good Psalms 34: 15) at all connected? I was trying to address exactly your point, because I think it’s safe to say that But in the Tzitziot part, picking up on what happened to our scouts, they certainly did get into trouble following their eyes. But I did wonder whether tur can also be used in a good way, in following a good example. It’s an open question. But I wonder, I think my takeaway is that when you go on a journey, when you walk around life and your eyes are open, you have to be careful. Even if you look at the verses, you wear the tzitziot not to stop you from looking, but to make sure that you don’t take the wrong action as a result of your eyes. But do you really believe it has only a negative connotation?

11:11 – AM:

No, I don’t, but I think it’s interesting that in these two stories, which are back-to-back, that it has a negative connotation.

11:19 – GS:

Okay, fantastic. So in the show notes, I do have from the concordances and others a whole understanding of what Latur can mean, but basically it has to do with going after turning and that sort of thing. And I also have a little treatment of the English word to tour. But where I want to go now is that I found a book in searching called Jews and Journeys, Travel and the Performance of Jewish History. And it’s written by a Josh Levinson, who I know from high school at Dalton. When I left Dalton for Torah vodaath—Dalton is a high school, a private posh high school in Manhattan. When I left Dalton for Torah Vodaath, Donald Barr, who was the principal, (and father of william Barr, attorney general in Busch and Trum administrations) said, this is the first kid I ever lost to a yeshiva. Well, Josh Levinson was the second. I used to see him in the library studying Jewish texts, but he actually made something of himself. He went to Hebrew University. He’s a professor there right now, and he wrote a book dedicated to Jews and journey. And just so that you can put on the right lens, here is kind of the premise of the book. The story of the Pentateuch, he writes, can be told as a traveler’s tale. The preparations for a departure, the hazards of departure, culture, privations and dangers on the journey, decisions to go back and to move on, moments of rest in days of march, failure to reach the goal even when it is within sight after years of fruitless wanderings and encampments. And what he does is he starts with Gan Eden, in Genesis 3: 23 it says, therefore the Lord God sent him out of the garden of Eden till the ground from whence he was taken. וַֽיְשַלְּחֵ֛הוּ ה׳ אֱלֹקִ֖ים

 It says, you could, in the tradition of Homer and the Odyssey, In the tradition of Chaucer and A Canterbury Tale, you could definitely make a case, and Joshua does it, that the whole Torah, obviously we have 40 years in the desert, obviously we have the expulsion and we have Jeremiah and we have exile and return, you could make the case that much of the Torah is almost like a traveler’s tale, and it lies in the tradition of great societies whose early primary sources are books like the Odyssey by Homer, where it talks about that primordial journey of finding one’s home, one’s homeland, and finding one’s self. It’s called the travel narrative, and it is a thing. Is, if you study literature, travel literature and travel narrative, is one of the most basic forms of discovery that has lasted up until today in Condé Nast magazine. Have you ever thought of it like this? You do a bunch of traveling yourself.

15:00 – AM:

It’s a great way to look at it. I think, I mean, you’re right that the story is about travel. It’s about the challenges of travel, right? Travel has so many different, you know, different complications connected with it. I’ll just say, talking about travel for one second, you know, the book of the Torah that we’re in is called Bamidbar in the desert. You know, desert is a place of chaos. And it’s interesting that they send spies to the land of Israel, which is a place of order. It’s not desert anymore. But what they report back is that the land has even more chaos than the desert. Isn’t that interesting, if you look at it that way?

16:03 – GS:

