Sermon: Parashat Shelach Lecha “Stop. Look. Listen. Think.”
Written by Rabbi Nicola Feuchtwang — 21 June 2025
(A slightly different version of this piece is available on the website of Leo Baeck College at https://lbc.ac.uk/d-var-torah/parashat-shelach-lecha-14/ )
“Stop at the kerb; look right, look left, look right again….”
How did you learn to cross a road safely? Was it with Tufty the Squirrel? Or with the Green Cross Code Man? Or with those silly little hedgehogs? Or with Super Mario?
The slogans and the gimmicks evolve over time, trying to drill into us the need not just to go through the motions but to pay real attention. The basic message stays the same, as one of the recent Transport for London videos puts it:
STOP. LOOK. LISTEN. THINK
(or in another version STOP. LOOK. LISTEN.LIVE)
I have been thinking this week about how we ‘look’ and what we see.
Imagine a single cluster of grapes so big and juicy that it has to be carried on a frame by two people. According to a verse just before our reading this morning, it was part of the evidence that the spies brought back from the Promised Land, a symbol of its abundance. In fact, it became the logo of the Israel Ministry of Tourism, and you have probably seen it a thousand times over the years– in shop windows, on souvenirs, and on bottles of kosher wine.
It is such a striking image that it caused me to slip up in public the first time I read from this parasha. Instead of reading that the people wanted to pelt Joshua and Caleb with stones (avanim),[1] I inadvertently suggested that they did so with grapes (anavim)!
What we see may be shaped by our expectations, and how carefully we look.
And that in turn can shape what we say, and what others hear.
Another personal story: As medical students, my group was once reprimanded by a senior doctor for writing “Drunk” as the first word on the admission notes of a noisy young man in the Emergency department. “By all means write that he complains of headache, smells of alcohol, and that his movements are uncoordinated” she said. “But perhaps he didn’t drink any alcohol; perhaps someone hit him with a bottle, and his problem is a head injury, not intoxication. Distinguish between facts and assumptions. Don’t leap to conclusions without looking at the whole picture.”
Even when our observations are accurate, there may be more than one possible interpretation of the situation. I have tried to be guided by that wisdom ever since.
We don’t know whether the twelve spies split up to survey different parts of the country, or whether they travelled together throughout, but they don’t seem to have disagreed much on what they actually saw. The history-shaping discrepancy was in their interpretation of its significance – and the impact of their words on the rabble of former slaves who heard them. It made slavery feel preferable to prolonged uncertainty – and triggered that impulse to carry out a summary execution of the more optimistic Joshua and Caleb, which was only thwarted by divine intervention.
What is it that makes us want to kill people who say things we don’t want to hear?
Commentators throughout the ages and into our own times have debated why the ten spies were punished so severely for their candid assessment of the land: was it for a lack of faith in divine power, or for assuming they knew how the inhabitants of the land regarded them; for cowardice, for ‘bad-mouthing’, for failing to believe in a better future? Or was it for failing to distinguish between observations and impressions, between facts and assumptions?
After this narrative, the Torah reverts to legal/sacrificial code and its implementation, always stressing a distinction between deliberate and ‘in error’ violations. Then our modern sensitivities are shocked to learn that execution by stoning may be not just a threat but divinely ordained in certain circumstances.[2]
The final verses of Parashat Shelach Lecha detail the commandment to put tsitsit (usually translated as a ‘fringe’ or ‘tassel’) on the edges of our garments:
look at it and recall all GOD’s commandments and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your urge to stray.[3]
This passage is so familiar as the third paragraph of the Shema that we might overlook its paradoxes: are we being instructed to remember to look – or to look in order to remember? We are warned that our eyes can lead us astray, and yet those same eyes can be our salvation.
I am reminded of a fable attributed to R. Nahman of Bratslav:
The king’s forecaster warned him that this year’s wheat crops were infected, and everyone who ate from it would go mad. The problem is that the wheat was already delivered, and the nation was already eating it. There was no way to stop the nation from going mad.
The king and his adviser were faced with a dilemma.
If they didn’t eat the wheat, they would remain sane, but the rest of the mad nation would think the king and his advisor were crazy. But if they ate the wheat, they would go crazy too.
They devised a plan. They too would both eat the wheat and go mad. But they would put a mark on their heads, so when they looked at one another they would at least remember they were both crazy.
I like to think of this as perhaps a bodily version of tsitsit, or a knot in a handkerchief – to remind us that we may have forgotten something even if we cannot immediately recall what it was.
This week, it has felt as if the whole world has eaten infected wheat and gone mad. Israel and Iran are hurling not grapes and not stones, but terrible fire at each other. I fear for my friends and family whose homes and lives are in real danger. And yet in some ways I fear even more what has been happening within our Jewish world in recent months: the entrenched positions, the resistance to listening and looking attentively, the willingness to throw stones at each other, both literal and metaphorical.
I know that, in addition to the fear, there is also anxiety, anger, frustration, despair…
There are practical things we can do, if not to influence the heads of state, at least to support those suffering from their decisions. (For example, the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism has been coordinating online educational programming, food parcels, hospitality, and so on).
Let us also try to look at the foreheads and into the eyes of those who view the world differently, even if we think they may be crazy. Perhaps in that exchanged glance, we can find a glimmer, a spark, of sanity on which to begin rebuilding.
Shabbat Shalom.
[1] Numbers 14:10
[2] Numbers 15:35
[3] Numbers 15:39