Yesterday, I was invited to give the d’var Torah (literally: “Torah talk” or sermon) at my synagogue to mark the occasion of my wedding anniversary. The subject of the talk was the Torah portion that contains the story of Joshua and Caleb spying out the land of Israel in advance: Numbers 13:1-15:41. Perhaps the talk might interest some readers of NRO. If so, here it is. If not — well you know how to skip it.

DVAR TORAH, June 24, 2006

I stand in the pulpit today not because of my Jewish knowledge, which is negligible, but because of the coincidence that this week my wife Danielle and I celebrate our 18th wedding anniversary.

I earn my living with my keyboard, but to describe my feelings about these past 18 years, my own words do not take the first steps on the road to adequacy. And so I fall back, as my late grandmother always advised me to do in emergencies, upon her hero, the man she always called Willie Shakespeare:

[S]he is mine own,

And I as rich in having such a jewel

As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,

The water nectar and the rocks pure gold.

Rabbi Herzfeld has kindly honored us on this glad occasion with an invitation to speak on the Torah portion, Sh’lach.

Now it might be wondered what Sh’lach, one of the very first spy stories in world literature, has to do with marriage. But as one quickly discovers, marriage is one of life’s greatest intelligence-gathering operations. Four decades ago, a friend of ours, on the verge of marrying himself, telephoned a friend of his who had just returned from honeymoon to ask, What was it like? “Old boy,” said the married man — they are both English — “you come home from work, and there are all these questions. Where did you go? Whom did you see? What did you say? It’s like living with the secret police.

And I might add: If you don’t answer, you end up in solitary — both men were divorced within the first year of their first marriages.

Now a deeper question: What do spy stories have to do with Judaism, the religion?

I don’t ask what they have to do with Jews, the people — as we all know, Jews have been involved in spy stories from the beginning.

The first modern spy story is John Buchan’s The 39 Steps. Written in 1916, in the midst of the horror of the First World War, but set in a vague prewar world of plots and conspiracies, the book’s hero and narrator stumbles upon a sinister secret. As he unravels the mystery, he is led further and further away from ordinary life toward the innermost truth of events. Here is how one character interprets those events for the narrator’s benefit:

[W]ay behind all the Governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on, engineered by very dangerous people. He had come on it by accident; it fascinated him; he went further, and then he got caught. I gathered that most of the people in it were the sort of educated anarchists that make revolutions, but that beside them there were financiers who were playing for money. A clever man can make big profits on a falling market, and it suited the book of both classes to set Europe by the ears. … The aim of the whole conspiracy was to get Russia and Germany at loggerheads.

When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it would give them their chance. Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland. Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.

‘Do you wonder?’ he cried. ‘For three hundred years they have been persecuted, and this is the return match for the pogroms. The Jew is everywhere, but you have to go far down the backstairs to find him. Take any big Teutonic business concern. If you have dealings with it the first man you meet is Prince von und Zu Something, an elegant young man who talks Eton-and-Harrow English. But he cuts no ice. If your business is big, you get behind him and find a prognathous Westphalian with a retreating brow and the manners of a hog. He is the German business man that gives your English papers the shakes. But if you’re on the biggest kind of job and are bound to get to the real boss, ten to one you are brought up against a little white-faced Jew in a bath-chair with an eye like a rattlesnake. Yes, Sir, he is the man who is ruling the world just now, and he has his knife in the Empire of the Tzar, because his aunt was outraged and his father flogged in some one-horse location on the Volga.’

As Europeans tried to make sense of the catastrophe into which their civilization had fallen, they needed villains whose villainy compared commensurately with the magnitude of the disaster. And in the European imagination, the ultimate villains are the people connected to the greatest act of treachery in their iconography: the Jews.

The Jewishness of the villain is more often hinted at than stated directly in spy stories after Buchan. The spy story is a distinctly English genre. It is a story about people who are secretly powerful, precisely the fantasy that would appeal to a nation that felt its power ebbing. English anti-semitism has usually hesitated to state itself explicitly — it is something that is there and not there, something you can never quite fight because you cannot quite grasp it. “You catch it on the edge of a remark,” as the character Harold Abrahams says in the movie “Chariots of Fire.”

