‘Fear them not’

This Passover, American Jews must learn the lessons of the story of the spies.

My new book, Self Defense: A Jewish Manifesto, is now available at Amazon via Wicked Son Books and the Z3 Project.

With Passover upon us, everyone is again contemplating the great epic of our enslavement in Egypt and escape from bondage. We tend to concentrate on such famous stories as the Israelites’ suffering, Moses’s mission, and the crossing of the Sea of Reeds. But one of the most telling and perhaps disturbing episodes of the Exodus comes much later, in the book of Numbers, when the Israelites finally reach Eretz Israel after their journey through the desert.

Literally in sight of personal and collective freedom, Moses sends a group of spies into Eretz Israel. They return with tales of the beauty and fecundity of the Land, but many of them falsely claim that it is inhabited by all manner of enemies who will destroy the Israelites should they attempt to enter it.

The people’s reaction is immediate and terrible. According to Numbers 14:

All the children of Israel murmured against Moses and against Aaron; and the whole congregation said unto them: “Would that we had died in the land of Egypt! or would we had died in this wilderness! And wherefore doth the LORD bring us unto this land, to fall by the sword? Our wives and our little ones will be a prey; were it not better for us to return into Egypt?”

Moses and his allies desperately try to assuage their people’s fears, declaring, “Only rebel not against the LORD, neither fear ye the people of the land; for they are bread for us; their defense is removed from over them, and the LORD is with us; fear them not.”

The people refuse to listen and clamor to be returned to Egypt. God then appears to Moses with terrible vengeance in mind, but Moses dissuades him from destroying the Israelites entirely. Instead, God imposes an only slightly less draconian punishment:

Say unto them: As I live, saith the LORD, surely as ye have spoken in Mine ears, so will I do to you: your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness, and all that were numbered of you, according to your whole number, from twenty years old and upward, ye that have murmured against Me; surely ye shall not come into the land, concerning which I lifted up My hand that I would make you dwell therein.

So, the Israelites are left to wander the desert again, until the generation of the Exodus has died, except for a handful whose courage did not falter. It fell to the next generation to inherit the Land. Freedom is waiting, but the freed slaves themselves will never see it.

Learned helplessness

There is a lesson in this story of the utmost importance, especially for today’s American Jews, and we ought to reflect on it with trepidation and determination.

The failure of the Israelites to find the courage to seize their freedom tells us something deeply disturbing: Slavery often feels easier than freedom. There is a good reason for this, because freedom is difficult. It requires a step into the unknown, the realization that one’s destiny is now in one’s own hands and no one else’s. In such a situation, we cannot know what will follow or if we have the strength to contend with it, and it is terribly easy for our courage to fail us and prompt us to long to return to bondage.

The story of the spies also teaches something fundamental about human beings: to a great extent, submission often comes more naturally than defiance. This appears to be hardwired into our psyches for somewhat unknown reasons, but it is a well-documented psychological phenomenon, known as “learned helplessness.”

In some rather cruel animal experiments conducted decades ago, researchers subjected a dog to electric shocks in a situation from which it could not escape. To their surprise, when the shocks were repeated in a situation from which the dog could escape, it chose not to. It had learned that resistance was futile, so it simply sat there and endured the torture.

What this means is decidedly disturbing: people can adapt even to torture. Moreover, they adapt to it so well that it becomes normalized. Human beings become blind to the possibility of escape and give themselves over to perpetual pain. Submission has become the default reaction to the excruciating, and defiance seems impossible.

This is precisely what happened to the Israelites. To keep the Israelites enslaved, the Egyptians had broken their spirits to the extent that, over the years of bondage and persecution, the Israelites had grown used to slavery. Even the possibility of freedom became unthinkable.

This had become their default mode of existence, prompting a perverse sense of torture as normalcy, to the extent that the unknown freedom that was now theirs for the taking became a terrifying prospect and, at the first possible opportunity, they chose to abandon it, even as the prophet of God assured them that there was nothing to fear.

The new slavery

This Passover, American Jews should think long and hard about what this means, just as the seder seeks to make everyone feel that they themselves are being freed from bondage along with their ancient ancestors.

American Jews should do so because, as we speak, a kind of slavery is being normalized. American Jews are being subjected to increasing intimidation, violence, ostracization, ghettoization, and perhaps, in the end, outright de facto expulsion. Their rights to freedom of speech, religion, and assembly are being, in practice, abrogated. They are being expelled from social, cultural, and political spaces. They are being forced to conceal symbols of their identity, avoid certain neighborhoods, and forgo attendance at antisemitic institutions like those of higher education. The world is becoming a no-go area for Jews.

Worst of all, perhaps, is that American Jews are already adapting to this insidious form of slavery. They have begun to accept it as the “new normal.” They are starting to submit to the reality that they can no longer be Jews unless they withdraw from American society, fortify their synagogues and institutions, build the walls of a de facto ghetto of the body and spirit, and accept that Jews will be assaulted and killed no matter what they do. Indeed, they are beginning to conclude that there is nothing they can do. Learned helplessness is slouching toward victory.

There are numerous reasons for this, such as the total failure of the American Jewish leadership to mobilize the community, as well as American Jews’ diminishing numbers. Nonetheless, there is no reason to submit. American Jews still possess substantial resources, influence, and social and cultural power, but if they are not used to liberate the community from learned helplessness, they will be slowly taken away by our enemies, leaving the community to conclude that, in the end, resistance is futile and flight may be the only option.

What American Jews must do is to organize and mobilize their community for genuine resistance. There are obvious ways to do this, such as the creation by the Jewish leadership of a new civil rights movement and the organization of local self-defense groups. But this will require a sea change in the American Jewish mentality, because American Jews’ greatest enemy is, above all, one of the spirit: fear and the foregoing of courage, the demand that they be returned to Egypt lest they die in the desert. If they make this demand—and thankfully, they have yet to do so—they will die in the desert as the generation of the Exodus did, and who knows what, if anything, will be left to the next generation?

The Haggadah teaches that our enemies rise up against us “in every generation.” They have risen up again, and it falls to this generation to resist them, but they can only do so if they contemplate the story of the spies and understand that Passover calls on them to reject submission and, instead, heed Moses’s admonition: “fear them not.”