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one more nation in a world 
of nations, with the same 
kind of economic, social and 
political problems that every 
nation has to deal with.

FEAR OF SUCCESS
The spies were not afraid 
of failure. They were afraid 
of success. Their mistake 
was the mistake of very 
holy men. They wanted 
to spend their lives in the 
closest possible proximity 
to God. What they did not 
understand was that God 
seeks, in the Hasidic phrase, 
“a dwelling in the lower 
worlds.” One of the great 
differences between Judaism 
and other religions is that 
while others seek to lift 
people to heaven, Judaism 
seeks to bring heaven down 
to earth.
Much of Torah is about 
things not conventionally 
seen as religious at all: labor 
relations, agriculture, welfare 
provisions, loans and debts, 
land ownership and so on. 
It is not difficult to have an 
intense religious experience 
in the desert or in a monastic 
retreat or in an ashram. 
Most religions have holy 
places and holy people 
who live far removed from 
the stresses and strains of 
everyday life. There was one 
such Jewish sect in Qumran, 
known to us through the 
Dead Sea Scrolls, and there 
were certainly others. About 
this there is nothing unusual 
at all.
But that is not the Jewish 
project, the Jewish mission. 
God wanted the Israelites 
to create a model society 
where human beings were 
not treated as slaves, where 
rulers were not worshipped 

as demigods, where human 
dignity was respected, 
where law was impartially 
administered to rich and 
poor alike, where no one 
was destitute, no one was 
abandoned to isolation, 
no one was above the law 
and no realm of life was a 
morality-free zone. That 
requires a society, and a 
society needs a land. It 
requires an economy, an 
army, fields and flocks, labor 
and enterprise. All these, 
in Judaism, become ways 
of bringing the Shechinah 
into the shared spaces of our 
collective life.
The spies feared success, 
not failure. It was the mis-
take of deeply religious men. 
But it was a mistake.

JEWISH SPIRITUALITY
That is the spiritual 
challenge of the greatest 
event in 2,000 years of 
Jewish history: the return of 
Jews to the land and state of 
Israel. Perhaps never before 
and never since has there 
been a political movement 
accompanied by so many 
dreams as Zionism. For 
some it was the fulfillment of 
prophetic visions, for others 
the secular achievement of 
people who had decided 
to take history into their 
own hands. Some saw it as 
a Tolstoy-like reconnection 
with land and soil, others 
a Nietzschean assertion of 
will and power. Some saw it 
as a refuge from European 
antisemitism, others as the 
first flowering of messianic 
redemption. Every Zionist 
thinker had his or her 
version of utopia, and to a 
remarkable degree they all 
came to pass.

But Israel always was 
something simpler and 
more basic. Jews have 
known virtually every fate 
and circumstance between 
tragedy and triumph in the 
almost 4,000 years of their 
history, and they have lived 
in almost every land on 
earth. But in all that time, 
there only ever was one 
place where they could do 
what they were called on to 
do from the dawn of their 
history: to build their own 
society in accord with their 
highest ideals, a society 
that would be different 
from their neighbors and 
become a role model of how 
a society, an economy, an 
educational system and the 
administration of welfare 
could become vehicles for 
bringing the Divine presence 
down to earth.
It is not difficult to find 
God in the wilderness, if you 
do not eat from the labor of 
your hands and if you rely 
on God to fight your battles 
for you. Ten of the spies, 
according to the Rebbe, 
sought to live that way 
forever. But that, suggested 
the Rebbe, is not what God 
wants from us. He wants us 
to engage with the world. 
He wants us to heal the 
sick, feed the hungry, fight 
injustice with all the power 
of law, and combat ignorance 
with universal education. He 
wants us to show what it is 
to love the neighbor and the 
stranger, and say, with Rabbi 
Akiva, “Beloved is humanity 
because we are each created 
in God’s image.”
Jewish spirituality lives in 
the midst of life itself, the life 
of society and its institutions. 
To create it, we have to battle 

with two kinds of fear: fear 
of failure and fear of success. 
Fear of failure is common; 
fear of success is rarer but no 
less debilitating. Both come 
from the reluctance to take 
risks. Faith is the courage to 
take risks. It is not certainty; 
it is the ability to live with 
uncertainty. It is the ability 
to hear God saying to us as 
He said to Abraham, “Walk 
on ahead of Me” (Gen. 17:1).
The Rebbe lived what he 
taught. He sent emissaries 
out to virtually every 
place on earth where there 
were Jews. In so doing, he 
transformed Jewish life. 
He knew he was asking his 
followers to take risks by 
going to places where the 
whole environment would be 
challenging in many ways, 
but he had faith in them and 
in God and in the Jewish 
mission whose place is in the 
public square where we share 
our faith with others and do 
so in deeply practical ways.
It is challenging to leave 
the desert and go out into 
the world with all its trials 
and temptations, but that is 
where God wants us to be, 
bringing His spirit to the 
way we run an economy, a 
welfare system, a judiciary, a 
health service and an army, 
healing some of the wounds 
of the world and bringing, 
to places often shrouded 
in darkness, fragments of 
Divine light. 

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-

2020) was a global religious leader, 

philosopher, the author of more 

than 25 books and moral voice for 

our time. His series of essays on 

the weekly Torah portion, entitled 

“Covenant & Conversation” will con-

tinue to be shared and distributed 

around the world. 