Ian Fleming’s Auric Goldfinger for example is described as Eastern European, communist, short, red-haired, and obsessively fascinated by gold — never named as a Jew, but unmistakeably a figure out of the anti-semitic imagination. (In the movie, they transform him into a stage Nazi, by magnifying his height and bulk, endowing him with blond hair, and dropping German words into his dialogue.)

But between The 39 Steps and Goldfinger something vast happened: the communist revolution in Russia. And suddenly Jews emerged from the espionage fantasy into the real world of intelligence and counter-intelligence.

Another great novelist, Alan Furst, explains in his best work Dark Star the dangerous fascination that the secret life of the spy exerted on Jewish communists in the years after 1917:

What can be so bad about a cover name or a nom de revolution if your own name had never particularly meant anything? The Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in the 19th century gave the Jews the right to call themselves whatever they liked. Most chose German names, thinking to endear themselves to their German-speaking neighbors. …

A man invented. A man of the air. Just how would such a man’s allegiance be determined? …

The Czar’s Okhrana was recruiting in the Pale as early as 1878, seeking infiltrators — Jews did wander, turning up as peddlers, merchants, auction buyers, and what have you, just about anywhere — for their war against Turkey. Thus, when the operatives of the Okhrana and the Bolsheviks went at each other, after 1903, there were often Jews on both sides: men of both worlds and none — always alien, therefore never suspected of being so.

[The] Pale of Settlement produced a great number of … [i]intellectuals. [T]hey knew the capitals of Europe and spoke their languages, wrote fiercely and well, and had a great taste and talent for clandestine life. To survive as Jews in a hostile world they’d learned duplicity and disguise: not to show anger, for it made the Jew-baiters angry, even less to show joy, for it made the Jew-baiters angrier. They concealed success, so they would not be seen to succeed, and learned soon enough how not to be seen at all: how to walk down a street, the wrong street, in the wrong part of town, in broad daylight — invisible.

And in truth, a disturbing number of the leaders of the Cheka and later the NKVD were Jewish, up until the Soviet purges. Furst describes what happened next, through the experience of a character, a Jew, whom we first meet as a minor operative of the NKVD.

He’d put his life on the line, preferring simply to die at the wrong end of a gun rather than the wrong end of a club, and for twelve years — until 1929, when Stalin finally took over, he lived in a kind of dream world, a mythical country where idealistic, intellectual Jews actually ran things, quite literally a country of the mind. Theories failed, peasants died, the land itself dried up in despair. Still they worked twenty hours a day and swore they had the answer.

It could not last. Who were these people, these Poles and Lithuanians, these Latvians and Ukrainians, these people with little beards and eyeglasses who spoke French down their big noses and read books? — asked Stalin. And all the little Stalin’s answered, We were wondering that very thing, only nobody wanted to say it out loud.

Then came the most horrific calamity in Jewish history. And not only in novels, but in life, Jews were forced to the uttermost margins of existence — and by the millions into non-existence. From the Holocaust, emerged the state of Israel, confronting neighbors determined to repeat the work of the Nazis, only this time in sand and sun rather than night and fog.

To survive, the Jews of this new country had to learn in a hurry the techniques and methods imputed to them by their detractors.

The Zionist history of espionage begins before the birth of the Zionist state. During the First World War, two young Zionists — Yosef Lishansky and Sarah Aaronsohn — spied on the Ottoman armies from their tiny settlement in the Yishuv, and carried the information to the British, hoping for independence as a reward. They were captured in the end, and died horribly, as successful spies so often do: Lishansky was hanged, Aaronsohn — just 27 — was tortured for 4 days and finally committed suicide with a smuggled pistol.

The intelligence ring they founded, Nili, is the first ancestor of the fabled Israeli intelligence services of our time.

In our time, as in Joshua’s, intelligence has again become essential to Jewish survival. To understand the intentions of one’s enemies; the plans of a terrorist; the completion date of a nuclear weapons complex in Iraq or Iran; these have become matters of life and death for the Jews of Israel.

And here in this new Israel, this America, this haven and refuge for so many of the persecuted of the world, including Jews, this defender of the values of freedom and tolerance by which Jews live or die … here too the world of intelligence has claimed Jewish energy and devotion.

