Sh’lach L’cha
Numbers 13:1 – 15:41
For forty days and forty nights the scouts sent by Moses gathered information and sampled the local fruits in the Promised Land. Upon their return, Caleb and Joshua encouraged the people to enter and conquer the land, but the other ten scouts warned them not to do it. They said: The people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large….” (Num. 13:27-28). “We cannot attack that people, for it is stronger than we…. The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its inhabitants. All the people that we saw in it are of great size…and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” (Num. 13:32-33).
I have often wondered why the ten fearful scouts—wise and discerning individuals specially selected by Moses—were so pessimistic in their report. What did they fear? After all, they had seen God destroy the mighty armies of Pharaoh; how could Canaan’s armies stand a chance against them? They had witnessed miracle after miracle ever since the plagues of Egypt: the parting of the Sea of Reeds, Revelation at Sinai, Miriam’s traveling well, the daily supply of manna…. All their needs had been taken care of by God, day in and day out. How could the Canaanites contend with that kind of divine support? In truth, according to the rabbis of the Talmud, the scouts’ doubts were even more insulting to God than that. How so? The rabbis offer a different translation of the Hebrew: “We cannot attack that people for it is stronger than Him…. [this] is a land that devours its inhabitants” (Sotah, 35a). Despite continued divine providence in their journey through the wilderness, they feared not only that the people of Canaan would be stronger than God, but that settling the land itself would lead them to their doom.
One interpretation of the scouts’ argument is that the Israelites were not ready to enter the land because they were spoiled by God’s ceaseless providence. Going into the land would mean that the manna would stop falling from the sky and Miriam’s well might disappear. The Children of Israel would have to grow up and provide for themselves, while contending with a foreign people and its competing religion. Being busy with a thousand material preoccupations and new responsibilities, they would forget about God. According to this interpretation, the scouts’ real fear was not of external threats but of internal ones—indeed, the deepest internal ones: threats to the very soul of their people. They feared that the materialistic world and its daily concerns would consume the people’s energy, leaving no time for Spirit, and that God would be defeated by the harsh immigrants’ life, which was bound to consume every minute of every day and “devour” them. It was best to remain in the secluded peace of the wilderness, where all material needs were provided for, and where they could continue to deepen their newly acquired spiritual path.
Who could fault the elders from arriving at such a conclusion? Anyone who has ever experienced the peaceful quiet of a complete Shabbat, or of a meditation retreat, knows the attraction of spiritual seclusion. Some would say that the best way to find God, the best way to stay connected to the Divine, is to remain separated from the physical, materialistic world. According to this argument, the pessimistic scouts believed that God was to be experienced in the wilderness, not in the land of Israel. Entering the land would disconnect the people from the spiritual realm.
But if that’s what they were thinking, they were wrong. Without denying the seminal importance of wilderness experiences to our spiritual unfolding, Judaism insists that we are to recognize the Presence of God wherever we are, whatever we are doing. We are to remain aware that it is God acting through our acting, God speaking through our speaking. We are to remember the miraculous in the mundane, the absolutely sacred in the seemingly insignificant. Twice Joshua and Caleb urged the people to “go up,” and perhaps this is what they meant: to find God in the dailyness of life in the new land. It is one thing to “go up,” to ascend the spiritual path while in the wilderness; but the real “going up” is to remain aware of Spirit’s presence in the world itself, within the everyday reality of human interactions with that world in all its light and shadow. Yes, we are to carve out time to meditate or pray every day, to immerse ourselves daily in our inner “wilderness.” But that grounding space needs to infuse, in turn, who we are and how we show up in our world so that we can stay conscious of the holiness of every being, of every thing, and of every moment, in order to transform our world into the sacred place it already is.