D’var Torah: Shelach 2025/5785 שלח

Rabbi Dan Berman, Temple Reyim

The story of the spies lies at the heart of the entire book of Bamidbar; it determines who will – and who will not – be able to enter the Land of Israel. While the spies have generally drawn the scorn of traditional commentators, who are stunned by their lack of faith, I’ve always had such compassion for them. They did what they were asked to do, but they could not overcome their fears and anxieties of entering a land where another, apparently much more powerful, group of people already lived.

Of course they felt this way! Their sense of self was defined by enslavement. Their masters taught them to see others as strong and themselves as weak. Where would they have developed their own sense of fortitude, strong enough to believe that whoever they run into – people, Gods – won’t overpower them?

Upon hearing the spies’ reports, b’nei Yisrael broke out crying. They wailed all night and railed against Moses and Aaron and said to one another: nashuva mitzrayma: Let’s return to Egypt.

I have such compassion for the people who were unable to trust the land was indeed tov. But they could not be the generation that entered the land because they could not see beyond their own experience. They could not be imaginative. They needed to be able to dream. Going into the land required having faith in potential and in one another.

Victor Frankel was a Jewish Austrian psychiatrist and neurologist. He was a survivor of the Shoah and wrote a number of books, including one entitled Man’s Search for Meaning. The heart of Frankel’s work is that the primary human drive is not a pursuit for pleasure or power, but rather for meaning. He writes about love: “Through love one is able to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person and even more, he sees the potential in him . . . By his love he enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be, he makes these potentialities come true.”

Frankel is describing what it looks like to stand in the presence of God; to believe that we are in a state of becoming, and to love deeply enough to make others aware that they, too, have so much to give the world that they have not yet even begun to imagine.

This was what the scouts and the people who wept and wailed lacked. I don’t blame them. My heart breaks for them. But coming into the land required hopefulness, trust in each other, and faith in goodness. The dream was that the next generation would be more trusting, more open-hearted. As we look out now, from our various edges, the cusps of our various lands – in Israel and here – it seems more important than ever to hold onto that dream.