The Central Intelligence Agency as an organization has historically mistrusted and excluded Jews, especially from its operational branches. Barred from the agency itself, Jewish scholars and experts have studied its work, often fiercely criticizing its errors.

Ironically enough, Sh’lach could epitomize this outside critique of an intelligence organization. We see in Sh’lach intelligence going wrong in exactly the way outside experts often describe: 10/12ths of an intelligence organization allowing their own weaknesses, preferences, and institutional imperatives to distort their information getting. Only Joshua the son of Nun and Caleb the son of Jephunneh report the truth. As for Moses and Aaron, who opted to rely on the minority view of Joshua and Caleb, it was surely said of them that they were politicizing intelligence and “stove-piping” information, bypassing the proper channels.

But there is a deeper irony again. As this portion teaches us, intelligence and espionage will always be vital to the survival of nations, including both the Jewish nation of Israel and the great liberal democracies that have become the protecting and beloved homelands of Diaspora Jews, pre-eminently this mightiest liberal democracy of them all, the United States.

Yet espionage itself fails the test of Jewish ethics. As we all know, Jewish ethics are especially concerned with sins of speech, slander, and deceit. When US intelligence got around to reading the books of the late Ayatollah Khomeini — too late, alas, for as Bernard Lewis tells us the CIA refused to acknowledge the authenticity of the documents until after the ayatollah had come to power — they discovered that the Muslim cleric was obsessed with urination: when to do it, how to do it, how to prepare beforehand and clean up afterward. What urine was to the ayatollah, the sin of gossip is to the Jews. And what is the task of even the most mild-mannered of intelligence analysts — the man or woman who commutes to Langley every morning to read reports or study satellite images and to write reports on what he or she has seen — what is this analyst but a gossip at the highest level?

As for the true clandestine agent: His activities are condemned in the sternest way by the whole history of Jewish teaching.

“Keep thee far from a false matter,” says Exodus. 23:7. A whole branch of Jewish ethics has grown up around these words. Curiously, the Jewish ban on deception is grounded not on the prohibition against lying, but on the prohibition against theft. The sages believed that there are seven types of thieves and, of these, the most egregious is the one who “steals the minds” of people. This is the principle of geneivat da’at, deduced from an incident in which an attendant of one of the ancient rabbis duped a heathen ferryman. The rabbi told his attendant to pay the ferryman. Depending on the source, the ferryman believed he was to receive a kosher chicken but was actually given one that was unkosher, or else believed he was to receive undiluted wine (ancient wine being very strong and always mixed with water), but was instead given diluted wine.

Geneivat da’at is primarily a principle of commerce, but it applies even in situations in which there is no loss of money. The Talmud debates whether it is permissible to invite a guest to a dinner to which the inviter knows the guest cannot come. The consensus view is “No” — from my point of view, an unfortunate instance of the Jewish tendency to put candor before politeness.

More seriously: If Jewish law insists we take candor to such an extreme point, how can the work of intelligence, covert operations, misdirection, ever possibly be morally justified by and for Jews?

Perhaps you have read about the successful operation in Toronto, which detected 17 — now 18 — jihadists who plotted to detonate a huge bomb in the downtown of my native city, at an intersection surmounted by huge glass banktowers built in the 1970s and 1980s. The force of the explosion would have shattered the single- and double-paned glass of the towers and fired the shards into the building at speeds of hundreds of miles per hour, cuisinarting the officeworkers inside, killing hundreds and blinding thousands more.

The plot was foiled by intelligence officers who established a fake internet bulletin board, lured the jihadists in, offered to sell them explosives — and arrested them at the point of purchase. If it is forbidden (as it is) to sprinkle sweet-smelling wine in a winestore to lull purchasers into over-estimating the quality of the wine sold there, how can it be permitted to pretend to be a jihadist oneself in order to intercept other jihadists?

Jewish ethics reject the Roman principle, “Salus publicus supremus lex” — public safety is the supreme law. On the contrary, if the Bible insists on any point, it is to forbid the doing of evil that good may come of it. Even when good really does come of it, the evildoers are punished anyway –—as the children of Israel were punished with hundreds of years of slavery for the offense of selling their brother Joseph into slavery, notwithstanding that their crime enabled Joseph to save the children of Israel from famine.

