“And We Were Grasshoppers In Our Own Eyes”
June 7, 2002

When I was in USY I served as regional religious chairman for Northern New Jersey Region, HaGalil. In that capacity I visited many if not most of the synagogues in the region. I have paid attention in the subsequent years to one particular issue: most synagogues are not on a main street. I personalized this because the synagogue I grew up in began on the main street and then moved to an inconspicuous side street. Since I was not there and too young I don’t know the conversations that took place. I only know the result. This city seems to be an exception. In its time Grove Avenue was a very main street and our Religious School is on Parham Road. Even so, we proclaim our presence most modestly. As I have traveled the country from Bangor, Maine to Richmond, Virginia, I have been struck by the lack of prominenceof the locations of synagogues. In all of the synagogues in New York City only three come to mind of being on major main thoroughfares. On the other hand, churches are located in prominent locations and are built with prominence and imposing presence. Currently the church at the end of Monument Avenue on Horsepen is building a cross next to its extended sanctuary, which will be seen all the way from the intersection of Staples Mill Road to the church. I have always wondered: Why weren’t synagogues built in prominent places?

Let me hold that question and turn to tomorrow’s Torah portion of Shelach Lecha. In it Moses sends twelve spies to Eretz Yisrael to bring back a report. Ten are negative and pessimistic-in-the-extreme while two are positive. At the end of their report they totally demoralize and dishearten the people by saying that the inhabitants of the land are giants and they, the spies, “seem like grasshoppers in our own eyes and so we were in their eyes.” In the end, the generation that agreed with these ten spies and said let’s go back to Egypt were doomed to die in the wilderness. The spies traveled for forty days so Israel was punished one year for each day, thus forty years of wandering until the next generation would enter Eretz Yisrael. A second question for the night: Why did they compare themselves to grasshoppers?

A corollary question:

What exactly was the sin of this generation that kept them out of Eretz Yisrael?

What can we learn for and about ourselves from these two pieces?

1.) Grasshoppers are interesting to watch but we don’t really want them as household pets. They are part of the locust family, predatory insects known for their devastation of the fields. One of the plaques of Egypt was “Arbeh” a relative of the “hagrav,” the grasshopper. The natural reaction to seeing a grasshopper is to step on it and squash it. When the spies called themselves grasshoppers they were speaking shamefully, disgracefully, and demeaninglyabout themselves. They were lowering themselves to themselves. They were bringing disrepute upon themselves by referring to themselves as grasshoppers.

2.) By referring to themselves as grasshoppers they were inviting themselves to be victimized. The spies never spoke to the inhabitants of Eretz Yisrael. How did they know what they were thinking? The spies projected upon those living in the land that they were bigger and greater than them. They saw themselves as insignificant, unworthy and trivial. By using the language of “grasshoppers” they were inviting others to step on them and to destroy them. Because they thought of themselves as small, they assumed others thought of them as small, and therefore they put themselves in the posture and position to be stepped on. The truth was that the inhabitants of the land were terrified of them!

3.) The Italian Bible commentator Sforno has an interesting insight. He writes that they saw themselves as being so small as grasshoppers in comparison to the giants that the giants wouldn’t even bother with them to hurt them. They would be invisible! If they couldn’t be seen they wouldn’t be harmed. When I came to Columbia University it felt that of the 25,000 students I was the only one wearing a yarmulke. There wasn’t another to be seen. Sforno bridges the years from Torah to him to us: If we reduce our visibility we can virtually disappear and no one will notice us.And thus no one will bother us either. This logic of the spies was the rationale for our assimilation. If we lose our particularity and drop off everyone else’s radar screen, no one will bother with us. It was a logic whose goal was our self-defense but it was achieved by our self-abnegation. We were to deny ourselves in order to be.

Perhaps this logic explains why Jews changed their names, why Jews didn’t do Jewish things in public, and didn’t want to bepublicly recognized as Jews. Perhaps that is why synagogues were built on side streets and not on main thoroughfares.

If we wouldn’t be seen, we wouldn’t be bothered.

If we made ourselves like grasshoppers

we wouldn’t be worthy of their wasting their time on us.

We would be inconspicuous.

This was the sin of the generation of the wilderness, whose punishment was not to enter the Promised Land.

They abdicated their self-respect.

They gave up who they were.

They considered themselves insignificant and unworthy,

And though that everybody else thought about them the same way.

We learn from the Torah portion:

that it is a mitzvah to stand up as a Jews in public;

it is right to be proud of being a Jew;

that it is a mitzvah to do Jewish observances in public;

Judaism makes a compelling statement of the truths it proclaims;

that it is a mitzvah to stand up for our essence;

it’s a mitzvah to build synagogues on prominent streets;

to where a kipah, a chai in prominent places;

that it is a mitzvah to stand up for Medinat Yisrael,

even when it is unpopular,

even when we are outnumbered – like at San Fran. State Univ.,

even when we get unpopular newspaper press;

that it is a mitzvah to write letters to the editor;

it’s a mitzvah to buy vests for Magen David Adom.

The generation that entered the Promised Land were those

who believed in themselves,

who stood up for themselves,

and who maintained a vision of themselves.

The ultimate lesson of this Torah portion is,

on the most personal level, to believe in ourselves;

on a communal level, to believe in ourselves as a congregation and community;

and, globally, to stand up for ourselves as Am Yisrael, in Medinat Yisrael, and for

Jews throughout the world.

Without hubris but with much self-esteem, let us be proud to be Jews, proud of Judaism and proud of Medinat Yisrael.

Amen.