“Mirror, mirror on the wall.”
As the Snow White fable put it, sometimes we want to see ourselves a certain way – for good or for ill – and we project that impression on others.
Except nobody is their image, and nobody goes forward in life that way. That’s the ticket to going backward . It’s exactly why our spiritual ancestors wandered the desert for 40 years rather than enter the Land of Promise.
Mirrors, it turn out, can be profoundly deceiving.
By Rabbi David Evan Markus
Parashat Shlakh Lekha 5784 (2024)
Sometimes Torah is so wise that she can take our breath away – and our collective self image with it.Our spiritual ancestors made it to the Land of Promise, just across the Jordan. Moshe sends 12 scouts to check things out. Beyond the desert, they find a land flowing with milk and honey, grapes so big that they need a rack to carry a single cluster. (That image became Israel’s Department of Tourism logo.)
Except that 10 of them (source of the minyan) were too afraid to go forward. Accustomed to how things were, they feared anything different, so they “slandered” the Land. They told the people (Num. 13:32-33):
| הָאָ֡רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֩ עָבַ֨רְנוּ בָ֜הּ לָת֣וּר אֹתָ֗הּ אֶ֣רֶץ אֹכֶ֤לֶת יוֹשְׁבֶ֙יהָ֙ הִ֔וא וְכָל־הָעָ֛ם אֲשֶׁר־רָאִ֥ינוּ בְתוֹכָ֖הּ אַנְשֵׁ֥י מִדּֽוֹת׃ וְשָׁ֣ם רָאִ֗ינוּ אֶת־הַנְּפִילִ֛ים … וַנְּהִ֤י בְעֵינֵ֙ינוּ֙ כַּֽחֲגָבִ֔ים וְכֵ֥ן הָיִ֖ינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶֽם׃ | ’The land that we traversed and scouted consumes its inhabitants. All the nation we saw there are of great stature. We saw [giants] there…. We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we were in their eyes.” |
Amidst fear and maybe exhaustion, they let fear rule them – fear of change, fear of effort, fear of challenge. Nostalgia and yearning for ease turned them into a mob. They egged on others for support: better, they said, to return to how things were before. Better even to go back to Egypt, with new leadership to boot (Num. 14:2-4).
Fear and narrowness still dominated despite a year of miracles – Ten Signs back in Egypt, liberation from bondage, splitting the sea, manna and water in the desert, Sinai speaking the Ten Commandments, a cloud by day and fire by night leading them forward, and so much more. But no matter: they saw themselves how they saw themselves.
God had enough: if nothing would turn their hearts, then they’d need to be turned away. God forgave the people (in words we intone on Yom Kippur), but commanded the people to turn away from the Land and wander the desert for 40 years. If they were too bound to the past to step forward into the future, then that’s just what would happen. They’d need to literally die in the desert until a next generation unshackled to fear could come of age and try again – grasping tzitzit, commanded in this same portion, to remind them not to be clutched by fear or resistance. That’s where the tallit comes from.
And that’s why the Israelites took 40 years to enter the Land. It wasn’t that the actual trip from Egypt took that long, but that they held too tightly to their past and especially to fear.
We read this pivotal Torah portion each year to remind us to keep moving forward, not back. And we read this pivotal Torah portion each year to poke at the caricatures we make of ourselves and others.
Torah is a keen psychologist. She knows that we all tend to see ourselves and others a certain way – both individually and as a community – and that we project our images, good and bad, onto others and especially challenging circumstances. But doing so, Torah teaches us year after year, is our ticket to nowhere.
We are not grasshoppers, and no future is full of scary giants intent to take us down. We are not our worst fears, small or incapable. We are daughters and sons of the Sacred, created in the Image of the One we call God. A land flowing with milk and honey awaits us, if only we will fulfill our destiny and move forward.
David Evan Markus 