This week, we get the first report of the land of Kəná’an since the end of the book of Bəreishit. It is, to say the least, a somewhat mixed report. Among other things, we hear the spies decry it as אֶ֣רֶץ אֹכֶ֤לֶת יוֹשְׁבֶ֙יהָ֙ | éretz okhélet yoshəvéiha | “a land that eats those dwelling on it” (Bəmidbar 13:32). This is somewhat unexpected. The rest of the report feels coherent: The land is very fertile, but also its current inhabitants are mighty and dwell in well-protected cities — we might be jealous of their agricultural products, but those very products fortify the people there now and enable them to mount truly daunting defenses of their homes.

And yet we read that the land eats them.

It’s not the first time we’ve encountered the metaphor of a terrestrial digestive system. Vayiqra 18:28 assures the Israelites that if they follow all of G-d’s rules, וְלֹא־תָקִ֤יא הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ אֶתְכֶ֔ם | vəlo taqi ha’áretz etkhem | “the land will not vomit you out”. We might fleetingly expect this verb, taqi, to show up here too — “If we try to enter this land, it will vomit us out instead” — but that ill fits with the spies’ report. The spies aren’t describing what they think will happen to the Israelites if they embark on this war of conquest; they’re describing what the land is currently doing to the people already living there.

I’m not the first to have pondered this curious turn of phrase. Rashi, the endlessly prolific French commentator of the late 1000s, suggests that really what this clause means is that the inhabitants of Kəná’an were busy burying their dead; the earth was eating them by swallowing them up in graves.

Post-Biblical Jewish thought will elevate burying the dead to one of the purest acts of ḥésed, of lovingkindness, possible. The dead, after all, can do nothing for us. We can have no hope of a tit-for-tat benefit in seeing to their needs. Burial is an act of grace with no possibility of reciprocation. And here we learn that wherever the spies went, they found people across the land engaged in this devotion.

It would be possible here to turn and re-incorporate this clause back into the surrounding text, to suggest taht this whole passage is of a piece after all: The land produces abundant crops, the people there are hale and hearty physically, and they’re also steadfast and righteous morally. They have everything going for them, in other words.

But I think there’s a more ominous understanding here, too. The spies, after all, don’t seem to be in respectful awe of the current inhabitants; they seem afraid of them. Afraid and mistrustful. The land eating its inhabitants isn’t presented as a good and beautiful thing; it’s presented as a bad one. It’s taken as evidence that, should the Israelites proceed north thru the Négev, they will “fall by the sword” (Bəmidbar 14:3). (And in the background here it’s probably worth remembering that in Biblical Hebrew, a sword is commonly described as eating the people it slices into, Hebrew talking about a mouth where English would talk about an edge.)

How often this happens in the real world. Thru the lens of mistrust and hatred, the suspicious logic of us vs them, how easily an innocent gesture — or even a holy one! — can be transformed into a threat. A man reaches for his wallet and is assumed to have a gun. A cry for help is heard as a spiteful curse. A crowd of mourners come to bury their dead is read as a mob gathering to violent ends. Mistrust generates its own evidence, malice its own justification.

I know my government doesn’t want me to view Palestinians, Iranians, and so many others as people. My government would like nothing better than for me to see only a few disconnected snippets of their lives and come to the conclusion that they are strange and frightening, that it’s fine — or even (G-d forbid!) good — if they die. It’s an attitude that isn’t limited to the marbled halls of Washington; it’s in the air thickly all around.

It takes effort to resist this, but I can think of few more holy tasks. All these people deserve to live. Not because they are angels or otherwise beings of preternatural goodness, but just because they are people, each one as valuable as a world. I’m under no illusions that my words here will radically shift the course of geopolitics, that my condemning attacks on civilians will do anything to stop them. But I condemn them. I condemn them.

Every time I read the book of Numbers, I find myself a little more on the Israelites’ side, a little less on G-d’s. G-d condemns this generation to die in the wilderness, and Eikhah Rabah, Pətiḥta 33, imagines how this process might have played out: Every year, on the 9th of Av, the Israelites went to sleep in open graves that they themselves had dug. In the morning, those who survived the night would climb up out of their graves and return the earth back over those who had not. Perhaps we can imagine further, imagine them arguing with their very lifeless bodies: See? The earth eats us, too. We have heard reports of burials, not bogeymen; the land is full of people, not monsters. As you cover me with dirt, you enact what you thought you had to fear. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be afraid. Here is no need for war. We can imagine them hoping this ritual might turn the tide against the act of conquest. We can imagine them hoping as it was repeated year after year. We can imagine them hoping until there were none of them left to hope.

We can imagine hoping as long as we yet breathe. We can imagine working, with all our lives, to make that hope come true. Better to die in the wilderness than to forward this slaughter. The land eats us, too. The land eats us, too.

[This has been an installment of one-word Torah. You can read the full series here.]