And, for that reason, Moses pointedly accuses the two dissident tribes of being a new version of the 12 spies. In fact, Gad and Reuben’s wording, “Do not bring us over the Jordan” (Numbers 32:5), really does sound as if they were rejecting the Holy Land just as much as the spies, a position taken by the 15th century Spanish commentator R. Yitzhak Arama.When Moses associates Gad and Reuben with the spies, he actually goes beyond rebuke; he is identifying them as part of a larger and highly insidious sociopolitical movement, the bottom line of which was to resist God’s plan. Its adherents wanted to take action into their own hands and escape a divine purpose for which they did not feel prepared or motivated.But what is most important in the 38-year continuum that Moses draws between the spies and the Gad-Reuben axis is what occurs between its two landmark events. Rather than seeing the first debacle as a defeat, Moses sees it as a challenge. With his eye on the long-term, Moses knew that his calling was now to educate the children to think differently than their parents. And, in this campaign, the Torah reveals that he was largely successful.To get a better appreciation of Moses’ winning efforts, we need to follow the Talmud’s (Shabbat 116a) division of the book of Numbers into two main sections. From such a perspective, the spies episode and that of Gad and Reuben – both of them challenges to the Land’s desirability – serve as bookends delineating the second part of the book. In fact, they can be viewed as the first and last seminal events of Numbers’ main section.This symmetry is profoundly reinforced by the converse ratios of tribes that are “pro-Israel” to those that are “anti-Israel.” In the episode of the spies, only two tribal leaders had wanted to encourage the march over the Jordan. Now this is turned on its head with only two tribes voicing resistance to the march forward. And it is the remaining 10, which are needed to form a quorum.The implied lack of support for Gad and Reuben from the rest of the camp reveals the important effects of Moses’s work. It also explains why Moses treats Gad and Reuben so differently than he does the spies: his eventual assent to the former is not based on approval or even agreement, but upon resignation. He is resigned to partial failure in the context of overwhelming success. Moses had quarantined the danger and put its instigators on the defensive.If Moses is more forbearing with Gad and Reuben, that doesn’t mean that they got off scot-free. Perhaps his agreement to their request was a way of giving them exactly what they wanted — an inheritance outside of God’s land. But whereas the spies received this as a divine punishment, they got it at their own request!
In our observations, we are reminded why – in spite of all of Moses’ accomplishments – he is known as Moshe Rabbeinu, Moses our teacher. More than anything else, Moses understood that the way to correct the mistakes of the present lay not in headline-grabbing politics or even in religion, but rather in tireless and forward-thinking educational efforts. It would not be a bad thing for many current Jewish leaders to keep this in mind.
Francis Nataf is a Jerusalem-based educator, writer and thinker. The essay above is based on a section from the next volume in his “Redeeming Relevance” series on the books of the Torah (Urim Publications)