We Are Not Grasshoppers

Last Sunday, sixty thousand people filled Bathurst Street in Toronto — parents and students, Holocaust survivors in wheelchairs, clergy from communities not our own. The sound of Am Yisrael Chai rose over the city. I felt something I had not felt in a long time: we are not alone. We are many. We are powerful.

And then I opened Twitter.

Someone had responded to my post about the Walk for Israel with five words and a sneer: “This is a community that is afraid?!” Sixty thousand strong. Allies everywhere. Afraid? Please. Stop performing victimhood.

That commenter wasn’t just being dismissive. They were articulating one of the defining intellectual errors of our moment: the belief that power and vulnerability cannot coexist. That sixty thousand Jews marching in the streets proves the fear is manufactured. The Torah has a name for that error.

In Parashat Shelah Lekha, twelve spies return from Canaan — tribal princes, the best leaders Israel had, men who had witnessed the sea split. And yet they report: “vanehi v’eineinu k’hagavim” — “we were like grasshoppers in our own eyes — and so we were in their eyes” (Bamidbar 13:33). The Talmud in Sotah asks: how did they know what the Canaanites thought of them? They overheard the Canaanites say, ‘There are ants in the vineyards’ — took that ambient scorn, filtered it through fear, and called it testimony.

Our Twitter commenter made the inverse error. The spies projected their inner fear outward and called it fact. The commenter projected our outer strength inward and called our fear fiction. Both refuse to hold power and vulnerability simultaneously. The Sforno says the spies’ sin was not fear — the giants were real — but speaking fear as verdict, as though it were the whole story. The commenter commits the opposite sin: dismissing fear as theater, as though strength were the whole story.

Caleb stood up and said: “aloh na’aleh — we shall surely go up.” Same giants. Same walled cities. Different inner posture. He refused to let the threat write the ending.

Recently, the head of INSS — Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies — appeared on Firing Line with Margaret Hoover and made an argument that clarifies our moment. The West, he said, cannot hold two truths simultaneously: Israel is genuinely thriving, and Israel is genuinely fighting for its existence. Western political imagination has no template for a flourishing country facing an existential threat — so it resolves the paradox by dismissing the threat. The same logic is applied to us.

But power has never immunized a people against threat. The Jews of Weimar Germany were not a frightened, huddled minority. They were citizens, patriots, prize-winners. They wrote the philosophy, composed the music, and built the hospitals of one of the most culturally sophisticated civilizations in human history. They had fought for Germany in the First World War and buried their dead in German soil. By every measure that our Twitter commenter would recognize — presence, contribution, integration, achievement — they were not a community anyone should have feared for. And we know what happened. Not despite their flourishing, but alongside it, beneath it, before anyone thought it was possible. Strength and vulnerability coexisted then. They coexist now. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not learned the first lesson of Jewish history — and we have paid too high a price to let that lesson be forgotten.

So let me answer directly: yes, we are afraid. Since October 7, antisemitism across North America and Europe has taken on a character of organized menace — rabbis assaulted, Jewish institutions receiving bomb threats, firebombings, targeted intimidation. We watch what is happening in other cities and know, with certainty born of history, that it is only a matter of time. We scan the room before wearing a kippah. We calculate safety in spaces that used to feel safe. The automatic reflex is its own kind of wound. This is not weakness. This is hard-won Jewish intelligence — the wisdom of a people who have learned that the threat is real and arrives quickly. Fear is not the problem. Fear is the evidence.

Nachmanides calls the spies’ failure yiush — despair masquerading as realism. Our commenter wants to call our vigilance the reverse: performance masquerading as fear. The truth is harder than either. We are a people who have learned to march and scan the exits at the same time.

Rav Soloveitchik distinguishes between goral — fate — and yi’ud — destiny. Fate is what happens to us. Destiny is what we make of it. The spies chose fate. Caleb chose destiny. The sixty thousand on Bathurst Street were not there because they had no fear. They were there with fear, choosing something larger.

We are afraid, and we march. We grieve, and we build. We are threatened, and we welcome. The spies looked at their strength and saw grasshoppers. Caleb looked at the same strength and saw a people capable of more than they knew. Every time this community shows up — on Bathurst Street, in our sanctuaries, for one another — we answer the spies with Caleb’s words: aloh na’aleh — we shall surely go up — spoken in Hebrew, in Toronto, in 2026, by a people who have been saying it, and meaning it, for three thousand years.