Parshat Shlech in Febrile Times

 The piece that really caught my attention in this week’s Torah reading isn’t the piece where the spies either do or don’t share their confidence in the outcome of a military campaign.

 

The idea that some people believe that war will have a positive outcome and some don’t feels so close and so scary. And while the story we read entails a clear right and wrong side of the argument; that’s because God’s presence, on one side of the argument is Bolet – entirely clear. And I don’t live in such a clear world where God’s presence, on one side of the argument or the other is so dramatically manifest.

 

The piece that really caught my attention is what happened to the outcome of that disagreement.

I mean, I have a certain sympathy for the 10 spies who suffer from what the Rabbis calls, choser Emunah, lack of faith. They are clearly terrified. The classic thing to point out is this moment when they say, “We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked like grasshoppers to them.” They are scared, scared people assume that everyone else is stronger than they are.

 

But the thing that happened immediately after this is the bit that really breaks my heart. The whole community raise up their voices and weep. Vayilonu al Moshe – they rail at Moses and they gather together as a rebellious mass with a dismissive force that on the one hand seeks to isolate Moses and on the other unite all their efforts in opposing him.

“It would be better for us to go back to Egypt. Nitnah Rosh, Let’s get a new head and go back to Egypt.” And then when Moses attempts to calm their fears, they threaten, or start or agitate – the Hebrew’s unclear – to pelt Moses with stones.

And I can sermonise on this.

And my heart weeps for this – not the disagreement, but the overspill of disagreement into ad hominin attack into mob opposition into the threat of violence.

And at this point, the entire edifice that has been crafted since … well since Genesis really, starts to crack open.

The unity of the people is lost, in the opening of next week’s Parasha there’s a full on rebellion.

Moses’ ability to lead is lost, in the following week, he deals with another rebellious moment by castigating the people he’s supposed to lead and turning violent himself – to a rock, not a human, but that’s too much. Moses too loses the ability to enter the Promised Land.

God’s angry, and as a result of this week’s parasha decrees that none of the people who left Egypt will be let into the Land of Israel.

These are the things that happen when a grain of an understandable fear meets the industrial scale complex of magnification and difference, weaponised polarisation and political opportunism.

Ezra Klein, in his recent book, Why We Are Polarized analyses what is perhaps the gravest danger to the continued civil functioning of civil society – he’s got a lot to say about this society, but he’s writing largely about the United States, we shouldn’t hold that against him

There is much awry in American politics, but I’ve come to believe the master story—the one that drives almost all divides and most fundamentally shapes the behavior of participants—is the logic of polarization. That logic, put simply, is this: to appeal to a more polarized public, political institutions and political actors behave in more polarized ways. As political institutions and actors become more polarized, they further polarize the public. This sets off a feedback cycle: to appeal to a yet more polarized public, institutions must polarize further; and so on and so on.

He charts how we claim noble motives for ourselves and accuse those who disagree with us as self-serving idiots and how we excuse our own errors as incidental and go after the errors of the others as indicative. He charts much of this through the lens of 21^st century social media and 24/7 news cultures. But these aren’t new challenges and the response we should be seeking, in this increasingly polarized world are certainly not new responses.

We Jews, of course, tend to pride ourselves on our ability to argue. For every two Jews there are three opinions and all that. It’s a skill we’ve been working on for almost two millennia.

The word Talmudic is most often misused in contemporary discourse. I caught one definition – clearly not written by a Rabbi – that suggested Talmudic meant,  “characterized by or making extremely fine distinctions; overly detailed or subtle; hairsplitting.” That’s not really it, at all. You can trust me on this, I’ve read a lot of Talmud.

Talmudic passages classically work like this. One Rabbi says something is OK, then another Rabbi says it isn’t. And then everyone else piles in to analyse the first Rabbi’s argument – how could he (it was almost always he, back then – we’ve got better) how could he have said that this particular thing was OK when he said another thing, so similar to the first wasn’t OK. And the reverse applies too, and on the passage goes, weighing, counter-balancing and analysing each argument until, several folios later the passage concludes triumphantly with the conclusion that we were right all along. The first Rabbi was consistent with their own position in saying this thing was OK, and the second Rabbi was consistent with their own position in saying that it wasn’t.

The overriding commitment of the Talmudic project isn’t to demonstrate which side, and certainly which Rabbi is right or wrong. The overriding commitment is to justify each argument – present it as coherently as possible, to express it in such a way as to demonstrate the search for holiness and decency that its holder embodies.

That’s what it means to be Talmudic.

There’s even a Rabbinic doctrine of Mahloket BShem Shamayim – a disagreement for the sake of heaven, the kind of disagreement that survives.

I think this Jewish approach to argument as a good is predicated on three very Jewish ideas – not unique to Judaism, certainly, but characteristic and capable of explaining, I think, who we are at our best and who we need to strive to be again and again.

The first is a kind of self-interest. As a people, for 2,000 years, Jews have had to adapt and relocate and relearn new skills. We’ve need to learn things that we didn’t know just a whisper of time ago. And we’ve come to know that disagreement is the only way to learn. Through disagreement we grow, we discover that which we didn’t already know. We test out our hypotheses and learn which to abandon and which to develop. As a matter of self-interest we know we need to hold a space open for the new, for the counter-voice, even if, perhaps particularly if we are absolutely convinced of our own rightness.

The second is theological idea. Our understanding of God is that God understands all things and our understanding of us, as humans, is that we are finite and fragile and can’t. Even if we are absolutely convinced of our own rightness, particularly if we are convinced of our own rightness. To be a decent Jew, to be a decent human, is to be humble.

And the third reason, I think, that shapes our approach to argument is a belief in humanity. Every human, we claim is created in the  image of God. Even the ones we disagree with. Why, teach the Rabbis in Mishnah Sanhedrin, was all humanity created from one primordial Adam? So no-one can say my parent is greater than your parent, for we all come from the same parent. The most commonly repeated instruction in the Torah is to love the stranger, the person who is different. It’s a staggering idea.

And it’s one we desperately need to recover and hold close to the centre of who we are and how we engage with our fellows. We need to get over the idea that listening hard to the arguments of those who currently take opposite sides to us in debate are our enemies.

It’s not such a distant idea for those of us who, like me, take such pride in being a citizen of this country. You have to take pride in a country where the political party that loses in an election, His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.

I love the idea of loyal opposition.

In parliament and in the streets and even, God help us, on-line, we need to find opportunities to listen with a respect and humility and a sense of openness.

We need to treat disagreement as something other than a test in which our job is to triumph while ridding the other side of not only logical legitimacy, but humanity.

We need to treat disagreement as an opportunity to learn, a chance to practice humility, for indeed our reach is tiny and a chance to recognise the majestic nature of humanity.

It’s not true that such an approach renders us weak. The generation of the Midbar – the bratting ridiculing rebels of the desert generation - has long disappeared, but the people who learnt to take argument so seriously as to place it at the very centre of our interpersonal and theological journey through life are still here. And still learning. At least I hope we are. We certainly need to be.

Shabbat Shalom