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The heavyweight boxing division has a minimum weight of two hundred pounds, but no maximum weight. Many of the greatest champions were, in fact, close to the minimum. In the greatest heavyweight fight of all time, the bout between Joe Frazier and Muhammed Ali at Madison Square Garden in 1971 (the “fight of the century”), the two weighed in at 205 and 215 pounds, respectively.
But what about one of history’s largest heavyweights, the Italian fighter Primo Carnera? Carnera, active in the sport in the twenties and thirties, was a former circus strongman who weighed about two hundred eighty pounds. Towering over his opponents, he was so large that he was nicknamed “The Italian Alp.” Although he could hit with enormous power, he was easily outclassed by technically better fighters including Joe Louis and Max Baer. In other words, size isn’t everything.
This theme of facing a physically larger opponent is reminiscent of the experience of the spies in this week’s Torah portion, Shelach Lecha. While the spies conceded that the land of Israel which they had reconnoitered was in fact a “land of milk and honey”, they expressed reservations about their military capabilities against an entrenched local populace. The Torah relates that they even saw the descendants of a race of primordial giants living there: “They went up into the Negev and came to Hebron, where lived Ahiman, Sheshai, and Talmai, the descendants of Anak.” (Numbers 13:22) Incidentally, in modern Hebrew the word “anak” is an adjective meaning “giant”.
The spies relate that “we were grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so must we have been in their eyes.” (Numbers 13:33). But to our sages, this raised an immediate question – how did they know how they were perceived by others? Thus our sages observe in the 12th century Bamidbar Rabbah (16:11):
- They said (in Numb. 13:33), “And in our own eyes we were like grasshoppers.” The Holy One, blessed be He, said, “I forgave them for that [remark]; but I was exacting [when they said] (ibid., cont.), ‘And so we were in their eyes.’ The Holy One, blessed be He, said, “Did you know what I made you in their eyes? Who would say that you were not like angels in their eyes?”
In fact, the midrash goes on to relate that G-d had given the spies the appearance of angels, unbeknownst to them. If the spies couldn’t recognize their own G-d given, “angelic” nature, entering the land would wait until G-d sent His own angel a generation later.
And despite appearances, an angel defeats a giant every time.
- Rabbi Scott Hoffman
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