Shlach Lecha: The Etilology of Mistrust

Shelach lecha means “Send for you."

Comment: God did not ask the Israelites to dispatch spies. The people demanded it. God had already promised the Israelites both the land and that the land was “good.” The first time God promised the land of Israel to the Jewish people was with Abraham our Father so many years before. (Genesis 13) Reiterated time and again throughout the Torah, these descendents of Father Abraham had lost all faith in the Divine Word.

There was no reason for the spies to pass through the land on a mission except if they were already filled with doubts. Just think of the revealing statement by the returning spies who claimed that "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." (Numbers 13:33) To imply that the Israelites looked like tiny insects to the inhabitants of the land is a depressing, and unreliable, thought.

Perhaps “Send for you” means send a message to yourself about the reality of the situation.

Comment: The word “you” is singular.

The Zohar says that the underlying reason for the spies, really princes, of each tribe, giving such a negative report was they feared for their positions. The delegates/princes/spies believed that the change from escaped slaves to freemen in Israel might mean they would lose their position as princes of their tribes. Afraid of demotion they chose to frighten the people into remaining in the wilderness. In that way the princes remained in power. Perhaps then the reason "you" is in singular form is to tell us that HaShem was specifically speaking to the spies, not the congregation of Israel. God knew their hearts were dark and was warning each of them to think clearly.

Comment: When God declared to Moses to send out the spies what He really meant was, ‘send them out for yourself, if you have so little faith in My word. Did I not already tell you that the Land would be yours?’

In other words, God was telling the doubters that He was surprised at their utter lack of faith. How could the people have so little trust in the Lord after the plagues in Egypt? After the walls of water that parted for them at the Sea? After Mt Sinai? After the manna?

Rabbi Lawrence Kushner invents, based on a midrash, a conversation between two Israelites, Reuven and Shimon. At the splitting of the sea they converse:

"What is this muck?"Shimon scowled, "There's mud all over the place!""This is just like the slime pits of Egypt!" replied Reuven."What's the difference?" complained Shimon. "Mud here, mud there; it's all the same."... For Reuven and Shimon the miracle never happened.

Could this be the problem with the spies? Is it a natural human response to life to have short-term memory lapses?

A Hasidic Master, grandson of the famed Baal Shem Tov, noted that Moses asked the spies to take note of whether the land had trees (yesh) or not (ayin). The word yesh is a positive attitude of life. It is the predisposition of the faithful to see the hand of God in everything. Ayin, on the other hand, is a note of negativism. It is the unwillingness to see hope. Life is nothing more than a battle to stop the steady downhill pull into the dank abyss.

Despite all the implicit warnings to the spies, they were oblivious to hope; their trust in God was minimal.

Noteworthy is the date when these terrible events occurred: the day the spies returned from their mission was the most awful day on the Jewish calendar, Tisha B’Av.

Perhaps this great tragedy is why the Torah reading takes a strange turn toward the end of the parasha. The reading ends with the commandment to wear tzitzit – fringes on the corners of our garments. Why the mitzvah for the tzitzit? “To look and remember all the commandments of the Lord, God, to do them and not follow after your own heart and your own eyes.” (15:39)

Since our ego so strongly influences our yesh, God gives us a commandment which will act as a constant reminder that we must be aware of Providence. When doubts come to mind we are supposed to look at the fringes and be assured that we are not alone.



Haftarah insight:
Once again, spies are dispatched to view the land of Israel. This time, however, takes place some forty years after the debacle in Moses' time. The two spies were Pinchas and Caleb - who went the first time with Joshua.
Joshua carefully picked two individuals whose belief and trust is God is absolute. Their insight led to the home of Rahab. An unlikely hero, Rahab saves the spies. Who could have predicted that a whore would deliver Caleb and Pinchas? Yet, Rahab succeeds where the earlier leaders of ten tribes fail.
Faith is a more important criteria for the people than credentials or familial ties.

