There is a proverbial story, made popular by the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer about a rabbi who was visited by a quarreling couple. The wife first shared her complaint about all the terrible things her husband had done to her. The rabbi listened solemnly and said, “you’re right.” But then the husband jumped in and shared all the terrible things he had endured from his wife’s mistreatment. The rabbi listened solemnly and said, “you’re right.” At this point, the rabbi’s daughter, who was eavesdropping from the next room bursts through the door and yells, ‘how can you say that this one is right and that one is right? They can’t both be right!” The rabbi listened to his wise child, nodded his head, and said, “you’re also right.”
It is true that people have access to different facets of reality and experience reality differently. Two people, or groups of people, can experience the same events, and emerge with very different stories about who is right and who is wrong and who is responsible and who is a victim. These conflicting narratives are not necessarily the result of a lie. They are the result of the necessarily different perspectives that each individual is privy to as we encounter the world and the way those subjective experiences are the building blocks for our understanding of reality.
We know this from our own lives and we see a striking example of this in Sefer Devarim which we began this morning. Sefer Devarim are Moshe’s own words and Sefer Devarim contains Moshe’s perspective on the events of Jewish history that are known to us from the earlier books of the Torah. And so we have the third-person, seemingly neutral, perspective on the exodus from Egypt, standing at Sinai, and the trials and tribulations of the desert from Sefer Shmot and Sefer Vayikra and Sefer Bamidbar. And then, we have Moshe’s perspective which differs in significant ways. God endorses both perspectives and Moshe’s own words earn a Divine seal of approval and are then incorporated into the Torah. Each perspective is a facet of truth. Just as any fraction of Infinity is infinite, Moshe’s words and the words of Sefer Shemot and Vayikra and Bamidbar are all infinitely true.
And we have the advantage of hearing both perspectives and emerging with a fuller understanding than would have been possible with just one alone. Perhaps the most obvious example of this dynamic concerns the way that Moshe recounts the sin of the spies as his most significant and consequential failure, a perspective not at all apparent from Parashat Shlach in Sefer Bamidbar.
In the third aliyah of Parashat Devarim, Moshe explains, “וַתִּקְרְבוּן אֵלַי כֻּלְּכֶם, Then all of you came to me and said, “Let us send men ahead to reconnoiter the land for us and bring back word on the route we shall follow and the cities we shall come to.”
Whose idea is the delegation according to Moshe? It is the people’s idea. That is completely missing from Parashat Shlach whose very name “Shlach ” echoes the Divine command that seems to inaugurate the very idea of the spies’ mission:
וַיְדַבֵּר ה אֶל־מֹשֶׁה לֵּאמֹר׃
שְׁלַח־לְךָ אֲנָשִׁים וְיָתֻרוּ אֶת־אֶרֶץ כְּנַעַן
And God said to Moshe saying, “send for yourselves men to scout out the Land of Canaan.” It seems to be God’s idea. These are not contradictions that are hard to reconcile. The idea could have first arisen among the population and then God could have confirmed the request. But Moshe chooses to emphasize the origins of the idea among the people and to emphasize his own guilt in acceding to their request.
Rabbi Francis Nataf’s book “Redeeming Relevance” on Sefer Devarim, which we brought back with us from Israel this summer, offers a holistic understanding of Moshe’s sense of responsibility for this historic disaster.
From the very moment that ma’amad har Sinai was complete, once the revelation at Sinai had occurred, Moshe’s leadership agenda was to prepare the people for his own death and for their political and spiritual independence from him. Judges were appointed to resolve disputes between the Israelites without resorting to Moshe, and God’s own spirit was shared among seventy elders with two of them, Eldad and Medad, emerging as prophets in their own right. When Israelite civilians, of their own accord, asked for an accommodation for those who were impure to be able to celebrate Pesach, Moshe must have felt a great sense of satisfaction. The people themselves were so committed to observing mitzvot that they pushed for a clarification or an update of the Halakhah itself so that everyone could observe. Moshe was a facilitator of that update to the Halakhah but the initiative did not come from him and the resulting Halakhah was different from what he had taught the people to do prior to the update.
And then, in the words of Parashat Devarim, וַתִּקְרְבוּן אֵלַי כֻּלְּכֶם, you all came to me with a request to scout out Eretz Yisrael. Moshe must have assumed this too was a positive sign. It supported his agenda of creating a more empowered “civilian” leadership. וַיִּיטַב בְּעֵינַי הַדָּבָר וָאֶקַּח מִכֶּם שְׁנֵים עָשָׂר אֲנָשִׁים אִישׁ אֶחָד לַשָּׁבֶט׃ – this was good in my eyes and I selected the men to go on the journey, one from each tribe.
The catastrophe of the sin of the spies, and the reason that Moshe chooses to emphasize it more than any other episode in his 40 year career is because it was a catastrophe that emerged from Moshe’s own mistaken trust. He thought they were ready for independence from Moshe’s direct and constant guidance. He thought it was a positive sign that they wanted to scout the land. He couldn’t fathom how little support existed for the basic mission of the Jewish people at that time to cross the desert and enter Eretz Yisrael.
With this insight, we can look back to Parashat Shlach and understand how and why Moshe is paralyzed when the spies deliver their negative report. Moshe responded decisively to sins and minor rebellions in the past, but the spies gave their report in the context of Moshe’s own attempt to gradually disengage and empower others. Yehoshua and Calev then assert themselves in a doomed attempt to argue against the majority report of the other spies and, in that moment, guarantee for themselves a place in the next generation’s leadership.
Sefer Devarim and Parashat Devarim offer us a chance to remember the value of subjective perspectives and that God’s own Torah – our benchmark for truth – endorses the subjective experience of Moshe. This gives us insight into the thoughts of our greatest teacher and also gives us a glimpse of a fuller and more complete reality.
The day the spies returned was the 9th of Av and the crying of the Israelites, wishing to evade their destiny, doomed the day to be a day of crying long into the future. The destruction of the beit hamikdash is emblematic of God’s estrangement from humanity, which of course, is just a manifestation of humanity’s estrangement from ourselves. Recognizing that every human being has a legitimate story to tell about themselves and their experiences and their history, can lead to seeking out a truth that combines those smaller truths into a whole that encompases everyone’s story and erases none. This is the redemptive potential of Sefer Devarim which ends with Moshe’s blessing, and this is the redemptive power we need, and the world needs, this Tisha b’Av. The prophets promised that our fast days would be transformed into days of feasting and rejoicing. And this year, we are indeed eating and drinking and rejoicing on the 9th day of Av (since the fast is postponed until tomorrow). In this way, Shabbat this week is even more so a foretaste of the world to come (m’ein olam ha’bah). May we merit eating and drinking and rejoicing each year on Tisha b’Av as we are doing today.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 