This was my D’var Torah for Parashat Sh’lach L’cha on June 21, 2025. As I publish this a year later (5786/2026), I plan to iterate on very same focus in the synagogue this Shabbat.
It’s early summer; Year 2 in the wilderness, the midbar. It’s been some weeks of the nation moving forward, and also complaining. Some of it high-minded, about leadership; some of it practical, about the needs of day-to-day; a lot of it petty. It’s early summer of Year 2 when God decides it’s time to make the future more real, to take the first concrete steps toward being in the Promised Land.
God instructs Moshe to send out scouts to go ahead into Eretz Yisrael. One of the Hebrew terms is m’raglim, from the word regel; they were charged with “legging it out” all over the land. Moshe picked one scout from each of the twelve tribes, and asked them to report on the physical and human landscape out ahead.
After forty days, they came back with a report in two parts. One was directly in response to Moshe’s agenda, and it was unanimous. The amazing fruits that could grow in the land, like grape clusters so large and juicy that it took two people to carry them. The fortified cities the Israelites would have to reckon with when they arrived.
The second part Moshe didn’t ask for directly, but it turned out to be way more important. Ten of the twelve had this to say:
It is a land that eats up its inhabitants – eretz ochelet yosh’veha hi ארץ אוכלת יושביה היא
We were in our own eyes like grasshoppers – van’hi b’eineinu k’chagavim ונהי בעינינו כחגבים – and so we must have seemed like to them, who are giants.
The other two, Yehoshua and Kalev (Joshua and Caleb), Kalev in particular, said:
Yachol nuchal la — יכול נוכל לה
Capable, we are capable of this!
Moshe sent the twelve m’raglim out to see the backdrop of future– but what they came back with was a report about themselves.
Ten said: We’re too small. Grasshoppers we are – captives of the moment; can’t see above what’s around us.
Two said: We are capable, oh-so-capable!
We know how the story goes from here, how it leads to forty years of waiting in place, until a whole new generation can make its try. But I want to stay in this moment, the moment of the two reports. To think about the options the people had that summer, and in particular what we can learn from the one person who expressed that this people could do what it takes to get through the challenges to the future – Kalev.
There were that summer three possible paths. #1 Go forward. Fulfill a promise that in Egypt most people knew only in general terms, as a heritage from the past, a myth. Go forward knowing there would be fighting against enemies and that there would be fighting among themselves as was already going on.
Path #2: Go back to Egypt. Some people really said this! Let’s go back to a place they knew was one of oppression, where there might be relative safety for some and a fantasy of enough sustenance to get by on.
Or #3: Stand in place. Buy time, to be charitable about it; practice avoidance, to be less so. Keep the complaints and mild infighting of now as preferable to what it takes to chance it forward. No one articulated that as a choice, but we can see why it’s maybe a bit appealing, at least more so than back to Egypt.
So Kalev was the voice of path #1, of definitely go forward. Even more than Moshe. Kalev hasn’t been one of the elders we’ve heard about so far in the Torah. He ends up one of two who will be allowed to outlive their generation and go into the Promised Land. But I want to think about him now at the moment in the summer of year 2 and in the years right after, the person who was certain about moving forward and was still that person even during the time when forward wasn’t happening. Who is Kalev?
Start with his name, which I like to think of as ka-lev, meaning “like the heart.” And God says of him ruach acheret imo, “there is another spirit with him.”
That last phrase invites a lot of spiritual commentary, exploring the idea that Kalev had a more expansive spirit than is typical, or maybe even more spirit than his own.
The Netziv of Volozhin taught that Kalev was the only one of the twelve willing to go absolutely everywhere in the land, to the most dangerous and uncomfortable places. To test his faith in the future and its vision, and to see the biggest obstacles, and I think also to understand what it would mean to move ahead with people in his nation and his leadership who were afraid even to do that. Who might be cynical or who might be unprepared.
Along those lines, Rashi says that Kalev’s two spirits were that he could speak the language of the doubters, which made them open to hear the words from his heart. He didn’t disagree that getting into the land would be difficult, and that gave him credibility. So even if none of the ten spies with the grasshopper report were persuaded by him, a lot of the people in general were.
I think about his name, Kalev, “like the heart.” That kaf fascinates me; it’s actually often one of the more biting letters in the Torah or the Tanakh (Bible). There are two ways to be “like the heart.” One is to have sort of a heart. To portray yourself as having a big heart but not really having it. Praying for peace for all but not really caring about all, mouthing the words and trying to get credit for them. Vouching for equality for all, whether frankly that’s here or in Israel, and pretending it’s more complete than it is and not being there when push comes to shove. That’s being “like” a heart.