Yes, I agree. But Josh Levinson in the book doesn’t talk about the scouts. And what my argument today is going to be, that while you have Adam and Eve leaving Eden, and if he, one of the arguments that he makes is the last book of the Torah. He references II Chronicles 36: 23, where in the end King Cyrus sends the Jews back to their homeland and it says, v’y’al, let them go up. His argument is saying from the beginning of the Torah till the end of the Torah, it’s all about leaving the land, visiting the land, exile, return, finding oneself. But he spends a little bit of time on Lech Lecha, which is the obvious go-to example of a travelogue. But what I think what makes the scouts different is we read about Abraham, we read about Adam and Eve being sent on their journey, but we don’t get a sense of what they saw, literally, and we don’t get their impressions. And I think the story of the scouts, once you’re looking at the Torah within this rich of literature that describes a stranger in a strange land, of how we enlarge our vista, how we understand other cultures and therefore better understand ourselves, you could not get a more formal case of one of those journeys than our story of the scouts. So, before we start talking about it in that way, let me read a little bit more about what he talks about. He says, writings, literary or documentary, that take travel, real or imagined, as an essential condition of their production or dramatic situation that describe the movement of individuals across some kind of boundary, usually geographic, not necessarily so, and he brings Odysseus travels home from a strange land, Abraham travels to a strange land from home. A nostalgic yearning to return home and a desire to leave home and seek out a new world. The other is also constructing oneself. It’s a little bit of an expensive book because I think it’s a scholarly book, but certainly look at the excerpts that I provide in the notes. But some of the things that happen is there’s wonders. Themes of narrative are wonders. You have, and there are great Jewish narratives. I think last week I quoted the Bartenurah, who is the go-to commentary on the Mishnah. He’s also known for his travel stories. He went to Babylon. He talks about seeing camels that fly, and in the book it dissects it and explains that in the Talmud it talks about camels that can fly. So, you go to, whether you’re a Jew or you’re a Christian, you go to these exotic places, but the truth is, many times those exotic places are Bible-related. And either you confirm or you find that you can’t confirm the veracity of what you had thought. But there is this wonders. There’s a question of danger. If we have time, we’re going to read the traditional prayer that a Jew says before they travel It’s full of protect us from danger. I think someone should index the amount of laws in the Talmud that talk about whether you say the Shema when you travel? Do you say the full Shemona Esrei when you travel? We were a dislocated people and I would argue that we probably traveled more than others. We were a merchant class, and therefore we traveled with the Roman army. I think that you’ll find in a halakha, and this is a place for other research, I’d be curious to know what you think. Maybe it fits into your studies on the Erev.

20:46 – AM:

No, if you, Geoffrey, report on Venice, and you tell me this and you tell me that, So, you know, I trust you, but I can check you out. I can go there. I can go on Google Earth. I have ways to check it out. But, you know, you talk about camels flying. Travel diaries in medieval period were interesting because you could write literally whatever you wanted, right? Because nobody could check it out. I think that’s important to keep in mind.

21:17 – GS:

Yeah, and you also find that the concept of plagiarism didn’t exist as much. So, in this book, it talks about how Christians started coming to Palestine and seeing that it was desolate. And all of a sudden, they start quoting the same verses in Jeremiah. That this was the fulfillment of the prophecies and this was the punishment for the Jews. And this is the proof of their religion. The whole concept of the wandering Jew was a term that I think most Jews would say fits, but it was created for the most part by Christians where the Jew wandered and was stateless as a punishment for their sins. So now we’re getting into how these travelogues, as you say, there was no way of verifying the facts. Getting back to going after your heart and going after your lust, travel enabled people to fulfill and to confirm their preconceptions. So, if a Christian went and saw a desolate Palestine, this was proof that the Jews were punished. If they were surprised that it was so desolate, there were travelogues that said when they went to Haifa and they saw Mount Carmel that was green, they said, but it is still a land of milk and honey. There were some beautiful travelogues where they wax poetic about Mount Sinai. There’s a woman who comes from the Alps, and literally you can feel in her heart and mind that she thought Mount Sinai was the tallest mountain in the world when she climbed up of it. It’s really in the mind.

23:13 – GS:

But it’s in the mind of the beholder. And I think that’s the other part of why, when I look at lo taturu, do not go after your heart. What it means is that when you observe life, and I love the fact that in this book it says travelogues can be geographic or they cannot be. They can be fictitious. They can be in your mind. But the point is, not only are the facts up for grabs, but the concepts and the ideas and the ideologies that one sees are up for grabs. It’s interesting that you see in so many ways So many of these travelogues, not only these wonders, but—and anyone who read the Odysseus will know—scary things, monsters. So once one starts to read that—and then, of course, there’s bringing back souvenirs, where the whole theme of this year’s Biennale in Venice “Foreigners Everywhere” is how art, but more specifically museums, were used for the quote-unquote colonization ideology of the West, so that the West was able to take artifacts, rob, steal, grab artifacts from all over the world, and bring them back, put them into museums, and create the narrative of the nomad, of the barbarians.

