Scout’s Honor: Ways Of Seeing Canaan

Candlelighting, Readings:
Shabbat candles: 8:13 p.m.
Torah: Numbers 13:1-15:41
Haftorah: Joshua 2:10-24
Havdalah: 9:13 p.m.

Once again, we reach the familiar story of the spies (or scouts) dispatched to reconnoiter the land of Canaan. Ten of its 12 members return with the devastating news that Canaan is unconquerable; it is fruitless to go on. The two holdouts, Joshua and Caleb, demur. The land can be ours, they insist; don’t give up.

This is more than a case of a glass half-full or half-empty, the pessimists seeing problems and the optimists opportunity. Our commentators say it touches the heart of being human: the difference between a scout and a spy.

Elsewhere [Deuteronomy 1:24], the reconnaissance party is “spying out” the land (vay’raglu). But as we see here [Numbers 8:17], they were sent just to “scout” it (latur). Scouting and spying, says the Malbim, are dispositions of character, akin to “having” and “getting.”

When faced with something we might want, he says, we become “scouts,” simply checking out whether we really want to have it. If we decide we want it, we convert “scouting” into “spying,” the attitude of figuring out how to get it. Scouts look for positives: the reasons we might want it. Spies ferret out negatives: the contextual flaws that may suggest a strategy by which to get it. As scouts, the biblical explorers saw a land flowing with milk and honey. As spies, they sought out Canaanite weaknesses — and finding none, gave up hope of success. They were good scouts but bad spies. They properly saw the land as good “to have,” but could find no way “to get” it.

They were not supposed to be spies. After all, how to “get” the land was God’s problem, not theirs. Their mission was simply to be scouts, to ramp up excitement at having a land of their own rather than being slaves in someone else’s land or wandering endlessly through the no-man’s land that is the desert. The Torah values scouting over spying. Politically or militarily speaking, the tactics of “getting” something do matter, but what counts is whether we want to “have” it in the first place.

Too many in American society have forgotten that distinction. We are so enamored with “getting” that we spend our time figuring out how to get what we do not even want to “have.”

Take our obsession with shopping, for example — not shopping as a means of finding the best thing to have but shopping to get what we do not need and will never use even if we get it.

Or, better, consider the difference between getting a job and having it. We equate success with constantly climbing the corporate ladder. Managers should aspire to become vice presidents, who, in turn, should dream of being president. However, getting the job of president is not the same as having it. In 1969, author Laurence J. Peter gave us “The Peter Principle,” according to which, “employees tend to rise to their level of incompetence until every post is occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties.” The actual work is accomplished by “those employees who have not yet reached their level of incompetence.”

That is bad for organizations, and worse for the people in them, those who get the jobs they wanted to get but never really wanted to have. The Israelites wanted to have the land but mistakenly thought they couldn’t get it. Our society encourages us to get whatever job we can, even if we will not want to have it after we get it.

Life should be about having, not getting. At some point we ought to appreciate what we have, and, maybe, want to have even more, but our obsession with getting beyond what we can appreciate having is a sickness. Scouting out life’s opportunities is natural and healthy. Spying out the way to get everything in sight is a derangement well worth avoiding. 

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman,  co-founder of Synagogue 3000, and professor of Liturgy, Worship and Ritual at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, is the author of “My People’s Prayer Book: Traditional Prayers, Modern Commentaries” (Jewish Lights), winner of the National Jewish Book Award.