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16 Jul 2004 — B is for Beauty

It’s not easy being beautiful. Even if you were blessed with the right parents (sparing you the expense of the right plastic surgeon), preserving one’s looks takes the constant effort of diet and exercise, and maximizing their effect requires careful investment in clothes, hair products, and cosmetics. And after all that, if you show your dazzling face in public, everybody who sees it enjoys the fruit of your labor, but nobody has to compensate you for it. Nobody, that is, except for the citizens of Khazaristan.

In that country, wherever twenty or more people might gather (busy intersections, parks, restaurants, stadiums, and so on) there is a hidden camera, programmed to go off at random times of the day and night. The tireless belletometrists at the Department of Aesthetic Compensation study these crowd scenes, scoring the face, dress, and comportment of everyone in them. The citizens who were photographed can go to the Department, and if they can be identified in the picture, they can claim a royalty, proportional to their score and the number of other people present. Similar programs reward the owners of attractive cars, houses, and speaking voices.

Since these rewards are paid out of general tax revenues, the plain citizens are effectively subsidizing the good-looking ones. The most beautiful of them all can live off the royalties from the Department, a practice that gives new meaning to the phrase “walk the streets for money”.

Ever since instituting this policy, Khazaristan’s tourism industry has boomed. In addition, its clinic for plastic surgery is the most highly regarded in the world. The clinic has two departments. One corrects the accidents of nature with face-lifts, nose jobs, liposuctions, and so forth. The other specializes in reconstructive surgery for acid burns, to help victims of the country’s most common violent crime.

At the most recent meeting of the World Trade Organization, the Secretary of Aesthetic Compensation of Khazaristan, a former Miss Universe, attended a panel on cross-border intellectual property rights. After the US representative spoke about the social benefits of patent and copyright protection, and the need for all countries to cooperate on enforcing these rights, the Secretary rose to her feet. She spoke of the public benefit that beautiful people can perform for an ugly world, and challenged the other countries to follow Khazaristan’s example, and to ensure that alongside the catchy tune and the innovative drug, the handsome face get its due reward. When the US representative laughed, the Secretary excused herself from the meeting. Time and Newsweek ran photographs of the Secretary’s pouting face on their covers.

15 Jul 2004 — How to understand gay-marriage opposition

Imagine if, back when desegregation was the controversy of the day, someone had proposed: “Let’s compromise. Let’s let the black kids into our schools, with all the duties and privileges of the white students, and give them diplomas that give them exactly the same legal recognition as the white graduates’ diplomas … but don’t call them ‘students.’ Call them, umm, ‘civil learners.’” Nobody, on either side of the integration wars, would have taken this idea seriously. But when the controversy of the day is gay marriage, one out of every four Americans opposes gay marriage and supports gay civil unions. And President Bush, Senator Kerry, and the Massachusetts state legislature all take these folks seriously. What’s going on here?

One of the most common arguments against same-sex marriage seems to be the claim that letting same-sex couples marry will “dilute” the institution of marriage. The claim is easy to mock, and as far as I’m concerned makes no rational sense, but if tens of millions of Americans would grant gay couples all the legal benefits of marriage except for the name, perhaps we should try to understand why this name has such power. I would suggest that gender identity is the culprit here.

As I discussed earlier, a person’s gender identity is his or her desire to be recognized as a man or as a woman. So, for example, Diane Wilson begins an essay by saying “Imagine that you are the person you are right now, but only on the inside. On the outside, you have the body of a person of a different gender.” We can translate that as “Imagine that you wish, on the inside, that people treat you as the person you are now. But on the outside, you have the body of a person of a different gender, and everybody treats you as such.”

(Colt Illicit argues, based on his own experience and observations, that “sex identity,” the desire to have a certain set of genitals, is psychologically distinct from gender identity. I’ll accept the argument, but it seems to me that even for sex identity, there’s some psycho-social component. I’ve never heard of anyone having a burning desire to remove an uninfected set of tonsils, or otherwise change a healthy body part that nobody else will ever see.)

Now, if you care about other people treating you as a member of a certain gender, you have to do something to respect their desires. (If I went around telling my friends and co-workers, “I’d like you to think of me as a woman,” and did nothing to change my appearance or behavior, I wouldn’t get much cooperation. At the very least, I would get better results if I shaved.) So people learn, from a very early age, what signals men and women use to announce their respective genders.

