• This Week's Torah Portion

At the start of Parashat Sh’lach L’cha, God tells Moses to send representatives from the 12 Israelite tribes to scout the Promised Land. With the exception of Caleb and Joshua, the scouts’ report is far from promising. Their physical description of the land’s inhabitants causes such an outcry within the community that, at the start of Numbers 14, we are told everyone wept all night long. Among their worries, in Numbers 14:3, we hear the following:

The final phrase of this verse, “halo tov lanu” (wouldn’t it be better, or, more literally, more good) is accented with a very rare trope called, “mercha kefula” (double lengthening). This trope happens only five times in the entire Torah, which might lead some to believe that each instance was a scribal error. After all, the appearance of the trope looks similar to a more familiar and commonplace trope, t’vir. We can observe the difference underneath the initial letter tet in the table below:

Knowing how ancient Torah scribes wrote with quill and ink, it is easy to imagine that what should have been a single dot smeared into a curve. It may have been a slip of the hand or the scribe was startled by something. But because of the sanctity of these words, our tradition dictates that even human errors have something to teach us. Wouldn’t it be “more good” for contemporary biblical editors to correct the anomalous trope?

The late Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Professor David Weisberg suggested that the appearance of mercha kefula signals a lesson to be learned. How easy it must have been for the Israelites to feed off each other’s anxiety, exhaustion, and fear of the unknown! How enticing it must have seemed to simply turn around and head back to Egypt, even if it meant being enslaved again! God becomes enraged a few verses later in Numbers 14:12, threatening to strike the people with pestilence or disown them entirely. Despite Moses’s best efforts to intercede, God decrees in Numbers 14:36-38 that of all those who scouted the land, only Caleb and Joshua will get to enter it.

What can we learn from this incident and from the appearance of mercha kefula on the word tov? Perhaps it is the Torah’s version of the adage, “think twice before speaking.” Were we among the majority of scouts, no doubt we too would have been scared of what we had glimpsed. But would we have been so quick to start spreading word among the larger community? If our ancestors had access to the same best practices we do today for facilitated conversations, trauma therapy, or even simply journaling, they may have chosen more nuanced ways to characterize their impressions of the Promised Land. Had those scouts given it a second thought, perhaps their lives would have been lengthened, even if it meant 40 more years of wandering through the wilderness. In a time when anxiety, exhaustion, and fear of the unknown is once again pervasive within the Jewish community, may we have the courage to choose our words carefully that we might live to see a world which fulfills all its promise.