Parshas Shelach 5781
There are days when we feel like we would have been better off just not getting out of bed in the morning. It’s one challenge and crisis after another and we’re left completely steamrolled by the unstoppable avalanche that was put in motion the moment we woke up. For the Jewish People, that nightmare of a day began when they left Har Sinai, and they wouldn’t end for another forty years until they finally cross the Jordan into Israel.
The dividing lines created by the individual parshios—and the fact that they are read an entire week apart from one another—can make it difficult to see the interconnectivity from one parsha to the next. And so it is tempting to look at the events of Parshas Shelach as a series unto itself: A poor decision by the people to send their emissaries into Israel, to scope out a land that G-d had already promised them would be ideal. That decision precipitated the actual mission, which led to the negative report, which resulted in the people’s sin and the punishment of languishing in the dessert for forty years.
But it’s worth taking a deeper look. Why did the people make the decision to send the spies in the first place? Where were their heads at and how did that thinking come about in the first place?
The Ramban explains that the events of our parsha are rooted in last week’s parsha. More precisely, to an event that transpires on the timeline of last week’s parsha, but that is nearly undetectable in the text itself. The Ramban quotes the Midrash that describes the exit from the foothills of Har Sinai as being a hasty process, actually comparing it to children who run out of class as soon as it is over. The Jewish People were worried that if they dawdled at Sinai, Hashem might decide to include more mitzvos for them to keep, much as school children are concerned of what extra work their teacher may give them should they stick around too long. The Ramban suggests that if not for this sin, perhaps Hashem would have brought the people into Eretz Yisrael immediately. But because of it, they linger in the wilderness just long enough for the sin of the spies to occur, preventing their entry into Israel for another four decades.
Staying in bed the day the spies were sent out wouldn’t have done the job. They should have stayed in bed on the last day they were camped at Sinai.
When we think of examples of Divine retribution, we come up with examples of active punishment: famine, illness, death. But Hashem also punishes passively, providing a person with the means to serve as his own undoing. It is a mode of action that Chazal describe many times over.
בא לטמא פותחין לו, בא לטהר מסייעין אותו
יומא לח:
One who comes to sully himself, they provide him an opening; one who comes to purify himself, they assist him.
Yoma 38b
When a person seeks out the wrong path, the Heavenly court may simply give him the green light, leaving him to his own devices. This is as compared to a person who seeks out goodness, holiness, and purity, who is actively assisted in achieving these goals. This is the case with the Jewish People as they leave Har Sinai. Fleeing from the mountain framed Hashem as something less than our ever caring Father who wants only the best for us, and the people were permitted to become victims of their own warped mentality. They had primed themselves to accept statements about how Hashem was leading them to a land that would swallow them alive. Had they fought off those thoughts at Sinai, they would not have fallen prey to the slander of the spies.
The reality of free will is that Hashem will not always save us from ourselves. We usually think of this in terms of the one-off event. We have the choice to either commit the sin, or not. To perform the mitzvah, or not. But it is far more than that. Free will speaks not only to the individual act committed—right or wrong—but to the patterns of behavior we fall into.
Too often, remorse over a given misstep is met with the determination to not fail again. The next time we find ourselves in this position, we tell ourselves, we’ll choose better. We won’t share that gossip, won’t gobble down that brownie, won’t waste our time. But we don’t spend enough time considering where the behavior came from in the first place. What were the actions I took—or didn’t take—prior to that happening that set me on a path to failure? Had I already primed myself to say, eat, or do the wrong things hours, days, or even weeks before? What habits have I started to develop? What compromising situations do I put myself in? Did I train myself to accept a bad report of the Land by running from Har Sinai well before?
Fortunately, the same is true in reverse. Small steps we make towards developing proper habits pay dividends in the future. Identifying where we tend stumble and making minor advances towards avoiding those situations help place us on a positive trajectory well into the future. Though imperceptible at the time, the thoughts running through the heads of the Jews and the length of their strides as they left Sinai would spell the difference between wallowing in the dessert for forty years and immediate entry into the Promised Land. The small steps we take in life develop habits that quickly compound and can lead us in two very different directions, no less diverse than those of our ancestors in the dessert. The choice of which course to take is ours alone.