And a number of these signals are tied up with heterosexual marriage. If a person says “I am this woman’s husband,” or even “I’m looking for a wife,” that person is sending out an “I am male” signal. Those people who care about their gender identities, and who are used to relying on marriage-related signals to communicate their genders, are not going to appreciate this kind of noise in their communications channel, so to speak.

Of course, even if all of these marriage-related signals became unreliable, people could still use other signals to communicate their genders. So what? If half of all stop signs were suddenly painted blue, people would still recognize their message from the signs’ shape and wording…but most drivers would not be happy about the change.

(One could argue that the people who are made uncomfortable by gay marriage will just have to deal with it, and it’s better to make them uncomfortable than to settle for civil unions. Since civil unions really would carry the same rights and privileges as heterosexual marriage—unlike Jim Crow segregated institutions, where separate facilities were almost never equal—I’m not sure whether or not I agree with this argument.)

15 Jul 2004 — A is for Anonymous

[A few years ago, on my old static Web site, I started a series of essays describing political systems of imaginary countries. I’m revising those old essays and posting them here, and God willing, I’ll continue the series in the weeks and months to come.]

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In the United Nations Statistical Handbook, the entry for Vespucci Island has no entry for “population.” Nor does it say anything about the country’s Gross Domestic Product, its fertility rate, its literacy rate, or a dozen other statistics. The Vespuccian government, bound by a constitution with the world’s strictest privacy clauses, maintains no such information about its population, and Vespuccian citizens are proud of their government’s ignorance.

All Vespuccians have the right to keep their biometric information (their photographs, fingerprints, retina prints, etc.) strictly apart from their financial information (their assets, debts, account numbers, etc.). Since these two kinds of data are most easily linked through a person’s name, this translates to a right to be anonymous. A Vespuccian driver’s license has a photograph of its owner, an inscription certifying “this person is licensed to drive any automobile under such-and-such a weight”, and all the other usual accoutrements of driver’s licenses—but no name. A Vespuccian can open a bank account anywhere in the country without providing any kind of identification, using any name that he or she wishes. Vespuccian passports do have names beside their photographs, but only because other countries refused to accept anonymous travel documents. If an 20-year-old man asks for a passport made out to “Marilyn Monroe, born January 1, 1700,” the Minister of Foreign Relations will happily issue him one.

Even when ignorant of its citizens’ lives, the Vespuccian government manages to collect money from them. Its chief sources of revenue are the court tax, the weight tax, and the heat tax. Whenever people sign a contract or convey property to one another, and they want their agreement to be enforceable in court, they need to pay a tax in proportion to the maximum that any party could win from a lawsuit. Factories, warehouses, and retail stores have to record the weight of all goods they bring in for processing or sale, and pay an excise tax on the weight. The heat tax is based on the temperature of the waste water coming out of a building, and on satellite images showing the temperature of the surrounding air; it is charged to the property’s owner of record.

Both a progressive income tax and a traditional welfare system are impossible on Vespucci Island. There is no way to tell, by inspecting a bank’s records, the difference between five poor depositors and one rich depsitor using five aliases. However, the government does pay a monthly stipend, sufficient for food and shelter, to every citizen who wants one. On the first day of the month, you can show up at your local Welfare Office and have your picture taken. If the picture does not match any file photographs of foreign visitors, or of people who have visited a Welfare Office earlier on the same day, then you can receive your stipend as cash, or as a check made out to the name of your choice. At the end of the day, the file of photographs used to prevent double-dipping is erased.

As various money-laundering interests sought alternatives to Switzerland and the Caymans, some alighted on Vespucci Island, and the attention of larger countries’ governments followed them. After acrimonious debate, the legislature made an exception to its privacy laws: Anyone who brings foreign currency into or out of Vespuccian territory must have his or her picture posted, along with the amount being transferred, on the government’s Web site. This was enough to make the gangsters lose interest.

13 Jul 2004 — What to be afraid of

There’s a lot of buzz surrounding the White House’s desire for contingency plans to postpone elections in case of a terrorist attack. Balkinization gives a good rundown of the relevant laws.

The MSNBC article linked to above says: “Some legal scholars told NBC News that if a big enough Madrid-type attack were to disrupt voting in just one state, the entire election would have to be suspended because of the constitutional requirement that the election take place on the same day across the country.” This is not quite what the Constitution says. Article II, Section 1: “The Congress may [emphasis added] determine the Time of chusing the Electors, and the Day on which they shall give their Votes; which Day shall be the same throughout the United States.” According to Federal law (3 USC 2), “Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.” So if, say, there’s another massive terrorist attack in New York on Election Day, there’s nothing to prevent the New York state legislature from passing a law scheduling a make-up election to chose New York’s electors for President. As long as the make-up election happens before the Electoral College is scheduled to meet, there’s no need for the Federal government to do anything.

