A Different Spirit

Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform and now on YouTube. We also publish a source sheet on Sefaria, and a link is included in the show notes. If you like what you hear or what you read, why don’t you give us a few stars and say something nice.

This week’s Parsha is Shalach. This week, the state of Israel launched a surprise attack on Iran, an operation already being hailed for its strategic brilliance and no doubt will be dissected in military academies for years to come. In light of the planners’ boldness and their ability not just to read reality, but to shape it, we turn to the story of the biblical scouts. But this time, our focus isn’t on the failure of the majority; it’s on Caleb Ben Yefuneh, who defied the consensus more forcefully than even Joshua and who, the Torah tells us, was gifted by a “ruach acheret.” A different spirit. So, Rabbi, welcome. What a week this has been since.

Adam Mintz [2:11 – 2:18]: Wow. Yeah, it’s hard to believe. And I, please God, everyone should be safe, and it should come out with a good outcome.

Geoffrey Stern [2:20 – 3:19]: Yeah, yeah. And you know, I… One podcast I love is Call Me Back by Dan Senor. I was listening to it this morning, and his mother is an elderly woman from England, and she draws references to being in London as a young girl when, what was it? The War of London? The Battle of London? When the missiles were coming in and the English had a stiff upper lip, were making tea and just knowing that, as uncomfortable as it was, their troops were doing what needed to be done. I think this is so different than what happened on October 7th, because, as I said, in the intro, this was a brilliant surprise attack that read so many of the facts in a disruptive manner that no one thought of, and that added to the surprise. So it’s truly fascinating.

Adam Mintz [3:19 – 3:27]: Absolutely fascinating. And we’re praying that it should have a good outcome. Just like those people who made tea in London had a good outcome, this is gonna have a good outcome, too.

Geoffrey Stern [3:28 – 5:39]: Amen. Anyway, let’s get to the parsha, because the parsha is here. Week in and week out, we are in Numbers. And this is a story that pretty much takes up the whole parsha. So every year, we basically are talking about the scouts, the spies, those 12 individuals that were appointed to scout out the land.

Numbers 13, it says, God spoke to Moses saying, “Send agents to scout the land of Canaan, of which I’m giving to the Israelite people. Send one participant from each of their ancestral tribes, each one a chieftain among them.” So Moses, by God’s command, sent them out from the wilderness of Paran, all of them being men of consequence, leaders of the Israelites, and these were their names.

We are in the Book of Numbers, where counting is a big thing. So it goes ahead and lists the names, mostly without anything remarkable about them. The only commentary is in verse 16, where it says, these were the names of the participants whom Moses sent to scout. But Moses changed the name of Hoshea, son of Nun, to Joshua. Rashi comments, why did he change his name? By giving him his name, Yehoshua. In other words, adding the “Yah,” which is God, God’s name, in front of Savior. It’s “God may save.” He, in effect, prayed for him. May God save you from the evil counsel of the spies. Fascinating.

Joshua was the one who conquered the land of Israel. He was a warrior. There were many obstacles and challenges he had in his life that he could use God’s help for. But what Rashi punctuates is the fact that he’s given the name change here, Rabbi, is he really needed help? Not listening to those who were misinterpreting the facts, not to be led astray in the world of ideas as opposed to the actual battlefield. I found that fascinating.

Adam Mintz [5:39 – 5:50]: That is fascinating. And obviously you see here that Moshe changes his name because he’s obviously Moshe’s favorite. And if you’re going to be Moshe’s favorite, probably good things are going to happen to you.

Geoffrey Stern [5:50 – 7:26]: Okay, I like that. But of course, some of the commentaries that we’re going to see in a few minutes, reference or contrast, I should say the difference between Yehoshua, who had a name change, and Caleb, who did not. Caleb’s name could be considered a dog. I mean, a “Celev” and a “Caleb.” So let’s dive in a little more. We’re going to just go over the basic story because there are some interesting nuances.

So in Numbers 13:18, it says that you should go and see what kind of a country it is. Are the people who dwell in it strong or weak, few or many? Is the country in which they dwell good or bad? Are the towns they live in open or fortified? Is the soil rich or poor? Is it wooded or not? And take pains, continues the verse, to bring back some of the fruit of the lands. Kind of like going to the moon. We want to see some hard facts. Now, it happened to be the season of the first ripe grapes. So it talks about them going, and it mentions a bunch of the geography. They passed by from the Negev to Hebron, and they went into Wadi Eshkol and they cut down a branch with a single cluster of grapes. And there it says, and at the end of 40 days, they returned from scouting the land.

