Our member, rabbi and author Steven Ettinger, has turned his downtime during missile attacks to positive use by exercising his brain and his imagination to good purpose. Look what he has been thinking:
Sitting in the ma’amad with little else to do, one’s mind can wrestle with anxiety or can be distracted with something more constructive. I am choosing the latter – typing some stream of consciousness ideas about this week’s parshah, Shelach Lecha.
For some
prognosticators, this is the start of World War II, an “end of the world”
scenario. So naturally, a good launching
pad for my thoughts is at the very beginning. Hashem created the world
with “asarah ma’amarot”, ten utterances. He completed the process by
animating Adam HaRishon, the prototype human – who promptly succumbed to his
evil inclination and was exiled from paradise.
Several
millennia later Hashem repeated this pattern, albeit for a nation rather than
for an individual. He did not create a single person but the ultimate people, Am
Yisroel. In place of ten utterances
there were ten plagues. In place of seven days there were seven weeks. There is one significant difference, however.
Adam, after eating from the Tree of Knowledge, was prevented from eating from
the Tree of Life. Hashem gave the Jewish Nation a tree of BOTH knowledge and
life, the Torah, “eitz chaim hi.”
There is
still one aspect left to discuss, the sin and the exile. In Eden, the story is
succinct and clear – a well-known narrative.
The story has a beginning (“do not eat from the fruit of the tree”), a
middle (the story of how they ate) ,and an end (the punishment). There is even a villain upon whom some of the
blame can be cast.
If the
events of the Exodus present a parallel creation story, then where is this sin
and exile narrative?
It would be
tempting to answer that Am Yisrael or, more precisely, the generation
that was redeemed from Egypt, was denied entry to the Land of Israel, a form of
pre-exile, because of the sin of the Golden Calf. This would fit the mold
precisely. They were given two interrelated commands, that they heard directly
from Hashem: that He is their God and they are to have no others besides Him.
They proceeded immediately to violate these directives.
This MAY have been the “sin.” However, “the consequence was NOT “exile”.
Several thousand died, but there was forgiveness (“salachti ki’dvarecha”),
not punishment. So perhaps the parallel narrative is to be found elsewhere,
like in parashat Shelach Lecha.
In our parashah,
the spies go out to see the land, they return with a bad report and the people
despair. For this they are all punished and condemned to die in the desert over
the next 40 years. This is their sin and exile.
However, if
this truly is the “sin and exile”, if this is a continuation of our nation’s
creation story: Where is the parallel narrative? Where were they tempted? What command
did they violate? Why the length of the punishment? The answers to these questions will show us
just how similar the two patterns are.
The
temptation here for
the nation, their protagonist, is the spies. Like the nachash in the
Creation story, they present themselves as good guys. They show concern for the nation. But they, literally, are snakes in the grass.
The
command they
violated was based on Hashem’s concession to Moshe, “shelach lecha”
(“send for yourself”). Hashem in this
instance delegated to Moshe the authority to “command” a task. Moshe provided the meraglim with a
specific set of instructions in order to enable Am Yisrael to
immediately thereafter enter the Land of Israel, without any further delay.
Moshe had been their leader for a little over two
years. He had not only led them out of Egypt, performing many miracles, and
twice delivered the Torah, but he defended them from destruction after the sin
of the Golden Calf. How could they pervert his command and then rebel against
him? THIS was the violation of God’s command – not following the letter
and spirit of Moshe’s directives. The consequences of their actions were so
fatal that Moshe himself would never enter Eretz Yisroel!
The
length of the punishment is forty years. Moshe defended them for forty days; Hashem even offered
to destroy the Jewish People and start again with Moshe as the progenitor.
Forty years, the period necessary to eliminate this entire generation, was the required
consequence. This is more than paying mere lip service to the concept of
measure for measure, this defines justice.
We cannot
ever presume to understand Hashem’s plans and actions in this world. But, looking
back, we can sometimes discern patterns. There was a pattern in the creation of
Man and we can see a similar pattern in the creation of our nation. Great
tragedies have befallen our nation and out of the ashes we have experienced a
great re-birth and many, many miracles.
So we sit
in our shelters, seeing the Hand of Hashem revealed minute by minute. When we
look back, perhaps in a mere few days from now, we might well find that we witnessed
Hashem completing the pattern of His third and final creation -- not the
creation of Adam HaRishon -- the
prototypical man or the creation of Am Yisrael – the ultimate people, but the
creation of Yemot HaMashiach – the purpose for all existence.