Between 9/11/01 and, say, last fall, I could imagine Bush pushing through a law that would give some executive-branch agency the power to postpone elections in case of terrorist attack. I have a much harder time imagining Bush passing such a law in the current political climate. And without an amendment to the law, the Department of Homeland Security doesn’t have the authority to do diddly-squat about the election schedule. Considering Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, especially Justice Scalia’s scathing dissent, if the DHS does try to take action on postponing an election without permission from Congress, I have a hard time imagining the Supremes letting them get away with it.

Having said all that, I can imagine a few ways for Dubya to get leverage out of an Election Day terrorist attack.

First, if Tom Ridge hits the airwaves talking about an election postponement, even if he has no authority to do anything, it might confuse or scare a lot of voters into staying home. If more Democrats stay home than Republicans, there’s plenty of time afterwards for the courts to confirm that a valid election was held on the appointed day, and the Democrats who stayed home will have four more years to regret their decision.

Second, if terrorists hit a swing state that’s likely to vote Democratic but has a majority-Republican legislature, voiding the election in that state…3 USC 2 doesn’t require the state legislature to schedule another election to choose the state’s electors. They can just appoint the electors directly.

I don’t think even the current crop of Republicans would cause (or fake) a terrorist attack on Election Day in order to set these plans in motion, but if bin Laden gives them one, you can depend on them taking advantage of it. Just remember what they did in Florida.

05 Jul 2004 — Version numbering madness

Once upon a time in 1998, Sun Microsystems released “Java 1.0” onto an unsuspecting world. As is the case with most “1.0” products that neither embarass nor bankrupt their sponsors, this was followed by “Java 1.1”. When it was time for the next version to be released, there must have been some kind of tug of war between the development and marketing wings of the company: as far as hackers were concerned, it was “Java 1.2,” but as far as the marketing department was concerned, it was “Java 2”. At some point—I don’t know whether this was at the 1.2 or 1.3 release—the Java platform split into “Java 2 Standard Edition,” “Java 2 Micro Edition,” and “Java 2 Enterprise Edition.” But at any rate, when the version numbers were bumped again, you didn’t have “Java 2 Standard Edition” become “Java 3 Standard Edition”; instead, it was “Java 2 Standard Edition 1.3.” Likewise for 1.4.

And now, Sun is almost ready to foist a new version of Java on us, and what do they call it? “Java 2 Platform Standard Edition (J2SE) 5.0.”

I hear that Sun is in difficult financial straits these days. Free advice: fire your marketing department before they announce “Son of Java 2 Platform Extended Turbocharged Standard Edition 2010, Release 7.1.”

05 Jul 2004 — To serve you better….

I’ve finally figured out how to make HTML::Parser do the right thing, so now, if you type comments into the box at the bottom of an individual blog entry, you can use some HTML, but “ugly” and “unsafe” tags and attributes will be stripped out. By “ugly”, I mean anything that might screw up the page layout, such as the <h1> tag. By “unsafe”, I mean anything that might be used as a carrier for a cross-site scripting attack, like the “onLoad” attribute.

Coming soon: the RSS template will change so that the permalink will point to the individual blog-entry page (http://dynamic.ropine.com/yo/meta/comments-v2.html) instead of the page with all the entries of that day (http://dynamic.ropine.com/2004/07/05#comments-v2). This might make LiveJournal and other syndication services think I’ve just posted a half-dozen completely new entries, so I thought I’d warn y’all before I did it.

05 Jul 2004 — The first consultant

Let’s say that you are an independent consultant, hawking your services as a computer programmer. The people who hire you don’t understand anything about computers; the only way they know you’re qualified to work for them is that you have a reputation for using computers to solve lots of other people’s problems.

So one day, a very rich and powerful man approaches you and says he wants to hire you. You hear him describe what he wants you to do, and after thinking over the problem for a while, you decide that you can’t do it; indeed, you’re not sure anyone can. But the man insists, and it’s clear that if you even try to fulfill his assignment, he’ll pay you very, very, very well.