So, Rabbi, you always fond of saying 40 is a big number, I think, because it means some sort of transition. Is that what you read into it?

Adam Mintz [7:26 – 7:44]: I would say that 40 is good luck because Moses spent 40 days on the mountain. So you expect at the end of 40 days they return from scouting the land, that they come back with a good report. So, the fact they came back with a bad report makes it even worse because it’s 40 days. That’s good luck. That’s good news.

Geoffrey Stern [7:44 – 8:49]: Okay, I like that. And at this point, we have no clue what’s going to happen. In verse 26, it says they went straight to Moses and Aaron and the whole Israelite community at Kadesh in the wilderness of Paran. And they made their report to them and to the whole community as they showed them the fruit of the land. So far, so good. This is what they told him. We came to the land you sent us to. It does indeed flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit. They could have put a period on it. This is wonderful. They have the material evidence. They went straight to Moses. They got everybody there. And then in verse 28, it says, however, the Hebrew word is Ephes. The people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large. Moreover, we saw the Anakites there. Amalekites dwell in the Negev region. Hittites, Jebusites, and Amorites inhabit the hill country. And Canaanites dwell by the sea along the Jordan.

Adam Mintz [8:50 – 9:07]: I just want to say, the right? The Anakites. I saw this also in Sefaria. They translate the word “anakim” as “Anakites.” We always grew up to say that meant the giants. It gives it more of an oomph, doesn’t it, that they saw giants there?

Geoffrey Stern [9:07 – 11:18]: I was gonna say, I think I’m sticking with the giants part because I think everything that they’re saying is full of innuendo. They are steering the facts.

They’re not just talking about who’s living where. But first, they go with the Anakites, the giants, and then an Israelite cannot say the name Amalekites without knowing that that is going to create shaking in the boots. So they are giving the facts supposedly, but they are leading the audience. And of course, they start with this, but this Ephes, this however, and they talk about hill countries and other formidable enemies.

Then in verse 30, we get to the star of our show. Caleb hushed the people before Moses and said, “Let us by all means go up and we shall gain possession of it, for we shall surely overcome it.” He too is taking up on the innuendo, and he says, if you’re going to take anything from these facts, let’s do it. Let’s act. Let’s act boldly. He understood they weren’t discussing facts; they were discussing the commentary on it.

This week, we were all looking at the same facts, and everybody was commenting differently. Nothing changes under the sun. But he definitely talks about we shall overcome. Let’s go. Go. But the other men who had gone up with him said, “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we.” Thus they spread calumnies among the Israelites about the land they had scouted, saying, “The country that we have traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there; the Anakites are part of the Nephilim, and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves. And so we must have looked to them.”

Adam Mintz [11:19 – 11:21]: And of course, that tells you the.

Geoffrey Stern [11:21 – 11:27]: Whole story because it was always. They were always just talking about themselves, whether they knew it or not.

Adam Mintz [11:27 – 11:50]: And if you’re. If you’re insecure yourself, then you’re not going to come across as strong to the enemy. You need to have a lot. You better believe that those pilots who flew into Iran on Thursday night, that they had a lot of self-confidence; they had Israeli bravado. You need to have a certain sense of bravado to scare the enemy. If you think you’re a grasshopper, you’re not going to scare the enemy.

Geoffrey Stern [11:50 – 12:52]: Yeah, I love that. So we really have this kind of interaction between facts and perceptions and then perceptions affecting the facts. It’s a cycle. And in terms of. We said in the introduction about the planners of this campaign made the facts, your perceptions of yourself also create realities. There’s no question about it. Our friend Shadal says that on the word Ephes, which we translated above as the but word, the exception word, they should have said, the inhabitants are strong and the cities are fortified, but they sinned in using the word ephes, except. And he quotes Nachmanides, who we’re going to see in a section. So what he’s really saying is what they were saying about the facts was no problem. They added the commentary to it that they added except.

Adam Mintz [12:52 – 13:01]: And that’s what you pointed out about this week. You always get in trouble in the commentary. The facts are never problematic. It’s the commentary that’s problematic.