But before there were museums, and before there even taking artifacts, there had to be people who traveled and toured. So, this whole concept of writing about going to other places to scout them out is really at the forefront of the discussions. I mean, the famous, you know, unfortunately, Columbia is in the news, it’s this professor Edward Said who wrote Orientalism, and his whole argument was that the Orient, the Middle East, is seen through the eyes of the travelogues and the resulting novels that the Westerners wrote. So, we are really talking about something that is so, so timely, and what that kind of pushes us to do is to say, where does the Jewish journey come in? And that’s the purpose of the book, and that’s what I want to kind of talk about for the few minutes that we have left. Have you thought, Rabbi, about how maybe a Jew travels differently, now that I think we’ve kind of resolved how important travel is for our essence?

26:03 – AM:

Of course! We as Jews, like you say, you go to Jewish sites, you look for other Jews, means we see travel through our eyes as Jews and through the Jewish history. History of Jews. You’re traveling through Italy, it’s completely different from someone who is not Jewish and looks at it completely differently. Everybody sees travel. Now, it’s interesting, I think that’s more so when you go to Europe. If you travel in the United States, you know, Judaism is not as important because the United States doesn’t have a Jewish history the way Europe has a Jewish history.

26:48 – GS:

So, I totally agree with you, but I think it’s actually maybe even a little bit larger than that. I mean, there’s a wonderful book called The Jew and the Lotus, and it talks about 12 Jews who get summoned by the Dalai Lama, who wants to know what is the secret source of the Jews who lived in exile for so long. And so, they’re going there and there’s one paragraph that really sticks out to me, where someone asks one of the rabbis, well, who are you? And the rabbi says, where I’m a Jewish minister, a priest, and they go, who are the Jews? And the poor rabbi has to say, knowing that there are only, what, 10, 12 million Jews in the world, and we’re talking to a society of billions, he says, well, have you heard of Jesus? Have you heard of Christianity? So he has to give his resume by referring to Jesus. But the point is, there’s a situation where a Jew is in a position where he finds out about himself. Significance, insignificance. In our story, now that we’ve kind of given ourselves a refresher course in what the ingredients of all the travelogues, all of a sudden it takes on new meaning when Moses commands the scouts to bring back artifacts, to bring back grapes. That is part and parcel of what we do when we go to the moon, but it’s what every Marco Polo and Bartonura did, was it bring back data, bring back artifacts.

Inka Shunibara at entrance of Asrenal at venace Bianella 2024

Then there is the question of who is living in the land. So in the first exhibit I went to in Italy today in Venice. It was the Spanish Pavilion, and it was showing beautiful pictures, paintings made by Westerners of South America. And what was so beautiful about them is they showed the grandeur of the land, and there were no people in it. It was the old heritage of virgin territory. The people, the residents were ignored.

Intro to Spanish Pavilion at the Venice biennale 2024

Virgin Land

The European colonization of the Americas and other territories produced a way of inhabiting the earth. Far from the alleged objective of maintaining human life, the purpose of colonial inhabitation was the commercial exploitation of Iand, which destroyed the possibility of a world that included a non-European one.

Virgin Land shows a series of landscape paintings that belong to different Spanish museums and reference the current Spanish territory as well as the former colonies of Latin America, the Philippines, and North Africa. Each painting summarizes different temporalities, from the past to the present and vice versa, even pointing to a certain futurity in search of a sustainability urgent for our contemporary inhabitation.

This exhibition room displays the romanticized views of European or US painters that capture an illusion: the artifice of the creation and exoticism of these territories. To critically contemporize these views, the artist has superimposed quotes by writers, ecofeminists, and intellectuals from different parts of the world who, in defense of Mother Earth, highlight the matricides of capitalist society, the consequences of the abuse of primary resources, the ecological crisis, and the Indigenous care of the earth.

