This Shabbat is Shabbat Hazon, the Sabbath of vision, given its name because of the Haftarah portion, Isaiah 1:1-27 and Isaiah's vision of the people's transgression and their hope for redemption. This Shabbat is the one that immediate precedes Tisha b'Av. But the designation of hazon, meaning 'vision', can also be tied to one of the Biblical characters briefly mentioned in the Torah portion this week. "Not one of the men [counted in the census], this evil generation, shall see the good land that I swore to your fathers - none except Caleb son of Jephunneh; he shall see it, and to him and to his descendants will I give the land on which he set foot, because he remained loyal to the Eternal" (Deut. 1:35-36). Of the generation of the Exodus, only Caleb and Joshua make it to the Promised Land because of the hopeful report they brought back when they and ten other scouts checked out the Land of Israel. Joshua gets a book named after him in the Hebrew Bible, but Caleb does not.
Rabbi Zoë Klein gives Caleb a voice in her text, The Scroll of Caleb. According to Klein, Caleb represents the highest potential of every person. He is not capable of miracles and wonders, like Joshua's making the sun stand still, but he was able to see things that the other scouts couldn't. He helps us see that we, as ordinary people, possess extraordinary potential without being something we are not. On this Shabbat before Tisha b'Av, Tisha b'Av being the date on which numerous calamaties are said to have befallen the Jewish people (including among them the day on which the people chose not to listen to Joshua and Caleb, but rather to the ten other scouts), we are called to have vision like Caleb, seeing the potential of our future and our ability to fulfill the potential that God has placed within us, even when we seem overwhelmed by what seems impossible.
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