This week’s parshah recounts the first time the Israelite send spies to investigate the Land of Israel, an episode that leads to them wandering in the desert for 40 years until the entire generation dies. The haftarah recounts the second time, when Joshua sends two spies to investigate Jericho before conquering it. Reading it brought me back to fourth grade, when I studied the story for the first time. I remember writing an interview with the spies as a school project. The text doesn’t name them at all, so I decided that one of them was Caleb — apparently my teacher knew enough about midrash to cue me in that direction. I gave the other spy a made-up name, Mari ben Dari, which I thought sounded like Hebrew but was probably more influenced by the dwarves in “The Hobbit.”
Why the text leaves them unnamed could be its own d’var Torah, leading to a meditation on the individual soldiers who are actually carrying out Israel’s war against Hamas but whose names we in the U.S. tend not to know. But I’m more intrigued by the implications of their midrashic identities. Numbers Rabbah 16:1 identifies the second spy as Pinchas, Aaron’s grandson, the young zealot who (in)famously stands up for God’s honor by stabbing a copulating couple to death later in Numbers.
It’s hard to gauge their ages precisely, but we know Caleb and Joshua are the only two men from the generation that left Egypt who make it into the promised land — their reward for being the only two spies from the original 12 who gave a good report. And Pinchas is at least one generation, perhaps two, younger. The scene unfolds in my mind’s eye like a buddy cop movie. Caleb, the seasoned professional, jaded and a little grumpy, doing one last mission as a favor for his old pal the Chief before he can retire. Pinchas, the impulsive rising star, out to make a name for himself.
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The midrash itself seems to paint this picture of Pinchas as it tries to solve a textual question of why Rahav — a sympathetic harlot in Jericho — hid “him” (singular) from the king’s soldiers (Joshua 2:4). It has Pinchas tell her that priests are like angels, and angels can decide whether to be visible or invisible; therefore, “I am a priest, and there is no need to hide me. Hide my counterpart, Caleb, but I will stand before them and they will not see me.” The invincibility of youth fairly drips off Pinchas as he delivers this line with a swagger. (The Talmud in Megillah 15a also says that Rahav was one of the four most beautiful women in all of history. Despite Pinchas’s zeal against foreign women seducing Israelite men, and all the more so the prohibition on priests marrying converts, he’s obviously interested in her.)
Caleb has been here before — if not to Jericho per se then scouting the Land of Israel. What has he learned after 38 years of desert wanderings — about himself, about his people, about the world? Does he have regrets about how the last mission went, regrets he is determined to set right this time around? Have his years in the desert, as a senior elder, taught him patience and deepened his wisdom, or is he a washed-up has-been, ready to throw in the towel?
I can imagine him being resentful: If you all had just listened to us in the first place, we would have been here 38 years ago, and I would be entering this land in the prime of my life instead of my twilight years. Or perhaps his main emotion is loyalty: I’ll do whatever Joshua — whatever God — needs of me. (His name seems to be related to the word for dog, kelev; we don’t have much indication of how ancient Israelites viewed dogs, but I like thinking of him as loyal.)
And what about Pinchas, whose main attributes seem to be total devotion to God and a penchant for violence? (His PR people prefer to call it “righteous indignation.”) Is he a loose cannon, apt to do more harm than good until he settles down? Or is he the latest model, made for the current moment, able to see things Caleb can’t?
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While I play this scene out to my own amusement, I simultaneously can’t help but overlay it onto Israel and the occupation with bitter grief. I was in fourth grade in 1991, when — though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time — the groundwork was being laid for the 1993 Oslo Accords. It’s not quite 38 years later, but many of the same leaders are still in power; I do remember Netanyahu’s first election to Prime Minister in 1996. What have we learned over these 30-odd years? How much of the present crisis is happening because of tired old men in leadership nursing sour grapes, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Is it time for a Pinchas who can take radically different action? Or is it exactly the opposite way around, with the hot-headed Pinchasim of our day (ahem, Smotrich, Ben Gvir) glorying in violence, in need of some wise elders to restrain them?
I can’t read the biblical account of Jericho — today a Palestinian city in the West Bank of over 20,000 — without thinking of Gaza. Rahav and her immediate family were rescued because they helped the Israelites. Her neighbors? “They exterminated everything in the city with the sword: man and woman, young and old, ox and sheep and donkey.” (Joshua 6:21)
When it’s time to actually rescue Rahav and her family, the text describes the spies as young men (Joshua 6:23), which would seem to contradict the midrash’s identification of Caleb. Rashi solves this problem by saying that in this instance, with the battle raging around them, they needed to move swiftly, and so God made them like youths. Perhaps this holds out a hope that any of us can be transformed to meet the needs of the moment.
And perhaps, with the capabilities of both Caleb and Pinchas, we can find a way to change the course of the story so it does not have to end in wholesale destruction.
Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson is director of Leadership and Learning at T’ruah. He also serves as the part-time rabbi of the Flatbush Jewish Center in Brooklyn.