The words of the philosopher and Indigenous activist Ailton Krenak along with texts by the decolonial feminist Françoise Vergés and the historian Nancy Leys Stepan, among others, are contrasted with paintings that contain overlapping images. Detached from their original context, these symbols of truth land irremediably on the erosive footprint of man, which from the colony to the present day has mistreated the land and its so-called resources, voraciously smothering the reality of diverse communities and habitats. From the colonial mining of Potosi, to open-air garbage dumps in natural landscapes such as the Atacama Desert or the agricultural exploitation of Almeria. Spain, the so-called garden of Europe, landscape painting loses its aura of neutrality and is displayed as a violent generator of distance and difference.

So part of what you had to do was to comment, is this land inhabited or not? In our particular travelogue that we’re studying today, it certainly was inhabited. They go on to explain exactly…  exactly who is living there. The other thing, the next picture was of all of the Indians, all of the natives are the same. There’s this homogeneality. You bring a Western or a foreign colonial aspect to it. Here in our parsha they’re mentioning people tribes), Rabbi, that I not heard of before. So, what happens when you read a text like ours after being sensitized to some of the issues is that I think in this travelogue of our Jews, we actually saw things that may break the mold. We didn’t see it with the arrogance of a conqueror. We saw it slightly differently. Joshua Levinson suggests that a Jew comes to a new land and he sees it more as an immigrant than like a colonialist. And if you look at it from that perspective, you all of a sudden see the anxiety that there is, too, that an immigrant has. I would suspect that you will determine that the Jewish journey, not only does Abraham leave his homeland, unlike Homer, not to return but to find a new land, there are significant differences in our story, and I think we’ve said this many times over the last year. We Jews do not fit neatly into the colonialist and the colonized. We are different. When we go to another country and we meet with our scattered brethren in the diaspora, we have a network that no other nation has, because we’re all over the world. That is something else that you kind of described when a Jew visits another Jewish site. But there’s also looking at it as another and finding out who we are. So I want to conclude with two actual accounts One is Bereshit Rabbah that Joshua Levinson brings in the book. And it says, Rabbi Levi said, it’s in Bereshit Rabbah 39.8, when Abraham was traveling through Aram Naharayim and Aram Nahor, he saw them eating, drinking, and reveling. He said, would that my portion not be in this land, when he reached the promontory of Tyre, which is overlooking the promised land of Canaan, he saw there engaged in weeding at the time of weeding, hoeing at the time of hoeing. And he says, Would that my portion be in this land. The Holy One, blessed be He, say to him, To your descendants I will give this land. So what’s remarkable, says Joshua, is that in a sense this Midrash has Abraham choosing the land rather than God assigning it to him. And the second thing is that he is actually attracted to the people, the Canaanites. The indigenous inhabitants of this land. And this is the rabbi’s rendering, which is also kind of fascinating. The other story that I came across was of many, many, many years later, a chassid of the karliner, a Rebbe, was living in Palestine and for the high holidays a group of Hasidim from Jerusalem, among them others, journeyed to the court of Rav Aaron, who was the Karlin-Stolin Rebbe. They told various stories about the land and they also said that the local Bedouins are great thieves. Hearing this, Rav Aaron responded, I see, my friend, that your soul, there is a spark from the soul of the biblical spies. The chassid who told the story about the Bedouins objected, but Rabbi, I have not, God forbid, spoken evil of any Jew. To this Rav Aaron answered, the spies didn’t speak ill of any Jew either. We must not speak ill of any resident of the land of Israel.

So I think my takeaway is from the Meraglim, or from these scouts, is that number one, it sensitizes to read the whole Torah differently, to see it within the journey travelogue tradition of identifying narrative, a literature, where we define ourselves by looking at others, learning about them, learning about ourselves. I think this question of choosing who we are, choosing our land, is fascinating. And I think it just kind of opens everything up. And I think the scouts, if they did sin, then it’s probably their takeaways or their emotions, and even that is actually—it’s just really this immigrant anxiety that we have, and we have to learn about ourselves as well, that it is an anxious and very overwhelming thing to come to a new land. And that is the lesson of the leaving Eden, it’s the lesson of Lech Lecha, it’s the lesson of being Jew, and I would suggest it’s the lesson of being human and being engaged in this journey.

