The Sin of the Spies - A Rereading after Rabbi Yehuda Léon Askénazi (Manitou)

This week I witnessed something faintly bizarre.

Two young men walked into the offices of Brit Olam - offices where everything we do rests on faith in the Creator of the world. And the two of them looked as far from religious as one could imagine. Far from any kind of religiosity.

They were respectful, deeply so. But had you set their “religiosity" on a scale, the needle would barely have moved. I learned long ago not to weigh people that way. In the end, it depends on the heart within; the acceptance of the yoke of Heaven is not measured by anything outward at all. And still, the surprise kept deepening: they told me that for several years now they had been following, word for word, every teaching that comes from Rav Oury Cherki - one of the most profound and most widely heard rabbis in the State of Israel and in France, French being his mother tongue.

Then came the peak of the surprise. Speaking as the young generation - the generation that has carried the weight of this war for three years now - they said:

“It is clear to us that we are living in great days, and that everything still awaits its peak."

And then:

“But you, at Brit Olam, you have been in conversation with the entire population of the world for fifteen years. Believers, those who do not believe, those who live by the worldview of the progressive left, the Arab world, the Hindu world. And the most astonishing thing is that you have succeeded - thousands across the world follow you. Don’t you understand that you are the ones giving meaning to everything happening here? Don’t you understand that the people of Israel and the whole world need to be exposed to what you are doing?"

That already felt like too much - a demand so direct it was almost a shout: why aren’t you proclaiming what you do more loudly? I had not known how deeply we touch audiences this wide, even inside the State of Israel. Or, to be precise: I had not known how deep the shift inside Israeli society has become - a society searching for meaning because of the war.

And from there I began to look again at the story of the spies, in the book of Numbers. From a different angle.

The Worthy Men Who Betrayed

Ten men return from the Land, and they carry with them a report that will kill an entire generation in the wilderness.

Not ordinary men. The Torah is careful to call them “anashim," and whenever the word “anashim" appears in Scripture, it carries significance. Rashi adds a line that should ring in our ears: “and at that hour they were worthy." The moment they set out on their mission, they were upright, pure, the heads of the children of Israel. Each one is a prince of his tribe.

And here opens the question that Manitou places on the table - and it is not a distant historical question but a sword laid against our own neck:

How could men so worthy - chosen personally by Moses - betray their mission, sow despair in the heart of the people, and bring death upon an entire generation?

Had this been the failure of cowards, there would be no mystery. A coward runs. But these were not cowards. They were leaders. And that is precisely the point of danger - that the failure came not from weakness, but from a place that looked like depth.

The Sentence That Seemed Innocent

They spoke a single sentence, and in it their fate was sealed:

“We are not able to go up against the people, for he is stronger than us" (Numbers 13:31).

We read it and assume we have understood. The Canaanites are stronger than we are (“Us"). A military assessment of force, perhaps mistaken, perhaps exaggerated - but understandable. With that, one can argue. With that, one can live.

But the word conceals an abyss.

The Sages in tractate Sotah read the word “mimennu" entirely differently. Not “mimennu" - stronger than us, but “mimenno" - stronger than Him, than the Holy One, blessed be He.

And now the whole sentence turns over. Rabbi Chanina bar Pappa says the thing one cannot believe was said:

“A great thing the spies said at that hour... as if to say, even the Master of the House - the Lord of the world - cannot remove His vessels from there."

This Was Not a Military Assessment. It Was a Claim Against Heaven

Now the true picture emerges, and a chill runs through it.

The spies did not say: “The enemy is stronger than us." They said something far more terrible: “The enemy holds a moral right to this Land greater than ours - greater even than the Creator’s promise." They claimed, as it were, that even the Sovereign of the world could no longer remove His “vessels" - His people - from the place where He had stationed them, because the one dwelling here had the greater claim.

And if so, what use were all the signs and wonders? The exodus from Egypt, the splitting of the sea, the manna, the cloud? If the intruder is still here and justice is on his side, then the entire journey was in vain.

This was not a trembling in the knees. It was a collapse of faith - disguised as realism.

For a moment, the two young men from my office returned to my mind - the scale, and how little it had told me. I set the thought aside and read on.

And Here Is the Ground on Which Everything Stands

Many Jews grew accustomed, over the long exile, to call the Land by the name “the Promised Land." A seemingly innocent phrase, and within it the whole error.

For a promise is something future, conditional, distant - something that must yet arrive, and in the meantime one may wait, may even relinquish it. But the Torah does not speak this way. The Torah says: “the Land which I have given to the children of Israel" - given, in the past tense. Granted, complete, in our hands.

The difference between “promised" and “given" is the difference between a tourist and a member of the household. The tourist comes to see archaeology, landscapes, holiness - and then returns home. The one who belongs to the house is already home. And here Manitou touches the exposed nerve: how did we reach a state in which we feel like strangers in our own home? Perhaps precisely because for so long we felt “at home" while we were exiles in a land not our own - until we forgot where the true home was.

The Answer

So let us return to the question we opened with. How did the worthy men betray?

The surprising answer is that they did not betray out of fear - they betrayed out of a mistake of identity. They looked at the Land as a conditional gift rather than a completed inheritance, saw themselves as guests rather than owners, and weighed our right to the place on a moral scale against the enemy, instead of knowing that this place is not a reward for good behavior, but the ground on which the very purpose stands.

And this is exactly what passes between us and the generation of the wilderness. After all our people have endured, it is clearer than ever that holding onto the Land of Israel is not merely a question of physical survival. A people that seeks only to survive has no need of this Land in particular. But a people with a purpose - a role toward all of humanity - needs the place in which that purpose can rise and be realized. The Land is not the shelter. The Land is the vessel.

The spies did not fail at reading the military map. They failed at reading who they were.

And perhaps for this reason, Manitou closed his words with a single sentence that is both diagnosis and remedy:

“The time has come to return and read the Bible."

A Word Beyond the Lesson

And here is what makes this reading so sharp for our own hour. It was precisely the war of Swords of Iron that awakened the people to grasp our moral right to the Land - not as a slogan, but as something felt in the body. The question of purpose, which for years lay dormant beneath the surface, has now been carved open for deep clarification across every stratum of the nation - including those who appear, on the surface, disconnected from the path of Torah.

And they are not. The two young men who walked into my office were that very generation made visible. By the measure of “religiosity," they registered as almost nothing - and that measure was simply the wrong instrument. For the people of Israel, it is not a religion, however stubbornly the wider world insists on seeing it as one; it is a nation, a people bearing a calling. And the identity these two carried ran deeper than any religiosity I could have weighed: it was bound, directly and without their needing to name it, to the universal purpose of Israel - a purpose the war itself had pressed to the very surface of their lives.

They came to teach me, not the other way around. They are connected and searching for great answers. The generation of the spies measured the Land and saw a threat; this generation, passing through fire, has begun to measure itself and to ask what it is here for. That question itself is the beginning of the return.

The teaching at the heart of these words - the reading of the spies’ report - was written by Rabbi Yehuda Léon Askénazi (Manitou) for Parashat Shelach. The original words were written in 1994, during the Oslo Accords, and the parallel between the generation of the spies and those prepared to surrender the Land stood in the background of his remarks. Translated and edited from the French by Eliezer Cherki. The personal reflection that opens and closes the essay is the author’s own.