[Avodah] Shelach

[Zev Sero]

Ilana Sober Elzufon wrote:

> The spies in Parshat Shlach apparently did not speak with any actual 
> Canaanites. They toured much of the land and would seem to have done a 
> very thorough job, but they missed the ikkar. OTOH, the spies in Sefer 
> Yehoshua didn't manage to see much of anything except the inside of 
> Rachav's house and the top of her roof - but that was all they needed 
> for their mission to be successful.

Actually both did their jobs properly.   The problem is that these
people forgot what their job was.  Malbim points out that the name
we give these people, "meraglim", is a misnomer.  Nowhere in the Torah
are they called that.  And it's not as if this was a word that didn't
exist at the time; Yosef accused his brothers of being "meraglim",
Moshe sent people "leragel et Ya`azer", and Yehoshua sent "meraglei
cheresh".  It's not an accident these people are called "tarim" and
not "meraglim", because they were *not* spies, they were tourists.

They were sent to tour the land and come back with a report of what
it was like, so that the people would want to go there.  Thus they
were well-known politicians, carefully chosen for balance among the
shevatim, like a congressional fact-finding mission that's balanced
by region.  There was no secret about them, and they had no reason to
speak to the people, since the people were not expected to be part of
the landscape after the conquest.  All they had to report on was what
sort of people they were, i.e. did they appear to be prosperous and
healthy.  As for military secrets, these people had no expertise and
wouldn't know what to look for.

Meraglim, OTOH, are not named; on the contrary, their identity is
always a state secret!  They are sent in small teams, not 12 together,
and they are chosen for their expertise, not their tribal distribution.
They go in the dead of night, and return to report in secret.

When the tourists came back and reported "tovah ha'aretz me'od me'od"
they were doing their job; had they found it not to be so good, or
good only for some shevatim and not others, they would have been
obligated to be honest and say so.  "But there is no irrigation, as
we are used to, and the farmers depend on rain."   "But there are
parts that are cold and high up, and white stuff falls out of the sky
in the winter."  "But there is nowhere suitable for growing tropical
fruit."   What they had *no* business doing was commenting on the
strength of the people and the extent of their fortifications, and
expressing a decidedly *non-expert* opinion that conquest would be
impossible.   From "efes ki az ha'am", they deviated from their terms
of reference, and acted *as if* they were meraglim, which they were
not; they were out of their depth and didn't know it.

Moshe's and Yehoshua's meraglim, OTOH, weren't sent to look at the
scenery; they were unnamed secret agents, with military knowledge,
sent to find out about the enemy's defenses, and what weaknesses
the enemy might have.   If they had learned that "az ha'am" and
come to the sober professional conclusion that the invasion could
not succeed, it would have been their duty to come back and say so,
so that the commander would have the necessary intelligence and
could formulate his plans accordingly.

-- 
Zev Sero                      The trouble with socialism is that you
zev at sero.name                 eventually run out of other people’s money
                                                     - Margaret Thatcher