34:38 – AM:

Amazing. This amazing book, amazing discussion of travel. How wonderful that you’re in Venice. So everyone should enjoy the parasha. Enjoy the holiday next week. And Geoffrey, enjoy your trip. Look at it the way Jews have always looked at travel and make sure to bring back a positive report.

34:57 – GS:

Amen. Thank you. Shabbat shalom. Shabbat shalom. Thank you so much. And for you just who are sticking around, Celeste, Lauren, Henry, and Matthew, I will add that I learned for the first time that the Israeli pavilion is on the side yard of the U.S. Pavilion. And I literally said, is this the way it always is? And it actually, the United States gave Israel the land on the side of its pavilion from the beginning of the Biennale, which again, talks to this unique relationship between our countries. The Israeli pavilion has glass all around it. It is locked. You can look inside and make out some of the exhibition. There is a sign on the side of the pavilion that says the Israeli pavilion is closed until there is a ceasefire and the hostages are returned.

And I think if someone was standing outside with one of those clickers, there are probably as many people that are coming, lingering, taking pictures of the soldiers that are guarding it, thinking about the situation in Israel in the sense of Israel’s culture is on hold. Contribution to the world, which is so profound, is on hold. They have to worry about protecting themselves and until they can do that and getting the hostages back, the world will have to wait. But I think it turned out, you read about it in the press and you’re not sure whether it was the right move or not. I have to say that to me it was a profound statement and a very Jewish statement. It was a statement not of not closing as our guide said, but not opening. And so that was part of my journey today.

Lauren, how are you today?

36:59 – Lauren

I’m doing well, thank you. This was a really wonderful perception of this particular Parsha. The grasshopper mentality is something that bothered me a few times as I’ve read through this Parsha over a couple of years, and I think that I understand a little bit better now because travel opens perceptions of understanding. I think two of the scouts were open to that. Ten of them probably weren’t, and maybe the 40 years of wandering was the opportunity for that experience to resonate with them and to open up their minds. And I think that’s what happens. For me, what happens in travel, you’re in Venice right now, and travel in Europe for me is wonderful. And you know what the most wonderful part of the travel in Europe is? Is they’re going to all the churches and seeing the architecture and the art and relating that to my belief structures, which are obviously founded in Judaism, But that expands my perceptions, and it limits my grasshopper mentality. And so I think that’s my perception of what you said today, that there’s different ways of looking at it. And we all don’t arrive there at one time, but we can arrive there unless we experience the differences. And sometimes it’s scary, and sometimes it’s more comfortable for us to understand. Or sometimes we look at it with the perspective that we should have initially looked at it and those are the fortunate few and I think those were the two that did understand that message.

38:40 – GS:

So, I love that you bring up that beautiful verse that we saw ourselves as grasshoppers because it truly was all about their self-perception and if you think about it, we always get into this question of a punishment. Is it a cure or is it a punitive? And I think you’re right that there was no way that this generation, as depicted in the Torah, was ready to have that immigrant experience of coming to the other land, of going from slavery to freedom in one generation. So, I don’t think it’s so much as blaming them as they had the honesty to really voice their own concerns and as a result it became pretty obvious that it was going to take another generation.

And that’s that self-discovery, I think, that is so important about this type of travel, this type of journey. I mean, nowadays, in modern language, everything is a journey, right? You know, you ask an employee to do something, they say, well, I’m on this journey. So, the nomenclature works. We are, and the Bible is, the Torah is truly about a journey, and it’s as much about self-discovery as learning about anything else. So, I totally, I just totally agree with you. It’s not helpful to be judgmental in this case. I think that they deserve a lot of credit for saying that they felt like grasshoppers. I think that is important that it’s shared with us. It truly is a narrative. There are so many journeys but you don’t get the inner mind of the participants the way you do in this story of the scouts. And I think that’s what makes it, at least to me this year, totally, totally unique, refreshing, and as someone who’s traveling, just opening up my mind and vistas. So thank you so much for that comment. Shabbat shalom, see you all next week.