Rabbi Saul Oresky
This week’s Torah portion is Shelach Lekha, Numbers 13:1-15:41.
Shelach Lekha presents us with a negative model of journalistic responsibility. In Numbers 13, at God’s bidding, Moses sends a dozen men of renown, one from each tribe (except Levi) to scout out the land of Canaan, to the edge of which God has brought the Israelites.
We know the story well. The spies return with some nice fruit (including a massive cluster of grapes, big enough to be carried on a pole by two men). But a minyan of them brings a decidedly not nice report about the land itself.
Not waiting for a private audience with Moses and Aaron, they tell them and the whole Israelite people that, while the land is indeed fertile — “a land flowing with milk and honey” — it is also unconquerable and inhospitable. They refer to its inhabitants first as Anakim (a race of giants).
The men saw themselves as grasshoppers in comparison, which is how they imagined they must have looked to these giants.
We can understand their fear but not how they reported their findings: the public nature of their unvetted, highly slanted report spread fear and rebellion among the people and was the reason that the first generation out of Egyptian slavery was doomed to die in the wilderness. How could these “men of renown,” leaders of their tribes, not have known the effect that their reporting would have on the people?
Clearly Caleb and Joshua understood their roles differently than the minyan of cowardly spies. First Caleb and then Joshua stood up to the threatening crowd to reassure them that victory was in their hands, since God was with them.
But their pleas went unheeded, and only God’s intervention saved them from being stoned to death. These two men became the only ones of their generation to enter the land, perhaps because they alone among the scouts truly knew the import of their mission and what reporting requirements it demanded.
The Talmud (B.T. Sotah 34b), using an oddly singular verb in Numbers 13:22 as the proof text, speculated that Caleb alone had gone to visit the ancestral burial place at Hebron during the tour. That is why he saw the larger picture, the real significance of the land and our eternal connection to it.
But Caleb and Joshua did not prevail, and the libelous minyan nearly succeeded in ending our history only two years out of Egypt.
Some significant lessons of reporting can be learned out of this:
• Reporting must always be appropriate to the audience.
• It must take in the whole picture instead of focusing in on the nitty-gritty and only on the negative (context and balance are crucial).
• It must be presented in a socially responsible way.
• And it must never present lies, or a “truth” so partial and slanted as to lead to falsehood.
The reporting of 10 of the scouts violated all of these principles and led to a barely averted disaster, as well as a 38-year extended stay in the Sinai.
Irresponsible broadcast and print “journalists” in our day are equally dangerous, often resorting to outright lies to make their points and satisfy their employers and their media audiences. These people have abetted the dumbing-down of much of the voting public and have greatly slowed down our progress toward a fairer, more equitable society for all.
If we are to detoxify our current political and social debates, we will require news reporting that upholds the highest journalistic standards, as well as quiet or ignore the rancorous, clamoring pundits on both sides of the aisle. That will be the main way that we can sooner reach our own promised land — a saner and happier nation. ■
Rabbi Saul Oresky serves Congregation Mishkan Torah in Greenbelt.