A Matter of Halakha:
Three things were gifted to the Jewish people but will only be delivered through trial, reveals the Talmud. They are Torah, Israel and Olam HaBa.
In the first instance, Torah is earned through effort. While a gift, its true essence can only be apprehended when a person applies energy to it.
Israel too, is an inheritance but like Torah, gleaning its true power means travelling there and for the truely devoted, living in Eretz Yisrael.
Olam HaBa, while waiting for each of us, requires us to live a righteous life.
All three gifts come with a price-tag: we must earn them.

Bamidbar: Counting on Faith

Numbers.  It sounds like a CPA’s dream.  In Hebrew we call it Bamidbar, which means “wilderness.” The older name for the book is Sefer ha-Pekudim, the Book of Gatherings.” While this new book of the Torah does contain the tallies of Jews in the desert it reaches far more deeply than just a census.

For example. The first born in many families, maybe all, excites the parents.  This introduction of new life is so novel, it borders on the sublime.  God tells each family that they must redeem their first-born. Why?  Precisely because each family pins hopes and aspirations on this child.  Who knows if they will be blessed with another?  Great pains are taken to find just the right name that will help determine the character of the child.  Love is lavished on him.  Blessings are pronounced and his every cry is attended.  

Then God tells us, “He is not yours.”

The family must then redeem the child from God teaching a powerful and profound lesson about ownership and possession.  Such redemption announces that even life is tentative and that we need to be mindful that there is a greater power than us.

To this day we practice Pidyon ha-Ben, the exchange of silver to redeem the first-born.

For example. The Children of Israel must pass through the midbar, a brume of clouds, sun, rocks, sand and scorpions in order to obtain their objective of the Promise Land.  They trekked for forty years through that barren landscape.

Is this not kike our lives? We grow, challenge, make foolish mistakes, pay handsomely for them, and then finally grow to the stature of maturity? It is our own sojourn through a personal wilderness that eventually makes us worthy of entering our promised land. How long did we wander?  Twenty years? Fifty?

For example.  Each family among the numbers was responsible to help transport the Mishkan, Tabernacle, and its various appurtenances. They carried the holiest items where the Jewish people talked to and worshipped God.

How often we become carried away by trivialities!  We lie awake at night worrying over bills.  We stress about our children or parents.  We argue endlessly about the same things day after day, (which is usually about who wields power).  The Torah is gently reminding us that these things should not be the focus of our attention.  There is something far for worthy and meaningful.  Carrying the mishkan or cleaning the shul is far more meaningful and rightly prioritizes life’s demands.

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Davar Acher

The Torah reading for this week, the fourth book of the Bible, contains a census. The details of the parasha are parceled out deliberately as the Torah means to clearly delineate each of the tribes. The tribes are painstakingly separated both in name and in fact. Imagine the twelve tribes sorted out by their relationship to one of the sons of Jacob. Each took their place next to their sisters and brothers and cousins. Then under a specific banner they were singly counted. Every name is mentioned. Then they were supposed to march tribe by tribe into the Promised Land of Canaan.

What was supposed to happen and what actually happened are two different tales. In fact, the Israelites were bothered by their new freedom. Yes, bothered. The change from slave to freeman was too great a transition for them to make. That is why the complaining about water and food and the missing elements from Egypt began almost immediately after liberation. Perhaps the biggest act of rebellion was when the people bought the “lie” of the spies. The quarreling over whatever the issue was not at the heart of the problem. The real problem was a lack of trust.

Rabbi Ovadiah Sforno commented that had the Jews accepted the direction from God; had they believed and maintained their belief in the God that liberated them, fed them, gave them Torah they would have marched right into Israel. The enemies of the land would have scattered at the sight of them carrying their tribal banners. Instead, doomed to wander for a full generation, the Israelites entered Canaan under Joshua in a different fashion.

When the next generation of Israelites crossed into Canaan they were not counted. The names were not specified. Only the heads of the tribes are mentioned in the Book of Joshua. Why the difference? Because, tells Sforno, the Israelites lost something when belief left them. Instead of defining themselves through God, Torah and trust they defined themselves by other external criteria. They worried about the Canaanites. They agonized over food. They argued about water. The identity of the Israelites came from disbelief.