If you’re an ethical consultant, and you still want to try for this man’s business, you say, “I can’t do the thing that you’re asking, but tell me more. Why do you want me to write this program? What problem are you trying to solve? If you’ll let me deviate from the specific assignment that you’re giving me here, I might find another way to solve that problem.”

If you’re an unethical consultant, you’ll just take the job and the money, continuing your patter about how you may not be able to do the work, making sure that your payment doesn’t depend on success. Who knows, maybe you’ll luck out and find a way to do the job. If not, you have excuses for failure at the ready.

What does all of this have to do with the story of Balaam? Replace “computers” with “sorcery” in the above paragraph.

From the Moabites’ statements in Numbers 22:2–4, it’s clear that Balak and his ministers (unlike, say, the Amalekites) saw themselves as acting defensively; he wanted Balaam to curse the Israelites as a means to an end. Furthermore, since Moab and Midian were not part of Canaan, Balak could have easily reached an accommodation with the Israelites that would have spared both sides from war. Balaam, with his pipeline to God, was in a position to know this. If Balak was simply concerned that Moab would suffer the fate of the Amorites, Balaam could have blessed Moab that as long as they let the Israelites pass safely, they would not be attacked. If Balak was concerned that the herds passing through would ruin Moabite pasture land (this is the opinion of the Akeidat Yitzchak, cited here), Balaam could have blessed the pastures.

But if he had investigated any of these alternatives, Balaam would have had to explicitly turn down a lucrative and ego-inflating assignment—cursing a nation that had achieved one outstanding military victory after another—and convince his client to pay him for a more modest task. An ethical sorcerer would have done just that, but Balaam was not such a man.

PS: After he failed to curse the Israelites, Balaam came up with the idea of using Moabite women to seduce them (25:1–9, 31:16). My wife points out that he could have proposed this to Balak from the start. Of course, if he had told Balak up front that something other than sorcery was Balak’s best hope for victory, it wouldn’t have done much for Balaam’s reputation as a professional sorcerer.

28 Jun 2004 — White liberal seeks limousine

Michelle Cottle observes that while liberals flame on and on about “hypocritical” acts by conservatives (Henry Hyde’s “youthful indiscretions,” Rush Limbaugh’s drug addition, William Bennett’s gambling habit, Jack Ryan’s taste for kinky sex clubs, and now Dick Cheney’s naughty language), conservatives themselves don’t seem particularly bothered by it.

I’ll agree that this focus on hypocrisy is a bad rhetorical strategy for liberals, but there is one area where conservatives perceive, and mercilessly lampoon, liberal hypocrisy: wealth. If you read all the snark about how rich Kerry and his wife are, or if you recall the outrage over Hillary Clinton making a killing in the commodities market, you’d think that it’s some kind of disgrace for a liberal to have large quantities of money. (I assume they consider this wealth to be some kind of hypocrisy, rather than a bad thing in and of itself; our Vice-President didn’t exactly spend the last twenty years as a Franciscan monk, and his fellow Republicans don’t hold his career against him.)

But where’s the hypocrisy? Mere possession of wealth has never been a sin among liberals. Lefties have offered a number of justifications for raising the income taxes paid by the rich, but as far as I know, “let’s punish these guys for having so much money” has never been one of them. Heck, having money isn’t even a sin among Marxists—the literate ones, at least. Karl and Fred did not see the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie as a battle of Good versus Evil, but as the natural conclusion of an amoral historical process.

Let the record show that if the good Lord sees fit to challenge me with great wealth, I will cheerfully pay every penny of tax that I owe, donate heaps of money to people who probably want my taxes to be even higher, and use whatever is left over to splurge on a bigger house, vacations on Cape Cod, a nice set of china and silverware, tasteful dress clothes, and whatever other creature comforts would not make my Yankee forebears blush. And if that prompts anyone to call me a white-wine-swilling liberal elitist, I can only respond, “L’chayyim!”

28 Jun 2004 — The wages of death are sin

In the passage describing the laws of the red heifer, the procedure for burning the heifer and accumulating the ashes is referred to as a chatat, a sin-offering (Numbers 19:9); when describing how these ashes must be used on someone who has come in contact with a corpse, the related verb yitchata is used (19:12). Why? If, say, someone has a heart attack and dies in a house that you are visiting, the death isn’t your fault; where’s the sin?

For one answer to this, we can look at commentary on the sacrifices that a woman brings after giving birth. There, she is required to bring a dove as a chatat (Leviticus 12:6, 8). Again, we could ask, what’s the sin in having a baby? Rabbi Shimon ben Yochai explains: while she was in labor, the woman might have sworn never to have relations with her husband again (Niddah 31b), forgotten the oath, and then violated it.

