Stop. Look. Listen. Think.
“SHOPLIFTING IN PROGRESS”
Of course, that is not what was written on the hoarding on the High Street. It is what my young eyes first read, until I looked again and realised it actually said “Shopfitting”, a word less familiar to me at the time but closer to the reality of what was happening to the shop behind the wooden boards.
Another of my memorable misreadings happened the first time I read aloud from Parashat Shelach Lecha. Entranced perhaps by the image used by the Israel Tourist Board of the spies carrying their enormous cluster, I inadvertently described the Israelites as threatening to pelt their leaders with anavim (grapes) instead of the more lethal avanim (stones).
What we see may be shaped by our expectations, and how carefully we look.
Some years later, as medical students, we were once reprimanded by a senior doctor for writing “Drunk” as the first word on the admission notes of a noisy young man in the Emergency department. “By all means write that he complains of headache, smells of alcohol, and that his movements are uncoordinated” she said. “But perhaps he didn’t drink any alcohol; perhaps someone hit him with a bottle, and his problem is a head injury, not intoxication. Distinguish between facts and assumptions. Don’t leap to conclusions without looking at the whole picture.”
Even when our observations are accurate, there may be more than one possible interpretation of the situation. I have tried to be guided by that wisdom ever since.
We don’t know whether the twelve spies split up to survey different parts of the country, or whether they travelled together throughout, but they don’t seem to have disagreed much on what they actually saw. The history-shaping discrepancy was in their interpretation of its significance – and the impact of their words on the rabble of former slaves who heard them. It made slavery feel preferable to prolonged uncertainty – and triggered an impulse to carry out a summary execution of the more optimistic Joshua and Caleb which is thwarted by divine intervention.
What is it that makes us want to kill people who say things we don’t want to hear?
Commentators throughout the ages and into our own times have debated why the ten spies were punished for their candid assessment of the land: was it for a lack of faith in divine power, for assuming they knew how the inhabitants of the land regarded them, for cowardice, for ‘bad-mouthing’, for failing to believe in a better future… or for failing to distinguish between observations and impressions, between facts and assumptions?
After this narrative, we revert to legal/sacrificial code and its implementation, always stressing a distinction between deliberate and ‘in error’ violations. Then our modern sensitivities are shocked to learn that capital punishment by stoning may be not just a threat but divinely ordained in certain circumstances.
The final verses of Parashat Shelach Lecha detail the commandment to put tsitsit (usually translated as a ‘fringe’ or ‘tassel’) on the edges of our garments:
“…look at it and recall all GOD’s commandments and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your urge to stray.”
This passage is so familiar as the third paragraph of the Shema that we might overlook its paradoxes: are we being instructed to remember to look – or to look in order to remember? We are warned that our eyes can lead us astray, and yet those same eyes can be our salvation.
I am reminded of a fable attributed to R. Nahman of Bratslav:
The king’s forecaster warned him that this year’s wheat crops were infected, and everyone who ate from it would go mad. The problem is that the wheat was already delivered, and the nation was already eating it. There was no way to stop the nation from going mad.
The king and his adviser were faced with a dilemma.
If they didn’t eat the wheat, they would remain sane, but the rest of the mad nation would think the king and his advisor were crazy. But if they ate the wheat, they would go crazy too.
They devised a plan. They too would both eat the wheat and go mad. But they would put a mark on their heads, so when they looked at one another they would at least remember they were both crazy.
I like to think of this as perhaps a bodily version of tsitsit, or a knot in a handkerchief – to remind us that we may have forgotten something even if we cannot immediately recall what it was.
As I write, it feels as if the whole world has eaten infected wheat and gone mad. Israel and Iran are hurling not grapes and not stones, but terrible fire at each other. I fear for my friends and family whose homes and lives are in real danger. And yet in some ways I fear even more what has been happening within our Jewish world in recent months: the entrenched positions, the resistance to listening and looking attentively, the willingness to throw stones (metaphorical and literal) at each other.
Let us try to look at the foreheads and into the eyes of those who view the world differently, even if we think they may be crazy. Perhaps in that exchanged glance, we can find a glimmer, a spark, of sanity on which to begin rebuilding.
Rabbi Nicola Feuchtwang
(The title of this piece is borrowed from a Road Safety video by Transport for London)
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.