We Were Grasshoppers - It’s Time to Be Lions
Words of Wisdom with Rabbi Efrat Zarren-Zohar
This Dvar Torah was edited from one written by Dr. Mijal Bitton, Spiritual Leader and co-founder of The Downtown Minyan in Manhattan, and a Latina Jew of Middle Eastern descent. Mijal is a Sacks Scholar, a Maimonides Fund Fellow, a Hartman Fellow, and a New Pluralist Field Builder. She is an alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship and was selected in 2018 for inclusion in “36 under 36” in the New York Jewish Week as a “Public Intellectual (with) Public Values.” She writes a Substack featuring weekly insights from the Torah reading on how to live Jewishly post-10/7 and co-hosts the Wondering Jews podcast with Noam Weissman.
Like so many of you, I’ve been feeling it all for a week — terror, awe, dread, gratitude.
I have been glued to my screen, stunned by the audacity and precision of the IDF, the IAF, and the Mossad. Who are these people? I kept asking. How do they dare?
Then came messages from friends and family in Israel under fire.
Exhausted, anxious, heartbroken. Yet still — steady. Determined. United.
One phrase kept running through my mind: We are living in Biblical times.
There’s something ancient and electric in the air.
Even the name of this war — Am KeLavi, “A Nation/ People Like a Lion” — is drawn straight from the Torah (Bemidbar/ Numbers 23:24).
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Something is happening. Something big.
It doesn’t just feel like history unfolding — it feels like history roaring.
I want to unpack why so many of us feel we’re living in Biblical times.
A time when when miracles unfold and people step forward, even when they’re afraid. When they choose to live like lions.
This week’s Torah portion tells the opposite story. Called Shelach, it marks a turning point in the Book of Numbers.
Until now, the Israelites have been marching steadily toward the Promised Land.
But what should have been a moment of arrival, becomes a moment of collapse.
Moses sends twelve tribal leaders to scout the land. Ten return with fear — and slander.
They describe the land as one that “devours its inhabitants.” They insist the nations living there are too strong to conquer.
Then they utter a line that echoes across generations: “We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and
so we were in theirs.”
Panic spreads. The people cry, rebel, and plead to return to Egypt.
The consequence is devastating: this generation will not enter the land. They will die in the wilderness.
Only their children will inherit the future.
For centuries, commentators have asked: How could this happen? They had seen the sea split, stood at Sinai, lived daily inside miracles. How could they fall so far, so fast?
Here’s one answer I’ve been reflecting on.
Some commentators believe the spies didn’t want to enter the land because they preferred the spiritual safety of the desert — a life of protected holiness, without the burdens of nation-building and war.
What if the ten spies’ preference for “spiritual safety” simply reflected how small they saw themselves?
Instead of thinking, ‘We can do hard things because God is with us,’ they thought, ‘We should let God do everything — because we're too small to even try.’
They chose to become grasshoppers.
The tragedy of Parashat Shelach isn’t fear — it’s smallness.
It’s the refusal to step into a kind of life that demands everything of us — and, in doing so, can elevate us.
I think the reason this moment feels so magnetically Biblical is because of how far it is from our daily reality.
Here in the West, we live in a world of commentary and consumption, of protests and pixels, of outrage on demand. A kind of virtual reality — safe, performative, optional.
And I can’t help but wonder if our virtual reality is training us to be grasshoppers, who believe our voices matter more than our actions, that retweeting courage is the same as showing up.
We are, in many ways, the children of Fukuyama’s “end of history” — citizens of a world where the great ideological battles are supposedly behind us, where everything is flattened into lifestyle choices and social capital.
We scroll through crises, but rarely step into them.
That’s why the dissonance is so sharp. Because what we’re seeing in Israel right now isn’t virtual. It’s
Biblical.
It’s the return of real history — capital “H” History. A society mobilized. A nation that recognizes
miracles. A people fighting for its future, willing to pay a high price for the sake of life itself.
I’ll be honest: I’m still deeply afraid for our people.
Even with all the pride in Israel’s accomplishments and the miracles we’re witnessing, we do not know what the coming days will bring.
And yet, in the midst of it all, I feel the ache of being a spectator to sacred history — the pain of being far
from a people living in Biblical times.
They didn’t choose this arena, but they’re in it, showing the world what resilience looks like.
What I’m feeling isn’t just admiration. It’s an invitation — a call. A reminder that we, too, can choose to see ourselves, not as grasshoppers, but as lions.
That we can step into our own arenas, carry our own burdens, and live our own Biblical moments.
Let me end with a prayer for the days ahead:
May those risking their lives to protect our people be safe.
May those sheltering under fire be protected by the Guardian of Israel.
May Israel achieve victory over the terror-driven regime in Iran.
May our hostages in the tunnels of Gaza return home safely to their families.
May we remove the obstacles to normalization and pursue peace with relentless resolve.
And may all of us — wherever we are — find the strength to respond to God’s open miracles like the nation we are: few in number, but lions in spirit.