In a similar vein, the experience of being near a dead body, while not a sin in itself, puts someone at a much greater risk for it. Consider what happens in this parsha. Right after the laws of the red heifer are passed down, Miriam dies (Numbers 20:1). While the Torah records many deaths, this is the first one since the Exodus where a dead person is named and the death is not attributed to his or her misdeeds. Then, when the people grumble about not having water, the usual roles of Moses and God are reversed. Instead of God speaking of a harsh punishment and Moses begging for mercy, God simply tells Moses how to provide the people with water and Moses loses his temper at them (20:2–13). Because Moses could not stay focused on his duty in the aftermath of his sister’s death, he was denied admission into the Land of Israel.

28 Jun 2004 — I hear they go very nicely with “lyncher pants”

Am I the only one who thinks its a wee bit tasteless to refer to an article of clothing as a “wifebeater”? And while being interviewed for an article on lesbian chic, no less!

23 Jun 2004 — Your letter is very important to us. Please continue to hold.

This morning, I discovered that the /home partition on my mail server (a venerable 486 in our basement) was full, much to the consternation of qmail and courier-imap. I cleaned up my home directory on that server and everything seemed to be working again. My wife reported that she didn’t notice any problems with her own mail due to the problem, but she has had less spam than usual.

This gives me a wonderful idea for a spam-filtering technique: for 12 hours out of every 24, simply block all incoming email connections on your server. For legitimate users who send mail to a blocked machine, their ISPs’ mail servers will simply try again in a few hours, but the bulk-mail senders that spammers use probably won’t bother, because those programs are designed for people who want to fire off a few million messages and move on before they can be traced. Sure, any email that you care about receiving could be delayed for some random length of time, but that’s the price you pay for reducing incoming spam by half. Or you could block those connections for 18 hours out of every 24, and reduce incoming spam by two-thirds…

As D. J. Bernstein observes, one of the fundamental flaws in Internet email is that the recipient (or the recipient’s ISP) is responsible for storing his or her own mail. It would make much more sense for the sender (or the sender’s ISP) to take responsibility for storing messages and simply tell the recipient, “the next time you read your mail, there’s a message waiting for you to download at such-and-such a place”. If the Internet worked that way, then spam would be much less of a problem, because any message could be traced back to a server under the sender’s control with a permanent Internet connection, and the person owning that connection could be held accountable. And the odds of ever getting the whole Internet to make such a radical shift in the way it uses email are … well, about equal to the odds of getting all the spammers to give up their trade out of the goodness of their hearts.

23 Jun 2004 — Copy. Right.

Let’s talk for a few minutes about copyright. Copyright, you see, is the right to copy. That’s why they call it copyright. Unfortunately, some people, even people I generally respect, don’t copy this idea.

For example, Jesse Taylor is upset at the prospect of legislation that would authorize DVD “sanitizing” services, such as ClearPlay. The movie industry is up in arms over DVD sanitizers, and both sides have been duking it out in court for at least a year.

Taylor complains: “If the government can allow my copyrighted property to be sold in an altered fashion without my approval”—Stop right there. Your copyright to what you write does not give you an alterright. If you let me make a copy of something that you wrote, and then I alter it, without copying it, then I am in the right, because I made no copy. Right?

Elsewhere, Jeff Dillon is offended that Google uses Linux, and has modified Linux, but it has not made these modifications public. Linux is of course distributed under the General Public License, but since Google never gives a copy of their modified Linux to anyone outside of Google, the GPL doesn’t oblige them to show their modifications, no matter how much money they make by using them. Dillon sees this as a flaw in the GPL; he would like future versions of the license to force Google, or other companies that build services on top of GPL-licensed software, to give more back to the community.

Dillon says: “In today’s world, a fair percentage of the software being used is not being distributed to the client”—Stop right there. The authors of Linux have a copyright in the code they wrote, but their copyright does not give them a useright. If I want to restrict the use of software I write, then I have to make contracts with everyone who gets a copy of it, and if I catch someone misusing a copy, I have to prove that they consented to a contract and are now violating it. By contrast, if I put software under GPL, and someone copies it in a way that violates its terms, I have a much easier case. Whether or not the copier consented to the GPL, I have the copyright, and if they can’t prove I gave them the right to make their copies, they are not in the right. Copy?

