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Drash for Shabbat Shelach L'cha By Mara Levine - June 8, 2007 In this week's Torah portion, God tells Moses to send twelve scouts, one leader from each of the tribes, to explore the land of Canaan and report back on what the land is like and what kind of people live there. The scouts return from their reconnaissance bearing beautiful fruit and praising the land "flowing with milk and honey." Two scouts, Caleb and Joshua, offer an optimistic report that surely with God's help the Israelites can conquer Canaan as God had promised. But the other 10 scouts report that the inhabitants of the land are fierce giants, stating "we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." As they exaggerate and embellish the negatives, the Israelites' level of fear escalates until they question Moses and God, and cry out that they wish they had never left Egypt. God threatens to annihilate the Israelites then and there, but Moses persuades Him to reconsider. So God decrees that only Joshua, Caleb, and those Israelites under age 20 will be allowed to enter the Promised Land; the rest will wander in the wilderness for 40 more years and perish there. Reflecting on this portion, I wonder: What sin did the scouts commit to elicit such harsh punishment from God? They didn't lie; they gave an accurate report of the pluses and minuses that awaited them in Canaan. Was it their negative self-perception-seeing themselves as inconsequential insects? Was it their assumption that the "others"-the Canaanites-would also see them as small and weak? These sins don't seem so terrible to me. How about the behavior of the Israelites? Their hysterical fear can be explained in terms of social psychology and group dynamics. The more the scouts recounted, the higher the group's fear rose, and each fed off the other. As for their kvetching and thinking they should have stayed in Egypt-well, that shouldn't really have come as a surprise to God, either. They grew up as slaves, and had learned helplessness and pessimism. They were just being human. Some scholars suggest that the egregious sin which so angered God was the challenging of His will: The Israelites did not have faith that God would help them to reach the Promised Land, and they allowed their fear to override fulfilling His commandment. My perspective is that maybe God did not actually "punish" them. I don't see God's actions as angry. Perhaps He was just being pragmatic, even protective. If these 10 leaders could not exhibit positive thinking and faith in God, and the Israelites were so afraid of the fate that would befall them, God was essentially doing the Jewish people a favor. He didn't kill the Israelites; he just delayed their arrival, in order to encourage the emergence of leadership and hope in a new generation who did not know slavery. An important message here is not so much about putting our absolute trust in God to come through for us or else. It's about believing in ourselves, and having the courage to look beyond the reality of "what is" or "what has been" to "what can be". God never promised us a rose garden. He gave us the roadmap to get there and the capacity to plant and cultivate the seeds of a better world. Shabbat Shalom.
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