Geoffrey Stern [13:01 – 15:23]: Yeah. And the alternate of that is Caleb didn’t even bother addressing the facts. Shadal says Caleb had to say, let us go up. Go up. He said it twice. Twice. Aleh na’aleh, which implies from the words of the scouts, it was understood that it was not possible to go up. So it really was just more talking about the commentary. The reaction to what was seen as much as anything else. Nachmanides is fascinating vis-à-vis this last week. There is, and we’re not gonna get into it, there are two, at least two, if not three or four, versions of this in the text. And one of the versions seems to imply that it was God’s idea to send out the spies or the scouts. The other, that it was Moses. So in the beginning of Nachmanides commentary, he’s trying to square that circle. But what’s fascinating to me is what he ends up and says. And what he says is, it appears they asked of Moses, “Let us send men before us that they may search the land for us,” which means spying out the roads and working out the strategy of conquest, similar to the expression from the Kephar, “the prey.” When you prepare to spy out your prey, this is the meaning of the words before us. For they, the Israelites, will follow them later on in their route, similar to the expression “the Ark of the Covenant went before them.” So Ramban is saying this was not to do some sort of travelogue, to plan out a vacation. What we’re seeing here was military planning. Right. The 12 leaders of each of the tribes were sent out to make detailed maps; that’s why it says the road in front of us. And to look, it wasn’t. People don’t plan a war and come back and say, no, we’re not going. They plan it to say, here is the fortification, here’s a clearing, here we have a blind spot, so forth and so on. I just found that very timely in terms of an interpretation of what this is all about.

Adam Mintz [15:23 – 15:51]: You mean what again, how you interpret the facts, how you interpret the whole story here? What did Moses send them for? It’s interesting that it’s clear, you know, here it makes it seem that God spoke to Moses and it came to from God in Devarim. In Deuteronomy, it seems to say that Moses sent the spies. So even that basic point of who sent the spies is not so clear.

Geoffrey Stern [15:51 – 18:49]: Yeah, I only quoted an excerpt from Nachmanides, but I think the way he tries to square the circle is there were different, I guess, motivations for them going. Some of them were to see how beautiful the land was, to look at agriculture clearly, sustainability, how are we going to. But what he focuses on is that God said, do it. Moses kind of tweaked it a little bit. And then the people came up and said, we are going to plan this war. We are going to come up with a plan. And that’s what this is all about. He goes, and then he goes back and he says, but however, they started to make choices. And I think the reference that Nachmanides brings is fascinating. He says a choice is made of those, like someone trying to buy something. He says, all of a sudden they become consumers and they start holding the tomatoes to see whether they’re going to buy them or not and whether it’s good or bad. They changed the goal of the mission. The mission was to plot out a line of attack, and they misunderstood the mission and they came back and said, nah, we’re not going to go for this purchase. Maybe we should look elsewhere to shop. Just a fascinating to me metaphor. But then later on, he starts to talk about this word Ephes. And this is what Shadal referenced before. He says, in all this they said the truth. They gave a report about those matters which they had commanded to find out. Therefore, they should indeed have said, as in fact they did, that the people that dwell in the land are fierce, and the cities are fortified, for it was their duty to bring back words of truth to them and sent them and Moses, as Moses has commanded them. But the wickedness of the spies consisted in saying the word Ephes. Nevertheless, nevertheless, the people that dwell in the land are fierce, which signifies something negative and beyond human capability, something impossible of achievement under any circumstances. Similar to the expression, and he quotes from another verse, ha’Ephes le’Metzach hasto, it is impossible that the mercy will come. So Ramban really focuses on the sin. He’s not so much the interpretation. What he’s talking about is, and this gets back to what you were saying about the grasshopper thing. They were reflecting on their own inabilities. Clearly, you could make the case, since they were a divine people. It’s also in a commentary on their faith in God. But Ramban doesn’t even go there. Something negative, beyond human capability.

Adam Mintz [18:50 – 19:04]: That’s absolutely right.

I mean, you know, again, that’s… do you believe in yourself? And that also is relevant to this situation in Israel. Now, you have to believe in yourself. Now, that’s not enough, but you have to start there.

Geoffrey Stern [19:05 – 20:19]: You have to believe in the possible, no question about it. So then it goes on bringing back our hero. And in Numbers 14:24, it says, “But my servant Caleb, because he was imbued with a different spirit and remained loyal to Me, him will I bring into the land that he entered, and his offspring shall hold it as a possession.” So interesting that this is where I got the subject matter of our discussion. It says in Hebrew that Caleb had a “ruach acheret.” Ruach is a word we know from the first set, verse or two of the Torah, that ruach Elohim, the spirit of God, hovered over the land. Ruach is typically associated with spiritual things, but I think here it really means his… what’s the word, his spirit, his… the way he looked at things, his approach. Absolutely, his approach to things.