On alternate Tuesdays, I would admit that ClearPlay and Google are not entirely right. It is kind of silly to believe that you can improve a movie by stripping out the “profanity, nudity and gory violence” from it; if the film is worth watching at all, the naughty bits are important for appreciating it. And since Google has hired some of the best computer programmers in the business, and made megabucks off of their work with Linux, they should make good on their VP’s promise to “give something back”.

But that has nothing to do with copyright. Copyright is the right to copy. If the principles behind copyright are truly important to you, you shouldn’t use “copyright” to refer to any wrong that doesn’t involve copying. Right?

22 Jun 2004 — Can a Scout be multi-reverent?

On Sunday, we attended a Court of Honor for a friend of ours who was being invested as an Eagle Scout. The honoree belongs to one of the Scout troops for observant Jews.

After the ceremonies, my wife and the fledgling eagle’s sister worked up the courage to ask one of the Scoutmasters: could you be a pagan Scout? (One would think that Druids would have a particular interest…) The Scoutmaster told us that there weren’t enough pagan troops to create a religious emblem for pagans, like the Ner Tamid for Jews, but there were a number of Zoroastrians. We can infer by the Zero-One-Infinity Rule that if a religion that believes in two deities is kosher with the Boy Scouts of America, then a religion with a pantheon of any nonzero size is kosher.

Indeed, a little Googling turned up a Boy Scout troop in Utah (apparently defunct) that was sponsored by a community that worships the traditional Northern European gods. (If the members of this troop spend too long hiking, do they get Thor feet?)

21 Jun 2004 — Those who do not march in formation

The parsha of Beha`alotekha begins with details about the special duties of the tribe of Levi (Numbers 8). A little later, it describes how the tribes marched in formation (10:11–28). Then, there is the conversation between Moses and Chovev (a.k.a. Jethro), where the latter, despite Moses’ urgings, decides to go home to his own family. A few verses after that, we have the episode with the quail, which begins as follows: “The afsafsuf in their midst had a great craving, and even the Israelites sat and cried, ‘Who will give us meat?’” (11:4).

The commentators agree that the afsafsuf here is the `erev rav, the “mixed multitude,” that left Egypt alongside the descendants of Jacob (Exodus 12:38). What do these people have in common with Jethro? They did not belong to any tribe, and the pageant described in the preceding chapters does not define any role for them.

It can’t be a coincidence that the `erev rav started causing trouble so soon after the most prominent local convert took his leave, can it? My wife suggests two possible reasons:

1. Jethro was a role model and leader for the `erev rav, and once he left, rowdier elements of the group took over.
2. The native-born Jews in the desert were becoming less friendly to converts; Jethro dealt with the changed attitude by politely taking his leave, and the `erev rav dealt with it by becoming more militant.

21 Jun 2004 — The rhetoric of despair

The essential form of the yeshivishe drash is this: First, present a kashe—two statements from the same canonical text that seem to contradict one another. Then, present the teretz—an interpretation of both statements that resolves the contradiction.

Take the following verse, a statement from the spies regarding the Land of Israel: “It is a land that devours its inhabitants, and men of stature comprised the whole nation that we saw there” (Numbers 13:32). Contradiction!

The medieval commentators, of course, noticed the kashe, and provided various teratzim. Rashi, citing a midrash (Sotah 35a), says that God caused many Canaanites to die while the spies were passing through the land, so that the natives would be so busy burying their dead that they wouldn’t notice the spies; thus the remark about the land devouring its inhabitants. Nachmanides and Sforno interpret the spies as saying that the food, water, and air in Israel are so poor that only giants can survive there.

But there is another interpretation possible: that the spies were contradicting themselves. They were not trying to present a rational argument for turning around and going back to Egypt: they were trying to manipulate the emotions of their audience. With such rhetoric, it’s more important to be emotionally consistent than logically consistent.

Unfortunately, when Joshua and Caleb tried to rebut the other ten spies, they were not emotionally consistent: they “tore their clothes, and said to the whole congregation of Israelites: ‘The land that we passed through to scout, the land is very, very good’” (14:6–7). It was logically consistent for them to tear their clothes in sorrow over the revolt that the other spies were fomenting, and then speak with optimism about the Land of Israel. But these two actions were not emotionally consistent.

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Last year: How are tzitzit supposed to prevent you from sinning? The standard explanations are farfetched; my wife proposes an alternative.

Later posts / Earlier posts