An analogy. When Adam and Havvah met the snake in the Garden, the snake convinced them that the fruit of the forbidden tree was better for them than the other one. They took it. With that act, the two primal beings were sent into exile. Much later, Moshe would confront the nemesis of the Jewish people, Pharaoh, and defy him. Moshe showed the power of God as he exercised control over the serpents of Pharaoh. He grabbed the tail, trusting in God, and the snake became a staff. This act of faith was the beginning off the end of the exile for the Jewish nation.

The snake is an emblem of trust or disbeleief. No wonder later generations conceived of the snake as the yetser hara, the evil side, because it had the power to sway humanity into exile...but it also had the power to redeem it.

We can transform any act into something else with the necessary tool of faith. In fact, the gematria – numeric value – of snake is the same as messiah. In other words, an end to the ultimate exile will be granted when we each take the serpent by its tail - an act of faith.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, the Kotzker Rebbe, was a challenging Hassidic master. The Kotzker demanded an absolute, personal search for truth. Listen to his words:

"If I am me because you are you, and you are you because I am me, then I am not me and you are not you. But if I am me because I am me, and you are you because you are you, then I am me and you are you."

In the final analysis, we must be accountable individually. We are responsible for ourselves. When we have the necessary ingredient of life, faith, God counts us, loves us, and declares, “Now you are a whole person.”




Haftarah Insight:
Hosea does not give up. Faced with a painful life - a woman, his wife, who abandons him and the desolation of having been abandoned for another - Hosea maintains his faith. Despite all she does, Hosea believes in the power of love, return and redemption. In much the same way, Hosea teaches us that God does not give up on us. He still loves, believes in our potential and awaits our return. "You are the children of the Living God!" the prophet proclaims.

A Matter of Law:From this Torah parsha we derive the idea that people are never to be counted. If a census needs to be taken we use the method devised by the Torah itself, we count possessions - shekels here - not souls. The law is extrapolated to even refusing to count the presence of ten for a minyan.

B'har: The Shabbats

When God created humanity He tasked us with, “fill the earth and subdue it.”  Simple enough.  All Adam and Eve had to do was procreate and become masters of their earth.  Yet it soon became apparent that humankind’s appetite for control required greater and more specific directives.  

Left to our own irresponsible behaviors we would bring ruin on one another and on the land.  So God directed us to obverse laws that would curtail our destructive tendencies because we could not be trusted to control our lust for power and possessions. So, He told us to observe a once-per-week Shabbat.  Every seven days we are to light candles, bless wine and break bread. On Shabbat, the Holy One told us to live in the world on this Shabbat, not above it.  In that way the earth would reclaim one day for its own healing and we could reclaim the vitality of our lives.

Then God saw fit to add that when people sold themselves into slavery they needed to be set free after six years of labor.  Everyone deserves a new start in the seventh year. 

In B’har, God further expands the rule of seven by indicating the shmittah, a seventh year of Shabbat for the land.

We are just beginning to learn the value of this mitzvah. The body heals when it is given time to rest.  The mind recuperates when given a Shabbat.  Society heals when old debts are forgiven.  And the earth too needs time to recover from the never-ending onslaught of chemicals, depletion and deforestation.

To emphasize the importance of this mitzvah the Torah states that this was a law given at Mt Sinai.

God gave us a gift of a body and universe that self heals. But only if we give it what it needs.

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Davar acher

“Six days you shall work and on the seventh day you shall rest; from plowing and harvesting you shall rest.”

This text, from Exodus 34: 21, tells us to observe the Shabbat and, for some strange reason, chooses to use the example of refraining from planting and reaping on the Shabbat. Why did the Holy Text use this example and not, say, refraining from work? Or not shearing sheep? Or not making fire?

