On June 21, at Ohel Yitzhak in Nahalat Shiva, Gil Zohar celebrated the 57th anniversary of his bar mitzvah. <\/i>(photo Gil Zohar)<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/i>Man plans, God laughs, goes the Yiddish aphorism. For the last half year, I have been diligently learning the trope of Parshat Shelach Lecha (the Torah portion meaning Send for Yourself) to celebrate the 57th anniversary of my bar mitzvah, which I had when I was a boy in Toronto. My wife Randi and I had planned a kiddush at the historic Beit HaRav Kook synagogue near our home in downtown Jerusalem. We are members there, and enjoy the leadership of Rabbi Yitzhak Marmorstein, formerly of Vancouver\u2019s Or Shalom. Alas, the war with Iran started. In accordance with the Home Front Command orders against large public assemblies, the shul closed. And so, we considered canceling the simchah.<\/p>\n
While all but Jerusalem\u2019s most essential businesses were locked down tight as a drum, the wartime defence regulations allowed synagogues near a bomb shelter to keep their doors open, with limited attendance. Hence, Ohel Yitzhak, the Sephardi synagogue in our courtyard in Nahalat Shiva, built in 1888, remained open. And so, we switched the venue from the former home and yeshivah of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935) \u2013 the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine \u2013 to the equally historic synagogue where Ben-Zion Meir Uziel (1880-1953) \u2013 Kook\u2019s Sephardi counterpart, who served as nascent Israel\u2019s chief Sephardi rabbi until his death \u2013 used to pray.<\/p>\n
The illustrious Sephardi landmark, resembling a house of worship in a mellah in Morocco, is close to the Herbert Samuel Hotel, which opened its miklat <\/i>(bomb shelter) to the public as well as hotel guests. So, on June 21, undeterred by the spectre of a ballistic missile salvo, I was called up to chant Maftir and read the Haftarah.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What\u2019s it like when the air-raid sirens sound nightly and warplanes roar through the starry sky? Lori Nusbaum of Toronto, who came with her son, Ryan De Simone, for my second bar mitzvah, has been posting on Facebook:<\/p>\n \u201cThe 3rd night in Jerusalem and the 3rd siren alert went off; it was 4:35 a.m. Sleep is hard. You don\u2019t want to be in a deep sleep and miss the [cellphone] notifications so you try to have \u2018one eye open.\u2019 There\u2019s something strangely intimate about being in a smallish space with a bunch of strangers, some in bathrobes, carrying pillows and blankets, wearing slippers, with sleep still in their eyes. You aren\u2019t sure if you should make eye contact or not. It\u2019s nighttime, so conversation is not really happening. I think we all want to keep sleep in our brains, hope we can go back upstairs quickly and close our eyes for a peaceful rest of the night.\u201d<\/p>\n Like many guests at the synagogue, Lori found my wartime bar mitzvah intensely emotional. \u201cMy somewhat unaffiliated son had an aliyah at one of the oldest shuls in Jerusalem,\u201d she posted on Facebook. \u201cOur friend, whose bar mitzvah we came to witness, literally took the tallit off his back to wrap around my son so he could go to the bimah. With tears in my eyes, so many emotions washed over me. Too many to describe adequately. This is what Israel is all about. The people who in the middle of a war come together, pray, help each other and celebrate life together. And give you the proverbial shirt off their back.\u201d<\/p>\n The grim situation in which we find ourselves today parallels the Torah reading of Shelach Lecha (Numbers 13:1-15:41) and its equally pertinent Haftarah (Joshua 2:1-24).<\/p>\n Returning after 40 days of reconnoitring the Promised Land, the spies sent by Moses reported: \u201cWe went into the land to which you sent us, and it does flow with milk and honey! Here is its fruit [showing a huge cluster of grapes hanging from a stave, today the symbol of the Ministry of Tourism, proudly worn by every licensed tour guide]. But the people who live there are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large.\u201d<\/p>\n Then, Calev ben Yefune shushed the crowd declaring, \u201cWe should go up and take possession of the land, for we can certainly do it.\u201d<\/p>\n Ten of his fellow spies (all except Joshua) disagreed \u2013 \u201cWe can\u2019t attack those people; they are stronger than we are\u201d \u2013 and they spread a slanderous report about the land they had probed. Misunderstanding the many funerals they had witnessed because of the plague God had sent so that the spies would go unnoticed, they said, \u201cThe land we explored devours its inhabitants. All the people we saw there are of great size. We saw the Nephilim there [the descendants of the giant Anak]. We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.