Adam Mintz [20:19 – 20:36]: He had a different… but by mistake, your connection to ruach Elohim Mi’rachefet is important because he had a different spirit. You’re supposed to understand that was a Godly spirit. He was the good guy.

Geoffrey Stern [20:36 – 21:26]: Yeah, yeah. I love that they had a spirit too. It just wasn’t a very good spirit. It was ruach ra’ah, I guess is another phrase in Hebrew. The other thing that’s interesting is the verses do focus on Caleb and not Joshua. In the beginning, it was Joshua, as Rashi said. And as you said, he was Moses’s favorite, his chosen leader. But the day really belongs to Caleb. He was the one who had that “ruach acheret.” And the distinction then between Caleb and the other ten spies is significant. But also there was a difference between Caleb and Joshua. And I think that this verse shows, and maybe through the commentaries and reading the text, we’ll maybe have a better sense of what was the difference between the two good guys.

Adam Mintz [21:26 – 21:38]: Right. Well, what you suggested was Caleb had it in his gut. He had a different spirit. Joshua needed some help from Moses to give him a different name.

Geoffrey Stern [21:38 – 23:15]: I love that. And that’s certainly, I think, where Rashi was coming from. And those are the traditional texts. So in the book of Joshua, it does recount this story again. And there, it says, and we’re talking about Joshua, Chapter 14, verses 6 through 15. In verse 8, it says, “While my companions who went up with me took the heart out of the people, I was loyal to my eternal God.” In the Hebrew original, it’s “him, sivi et lev haam.” Just a beautiful turn of phrase. They stole the heart of the people. This is all about stealing the spirit, spirit from other people. And the flip side of that is… it doesn’t use a word that we normally, I think, associate with faith. mileyti means fullness. And he was full. He was secure. He was complete. I would, I would, I would suggest. But again, even when the story is recounted in the Tanakh, it comes down to the perception of the facts, how one looks at it. And stealing the heart of the people is just profound. We came across that a little bit last time when we were discussing what happens when you have draft dodgers or people that don’t show up in the army. It takes away the spirit. And if you need anything in your fighting force, it’s that positive spirit.

Adam Mintz [23:15 – 23:17]: Absolutely right.

Geoffrey Stern [23:18 – 24:06]: So let’s get into this “ruach acheret,” this other spirit. Rashi says another suggests that he was filled with a twofold spirit, one to which he gave utterance, literally one in his mouth and another which he concealed in his heart. So this is fascinating. The commentaries are going to go in multiple directions. Rashi’s is that Caleb was able to hold one truth within himself and deal in subterfuge. We’ve come across this with Aaron dealing with when they sinned with the Golden Calf, you know, trying to guide them. Maybe they didn’t even know he was disagreeing with them on the trip. I thought that was fascinating. And of course, that comes into battle too, right?

Adam Mintz [24:06 – 24:06]: Very good.

Geoffrey Stern [24:07 – 25:13]: I mean, the planning that we had this week was the Israelis and the President speaking out of two sides of their mouth, which made it all possible. They were engaged in negotiation. So I liked that a lot. Another one is the Malbim. And what many commentaries say is “ruach acheret” really reflects more of an evolution. Caleb initially was with them, and then he went off to Hebron by himself. He went back to the ancestral burying ground and maybe meditated upon it. He thought about it, and he changed his spirit. So whereas the first Rashi talks about him holding the two spirits at the same time, one close to his chest and the other speaking it out loud, here other commentaries talk about a metamorphosis, an evolution in his thinking. He was adaptable. I think that’s a key element in terms of a good plan which could correct.

Adam Mintz [25:13 – 25:19]: You have to be able to adapt to different situations. A rigid leader isn’t going to get you anywhere.