But that wasn’t Kalev. The other way to be “like a heart” is to be even more than a human heart usually is. To have an open heart and think about those closest to you and other people too, when you are justifiably angry, when you are exhausted. To try to care about people whose lives matter to you but whose experiences you only start to understand.
To join a prayer service for Israelis and Gazans and Iranians when you have hardly slept because you have just been in your bomb shelter. That’s “like a heart” in the positive direction, like my heart but even bigger.
This week I had two chances to be with some people who are like that – ruach acheret, an extra spirit; Ka-lev, like a heart.
On Tuesday, I was introduced to a filmmaker in Israel named Eli Katzoff. Av Harris, Mike and Ruti’s son, introduced us because of short film Eli made this year for Moment Magazine about Rav Arik Ascherman. The film is about a kippah-wearing Israeli who not only is in the West Bank protecting Palestinians but wants davka to be seen by them as a kippah-wearing Israel.
Eli was talking to us from Hertzliya on the coast north of Tel Aviv, very close to where a missile from Iran had struck the day before. Eli’s been out filming about those missiles too, talking to people on the street, Israeli Jews. I hope we will all get to meet Eli, whose message is partly that documenting all of this conflict and even carnage is essential to creating a future of peace.
And on Thursday, I lay tefillin while taking part in an online interfaith service from Jerusalem and other places in Israel organized by a number of groups including the Rabbinic Voice for Human Rights and the Spirit of Galilee, Ruach Hagalil — there is that word again for “spirit.” My sort-of-cousin Rabbi David Goodman in Yerushalayim is part of this ongoing interfaith group even during the war. The service was in Hebrew and Arabic and English. At the beginning, one of the organizers said that if people needed to absent themselves for a time to get to a mama”d (safe room) or a shelter from incoming missiles, the rest of us should understand and hopefully they could come back.
It’s why I can even dare give a D’var Torah like this today, because it’s tempting to say: Who can have a heart open to more than their own here among Jews, much less in Israel in the raw early days of a war like between Israel and Iran.
Many people would say: Having this meeting means betraying your own, suppressing your pain for the sake of someone else’s ability to be in the room with you. Yet here were religious leaders finding a way to name all the pain and injury and death of everyone, to dare to talk about shalom and salaam together. And not just in generality, but to invite each other to sing and chant, to name everyone it is whose homes are under attack.
There were no negotiations needed about the language that had to take place before this service, little talk of the intricacies which everyone knows are there. It was just a moment of true humanity, big heart in three languages. Ruach acheret, each person with their own spirit and stretching to have another; ka-lev, like the heart, with the kind of heart that Rebbe Nachman taught is more heart-like than any heart in the world.
So thinking of all of this – Israel, Iran, Gaza, Pride, Juneteenth, ICE — what does it mean to be like Kalev, in this moment when sometimes it feels like we are going backwards toward Egypt, sometimes it feels like we are so stuck in delays?
Being like Kalev means it’s okay to have a clear vision of what the promised land looks like, even when you have no idea of what it will be like to get there from here, what it will be like to fight and win.
It means not seeing those in your way as giants and yourself as a grasshopper. And in fact helping other people, who know what the promised land looks like too, to see themselves not as small to you, but as giants to you. This is exactly how I feel about each of you.
It means seeing the future as urgent, even on the days you know others are avoiding it or thwarting it and you need patience. Making that future in the meantime real in pockets, urgently – whether an interfaith prayer service in Yerushalayim, or the Pride festival in Nashua this afternoon.
Being Kalev means knowing the difference between an attack on you and a question that deserves exploration, and when a principle is worth standing up for, is worth reframing the conversation from whether to how.
Kalev said about not just himself, not just those who were with him, but everyone in his nation: yachol nuchal la. Capable, we are capable of the future we have been taught to make real. Doubled language, yachol nuchal — We are capable with the powers we have now, and we will develop the powers we need.
I like to imagine Kalev through the 38+ years after that year 2 summer, not buying into the decree about 40 years. Knowing that is a possible outcome, but more so living as though any day would still be the day to get going into the land of milk and honey, of becoming the kingdom of priests and a holy nation that the people agreed to become at Har Sinai. Teaching each new child as they emerged in the midbar how to feel confident and urgent and ready, even on days when things are standing still and drifting backward. How amazing for those children to grow up, and have Kalev with them every step of the way, including the day the Promised Land and the Torah within it were completely real.
Yes, there is a way that a week like this one seems very much like the moment pinpointed in the parasha today. Those are the times we most need to be Kalev.
Shabbat Shalom.
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