\u201d<\/p>\n Grasshoppers? They might as well have called the Jewish people cockroaches.<\/p>\n In the words of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ztz\u201dl, this dibbat ha\u2019aretz <\/i>(slanderous report about the Land of Israel) is the language of fear and demoralization. They are big, we are small. They are strong, we are weak. They do not fear us, but we fear them. We cannot prevail.<\/p>\n Was this, in fact, the case? As the Haftarah makes clear, the 10 scouts could not have been more mistaken. A generation later, Joshua bin Nun too sent two spies \u2013 the same Calev, and Pinchas ben Zimri. They slept on the roof of a house belonging to Rahav the prostitute, which formed part of the walls of Jericho. Hearing about the spies, the city\u2019s king ordered his soldiers to arrest them, but Rahav hid them and misdirected the guards. What is more interesting is what she tells the spies of the feelings of Jericho\u2019s residents when they heard that the Israelites were on their way:<\/p>\n \u201cI know that the Lord has given this land to you and that a great fear of you has fallen on us, so that all who live in this country are melting in fear because of you. We have heard how the Lord dried up the water of the Red Sea for you when you came out of Egypt, and what you did to Sihon and Og, the two kings of the Amorites east of the Jordan, whom you completely destroyed. When we heard of it, our hearts melted and everyone\u2019s courage failed because of you, for the Lord your God is in heaven above and on the earth below.\u201d<\/p>\n Like contemporary Gazans and Iranians, the people of Jericho were anything but giants \u2013 they were terrified of us. The spies of Moses\u2019s day should have known this. They had already said in the song they sang at the Red Sea: \u201cNations heard and trembled; terror gripped Philistia\u2019s inhabitants \/ The chiefs of Edom were dismayed \/ Moab\u2019s leaders were seized with trembling \/ The people of Canaan melted away.\u201d<\/p>\n How did 10 of the spies so misinterpret the situation? They misunderstood Moses\u2019s instructions: \u201cAlu zeh b\u2019Negev v\u2019alitem et ha-har\u201d <\/i>\u2013 ascend (alu<\/i>) through the south, and ascend (va\u2019alitem<\/i>) the mountain. The word \u201cascend\u201d (aliyah <\/i>in Hebrew) also means to overcome. (When Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, \u201cWe shall overcome,\u201d he was citing this verse.) The spies lacked the faith that the land would be theirs, despite God\u2019s promises, and 39 years of wandering in the desert followed.<\/p>\n The Jewish people, in Israel and the diaspora, experienced a crisis of confidence in 1313 BCE following the Exodus from Egypt, on the eve of entering the Promised Land. Not so today. We have no such hesitations as the Israel Defence Forces battle the regime of the latter-day Haman in Iran and its Hamas, Hezbollah and Houthi proxies. Our response is to follow Moses\u2019s instructions: \u201cAlu.\u201d Ascend. Overcome. Make aliyah.<\/p>\n To that end, I invite you to celebrate Parshat Shelach Lecha with me at Beit Ha Rav Kook (9 Rabbi Kook St.) on June 13, 2026. Next year, in peaceful Jerusalem.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Gil Zohar<\/b> is a writer and tour guide in Jerusalem.<\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On June 21, at Ohel Yitzhak in Nahalat Shiva, Gil Zohar celebrated the 57th anniversary of his bar mitzvah. (photo Gil Zohar) Man plans, God laughs, goes the Yiddish aphorism. For the last half year, I have been diligently learning the trope of Parshat Shelach Lecha (the Torah portion meaning Send for Yourself) to celebrate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47045,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[6179,4330,218,24147,24146,24145,5412],"class_list":["post-47043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-op-ed","tag-bar-mitzvah","tag-israel","tag-judaism","tag-ohel-yitzhak","tag-shelach-lecha","tag-torah-portion","tag-war"],"blocksy_meta":{"styles_descriptor":{"styles":{"desktop":"","tablet":"","mobile":""},"google_fonts":[],"version":8}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47045"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jewishindependent.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}