Parashat Shelakh Lekha chronicles the story of Moses sending spies to scout out the Land of Canaan. Twelve tribal leaders are selected for a forty-day reconnaissance mission traveling from the wilderness of Paran to report on the Promised Land and its inhabitants.
After traversing desert wilderness and mountainous terrain, the men return and describe a land “flowing with milk and honey” (Num. 13:27). With some hyperbole and distortion, the spies also report that the land devours its inhabitants, the people are exceedingly fierce, and the cities are fortified and populated with giants (Num. 13:28, 32-33). This news bulletin evokes intense fear among the Israelites, nearly catalyzing a revolt against Moses and Aaron.
This is a problematic event in the history of the wandering Israelites. According to rabbinic tradition, only two transgressions caused God to threaten annihilation of the entire nation: 1) the idolatrous sin of the Golden Calf; and 2) the exaggerated, falsified reconnaissance reports of the spies.
This tale of the spies became part of the collective memory of the Rabbis. According to the Talmud (BT Taanit 29a), the spies delivered their report to Moses on Tisha B’Av. Hearing the news, the Israelites “broke into loud cries, and wept.” (Num. 14:1). With little empathy, G!d said to them: “You have wept without cause. Therefore, I will set [this day] aside for weeping throughout the generations to come.” Tisha B’Av became a collective punishment over time for the sins of the spies. According to Mishna Sanhedrin (M. Sanh. 10:3), the spies and the entire generation of the wilderness “shall have no share in the World to Come / Olam Haba.” Ultimately, the misdeeds of the spies led to forty years of wandering in the wilderness. None of that generation would enter the Promised Land, except for Joshua bin Nun and Caleb ben Yefuneh. They alone were the whistle-blowers, truth-tellers among the spies.
In my attempt to understand Torah, I often search for an inner, psycho-spiritual, or mythic dimension in Torah. This particular approach to understanding Torah is comparable to the allegorical interpretations of Philo, as well as those of the Hasidic Masters who tend to psychologize elements and characters in Torah.
In the Passover Haggadah, we read: Hayav Adam li’rot et atzmoh k’ilu who yatza m’Mitzraim—it is incumbent upon each person to see themselves as if they have left Egypt. In a similar vein, what would it mean to suggest that we see ourselves as the meraglim, the spies who lied to Moses? In what ways might we see the story of the meraglim as descriptive of an internal process?
Drawn from the waters of the depths, Moshe is the spiritual visionary who wants guidelines on the spiritual direction of his people. So he dispatches spies to discern the unknown future, saying: “Go see what kind of country it is, are people strong or weak, good or bad? Are towns open or fortified, soil rich or poor, is it wooded or not?” (Num. 13:18-19).
Symbolically, the Promised Land represents the place of our soul, our higher consciousness. Sending spies into the Promised Land is an attempt to evoke our highest knowing. As spiritual beings, we all have a yearning to comprehend and know our spiritual destiny, a hunger to sense how we can fulfill our divine calling.
From a psycho-spiritual point of view, sending spies is not the problem. It is hard-wired into our being to look around corners, to strive to intuit the unknown, to discern the direction in which we are evolving spiritually. The problem is how the spies responded to Moses’s request: deceitfully, fearfully, with exaggeration, and lying!
What did they report? “It’s bad news! The country will devour its settlers, there are giants in the land, we look like grasshoppers compared to them, things will turn out badly. We are screwed!”
Mythically, this response is representative of those parts of ourselves disconnected from hearing our spiritual yearnings and destiny, filled with fear and anxiety about the unknown. We have parts of our inner selves that don’t always tell the truth. We might see a fleck of imperfection and make it into a catastrophe. “Oh my G!d, this country will devour all of us!” “Oh my G!d, this person did not return my phone call or my email within two hours; they must hate me! I knew I was not capable, talented, good enough, smart enough.”
Instead of seeing the Promised Land of our soul with clarity, we perceive distortions, not perceiving our reality as aligned with our inner spiritual selves. We see failure and defeat where there are challenges; we see rejection when there might only be hesitation. The giants and spies report represents bogeymen we ourselves create in our own minds. The mind can catastrophize and blow things up out of proportion. Our distorted personalities exaggerate and make a mountain out of a molehill. “There are giants, they are going to eat us alive!” We fear we will get eaten alive by life and imagine the worst possible outcome. (Actually, as I often tell my children, life does not always live up to our worst expectations.)
Why does this kind of fear-based “catastrophizing” happen? If the land is flowing with milk and honey, as Caleb and Yehoshua reported, why do we see and fear the worst?
Let’s look at the word for spies, “meraglim.” The root is “rgl” (resh-gimmel-lamed), the same root as the word “hergayl,” habit. The consciousness of the spies, the mergalim, represents the habituated mind that cannot see clearly, that aspect of the mind stuck in old stories of our past, unable to be present to the truth happening in each moment. We cannot see the Promised Land of our soul with clarity, thereby losing touch with G!d and with our spiritual nature; we feel insignificant, like grasshoppers.
In Num. 14:37, we read that the spies who lied about the land died of the plague. This represents how, when we listen to the nagging inner voice of the habituated mind, like the meraglim, we end up spiritually dead, unconscious, unable to hear our divine calling and destiny.
But fear not! This story is designed to be a warning, a wake-up call. The Rabbis want us to remember the generation of spies, so we will not repeat their mistakes. We are not destined to live an unconscious life of the habituated, fear-filled, deceitful mind.
How do we avoid their mistakes? Notice the names of the two spies who told Moses the truth and survived. The first is Caleb – ka-Lev, which means “as the heart”— the one who lived in touch with his own heart: Caleb could hear G!d’s truth and reported truthfully what he saw in the Promised Land. The second is Yehoshua—G!d YHVH saves. Earlier in the Sinai desert, his name was changed by Moses from Hoshea to Yehoshua, adding the Yod of God’s name. He became one who knew God as the one who saves us.
The key to expel the habits of the conditioned mind that cannot see the truth of things: be in the heart (like Caleb), knowing G!d rescues us (like Yehoshua).
Finally, after the whole story of the spies, in the last verses of parasha (Num. 15:38-41) G!d enjoins the people to attach tzizit to the edges of their garments, to remember to perform the mitzvot. Symbolically, what are the tzizit? They speak of the human capacity to remember G!d’s Presence at all times.
So the message of the story of the spies is this: If we remember G!d’s presence and stay in our heart, we avoid the false consciousness of the spies, the habituated mind of the meraglim, and enter into the Promised Land of Higher Consciousness, wherein we live in touch with our spiritual destiny. It is this that Torah reminds us of this week.
Reb Simcha Raphael, Ph.D. received his Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies and was ordained by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi as a Rabbinic Pastor. He is the Founding Director of the DA’AT Institute for Death Awareness, Advocacy and Training, and has taught widely on Jewish views of death and the afterlife across the United States, and in Canada, England and Israel. He has served as an Adjunct Professor in the Religion Departments of LaSalle University and Temple University, in the Aleph Ordination program, and in the Art of Dying Institute of the One Spirit Seminary. A member of the Rabbis Without Borders Network, he is the author of seven books on death and Judaism, including the ground-breaking classic Jewish Views of the Afterlife and the recently-published Musings with the Angel of Death: Poems of Love, Life and Longing. His website is www.daatinstitute.net.