And intelligence agencies must do evil, or what seems evil. They must lie, they must deceive, they must even be prepared to kill.

I won’t pretend to have resolved this moral dilemma, which has perplexed greater minds than my own — and minds I should add less inclined to wonder whether the Romans maybe didn’t have it right after all.

But let me present two possible answers.

The first is to wonder whether the police who operated the billboards really did “steal the minds” of the jihadists. Even after they were caught, the jihadists remained unrepentant. They still wished to carry out their crime. Their bodies may be transposed to jail — but their minds remain their own, sealed inside their own hatred and rage.

The second — and better — answer recalls other commandments, equally binding. The stringent ethics of Judaism not only forbid us to kill innocents — all religions prohibit that — but also to act to protect the innocent against wrongful death. “Thou shalt not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor,” says Leviticus 19:16.

Judaism is more than a set of negative injunctions. Here is Maimonides:

If one person is able to save another and does not save him, he transgresses the commandment, “Neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor.”

Similarly, if one person sees another drowning in the sea, or being attacked by bandits, or being attacked by wild animals, and, although able to rescue him either alone or by hiring others, does not rescue him; or if one hears heathens or informers plotting evil against another or laying a trap for him and does not call it to the other’s attention and let him know; or if one knows that a heathen or a violent person is going to attack another and although able to appease him on behalf of the other and make him change his mind, he does not do so; or if one acts in any similar way — he transgresses in each case the injunction, “Neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor…”

And if to save one’s neighbor, one must infringe other ethical rules — what then? The sages anticipated that problem too. Observance of the Sabbath represents one of the supreme obligations of the Jew. Yet, although the preparation and administration of medicines involved the violation of the Sabbath restrictions, it is said: “If one has pain in his throat, he may pour medicine into his mouth on the Sabbath, because it is a possibility of danger to human life, and every danger to human life suspends the [laws of the] Sabbath.”

The need for medicine may seem an obvious justification for departing from other norms, but there are many more. The ancient rabbis taught: “One must remove debris [an act ordinarily forbidden on the Sabbath] to save a life on the Sabbath; and the more energetic one is, the more praiseworthy is one; and one need not obtain permission from the rabbinical court.”

Not only should one be swift to act to save others — but hesitation to act to save them is positively sinful.

“The energetic one is praiseworthy,” the sages say. If one delays action — for example, to consult a legal authority — the one “consulted is insulted, and the inquirer [becomes] a murderer.”

Our duties to rescue our fellow human beings are inescapable. The Jewish law of torts distinguishes between violations for which we have been forewarned and those otherwise. It is much worse to overstep the line between my neighbor’s property and my own if I have been warned of my trespass than if I haven’t. But when it comes to our duty to preserve innocent life, the rabbis say, “Man is always forewarned, whether [he acts] inadvertently or willfully under coercion or voluntarily, whether awake or sleep.”

As we go about our daily lives, we owe much of our security to those who protect us while we sleep. We do right to pray every week for the soldiers of the United States and the State of Israel and (let us keep in mind) of the other democracies as well. But as we pray for them, let us add a prayer for those secret soldiers who work in silence and shadow, and sometimes at even much more horrible risk, to protect the innocent.

In the Bible, it is God Himself who tells us what to think of these secret warriors. The spy Joshua goes on of course to lead the Hebrew nation. And of Caleb, Joshua’s partner, God says: “My servant Caleb, because he had another spirit with him, and hath followed me fully, him will I bring into the land whereinto he went; and his seed shall possess it.” God kept his promise. Caleb entered the Land of Israel at age 85, aged 25 years older than Joshua, the second oldest man allowed to enter. Caleb is uniquely granted his chosen portion of ground, Mount Hebron, according to Deuteronomy 1:36. Most significantly, God describes Caleb as “wholly following Me” six times in the course of the Torah — more than is said of anyone in the Jewish Bible, including Abraham or Moses.

A spy in the right cause serves the Lord more fully than any saint? It seems more than just a coincidence that we should be summoned to remember that insight as we read this weekend’s headlines.