Geoffrey Stern [25:20 – 28:13]: Yeah, you’ve got to be able to absorb new facts. And that’s, interestingly, the word that we talked about before that comes from being full is he decided. So there are a lot of commentaries that talk about this. Really, it’s almost as though when we had Abraham and “Lech Lecha,” it has one verse, and it’s left up to the commentaries to say what happened. How did he discover God? It was similar here with Caleb. He went on the same journey that they did, but there was a metamorphosis. It’s interesting how they describe his name. I joked a while ago that Caleb can mean dog. One of the commentaries that I saw said that, yes, he was compared to a dog in a good way. Dogs follow the trail. They stick with the mission. They’re totally loyal. But I think the real takeaway from Caleb is it has the word “Lev” in it. It has the word heart in it. And I think one of the commentaries on it is that it’s a full heart. It’s a complete heart with his whole heart. The Midrash Agada says Caleb ben Yefuneh. Why was he called thus? Because the words that were on his heart, Lev, he replied to Moses not according to what was on the hearts of the scouts, as it said, who had a different spirit. So he followed his own intuition, I think, would be one way of looking at that, his own judgment. And then, of course, we get to Ben Yefuneh. What does that mean? And Yefuneh can mean multiple things. One is to turn, “lifnot.” And he was to say Ben Yefuneh differently. He was a master of change. He was a master of the pivot. That is another quality. I think there is so much that’s going to come out in the history of what happened a week ago, but part of it had to do with what the changing circumstances were. After Hezbollah was destroyed, they could no longer launch their thousands of rockets as a deterrent against attacking Iran. What happened after the first time Iran launched their missiles and Israel didn’t disappear almost a year ago? What happened when Israel retaliated and was able to take down the anti-missile and anti-air defense systems? All of this, this was constant calibration. And I think that to a degree is what Ben Yefuneh means. It means someone who can master the change.

Adam Mintz [28:14 – 28:32]: Right, right. I mean, that’s great. I mean, it seems to be that what you brought up at the beginning, “ruach acheret,” seems to be what all the commentators are focused on. That’s what made Caleb different. That was in his name, Caleb. That was in his name, Ben Yefuneh. Everything revolves around.

Geoffrey Stern [28:33 – 31:16]: And the other thing that the Malbim says here is that he was also able. He turned away from the accepted wisdom, so to speak.

Speaker A: And so, what they really do is they contrast the two. Joshua was helped by God, and while Caleb is not shown as a secularist, he is shown as someone who was able to find it within himself. It wasn’t some sort of secret sauce that he was given, but very rational things.

So the way I want to end is, and this I had not really seen strongly, is that Caleb at the end talks about why we need to go. He says in Numbers 14, he exhorted the whole Israelite community, “The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land, Tovah, Aretz meod, meod.” There were those commentaries. Emek Davar is one who is fascinating when he comments on Genesis when God said after creation that creation was Tov meod. He actually references this quote by Caleb and does it again in his commentary on our verses.

I think what he’s trying to say is one fascinating thought. The traditional explanation for Tov Ma’od was that in every good, there’s also bad, and that you can’t recognize the good unless there was bad. I would almost say if you’re evaluating a plan or a strategy, if there isn’t any bad, there’s something wrong; it must be a trap. You have to be able to accept the bad.

But getting back to that spirit of God hovering over creation, looking at the spirit of Caleb, one almost wonders, in kind of looking at it like a Victor Frankl perspective, that what God gave us more than creating a world was, if the Torah gives us something, it’s what perspective, what judgment, what motivation we should take that world to be. And that’s why it says, after everything good, it’s good, it’s good. That was above the facts. God gave us what Caleb gave us in spades, which is you have to have the right attitude.

Adam Mintz [31:17 – 31:28]: That’s such a great thing. You know, the HaEmek Davarwas written by the Netsiv, who was the head of the Volozhin yeshiva in the second half of the 1800s. He always has great insights. This is a good insight. Very, very good.

Geoffrey Stern [31:28 – 32:27]: And the last thing I’ll say is it made me think over the last two years. The biggest mistake that Israel made in its history, and it did it twice, is it underestimated its enemy.

In terms of Gaza, we underestimated Hamas; in terms of the Yom Kippur War, we underestimated the Egyptians. In this particular war that we’re having now, they, if anything, overestimated the Iranians, overestimated the Lebanese and Hezbollah. That’s the right way to plan a war: be surprised that they are more of a paper tiger. But I think this is the war they were prepared for. Hezbollah was the war they were prepared for. And what they did is they didn’t ignore the strengths; they addressed them. When we underestimate our enemies or underestimate the challenges that we’re against, that’s when we get into trouble, actually.

Adam Mintz [32:27 – 32:36]: Oh, that’s a great thing to end on. So Shabbat Shalom, everybody. Am Yisrael Chai. We hope for good news from Israel, and we look forward to seeing everybody next.

Geoffrey Stern [32:36 – 32:38]: Shabbat Shalom.