Rashi explains that the Torah uses this specific example because it wants us to be aware that it is speaking of two different sorts of Shabbat. One of them is the seventh day of the week where we are supposed to leave the earth alone and the other is the seventh year when we are told to let the land lie, the Shvi’it year. Both are equally valuable.

So holy is the Shvi’it, explains Rashi, that even the sixth and eighth years are tinged by the holiness of the seventh year. That is, explains the French rabbi, accidental produce that came up on the eighth year of the land is also holy and plowing at the close of the sixth year is forbidden.

The Torah reading of this week, B’har, opens us with God speaking to Moshe at mount Sinai, saying, "Speak to the Children of Israel and tell them: When you come to the land which I am giving to you, the land must keep a Shabbat to God ...". Leviticus 25:1

The concept of a "Shabbat to God" was interpreted with great zeal by our Sages, of blessed memory. They stressed that the observance of the Shvi’it was critical to our well-being. Read their words:

Come and see how difficult the Dust of Shvi’it is: A man who deals in produce of the Shvi’it year will eventually have to sell his chattel ... then his property ... and his house ... eventually his daughter as a handmaid ... he will have to borrow with interest ... and will be forced to sell himself ... to someone who worships idols, which will cause him to do the same. Kiddushin 20a
The phrase, “A Shabbat to God” is stated at the outset of our parsha. The expression can also mean “a return to God." In thinking about the usual Shabbat, the seventh day of the week, our tradition sees this as a day that restores the soul to the body. Shavat va’yinfash states the Ten Commandments instructing us on observing the Shabbat day. On the holy Shabbat our nefesh is given a glimpse of eternity. In that sense, Shabbat is about returning to God. Shavat va’yinafash means that our soul, nefesh, is reawakened and re energized. The day and its observances allow us to be soulfully connected to our Maker.

Shabbat is about reestablishing our relationship with the Almighty. It is a return to God. The Chernobyl Rebbe wrote that the word "Shabbat" -- shin-bet-tav -- stands for "Shabbat Bo Teshuvah" -- in Shabbat there is a return to the Lord.

After seven Shvi’it cycles (7 X 7= 49 years), there is the Jubilee year when land is returned to its original owners and Jewish servants are freed. There are three Shabbats observed by our people; Shabbat, Shvi’it and the Jubilee. Each one contains the nuance of returning back to God. The Sefer HaChinuch tells us this to make us aware that everything belongs to God. We are simply travelers on the earth.

Perhaps there is another lesson here for modernity. Life surges forward with ever-greater velocity. The speed of innovation and the attendant demands on our soul are dizzying.

Who heard of a cordless phone thirty years ago? Who lives without a cell phone today??

I would not advise investing in maps. GPS systems will soon be in every car.

When was the last time you saw a floppy disc drive? Computer technology does not advance, it races.

How long will it be until there are no more gasoline driven cars?

Judaism does not seek to resist or demonize technology. Our task is to harness it, though, and not be harnessed by it.

I cannot help but wonder whether the terrifying curse that is mentioned in the Talmud above may contain kernels of truth. Perhaps we can end up selling all our possessions and ultimately our soul if we are not watchful guardians.

Amalek, the dreadful enemy of the Jews has the same gematria, numerical value, as doubt, safek. In the Talmud, Rabbi Yehuda said in the name of Rav: Had the Jewish people only kept the first Shabbat, no nation or people could ever have had control over them. It says in Torah, "It happened that on the seventh day some of the people went out to collect [manna].” Immediately afterward the Torah reveals, "Amalek came . . ." Shabbat 118b. Amalek was the doubt that God knew what was best for the nation of Israel. Amalek were the lingering and festering thought that perhaps humanity knows better.

Maybe the lessons of the past, the doubts, the idea that somehow we are made of different stuff than all the generations that pack human history, is there to teach us to trust God.

Perhaps that is why when speaking of the seventh and Jubilee years the Torah promises that if we observe these Sabbatical laws " . . . You will dwell securely upon it." Leviticus 25:19 Trust is asked of us. Trust can give us blessing and make us whole.