Courage And Faith: The Strongest Armor
D’var Torah for Parashat Sh’lach L’cha
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
June 4, 2021
As almost anyone who knows me well enough knows, I hate to make plans.
Though I am not exceptionally superstitious, I firmly hold on to the belief expressed in the famous Yiddish saying, Mann tracht un Gott lacht, roughly translated as “Man plans and God laughs.”
Too many times have I made travel plans, bought concert tickets, even reserved expensive airline tickets—only to have to cancel my plans at the last moment. So I still plan, but I don’t confirm until the last possible moment, when, with great trepidation and much wishful thinking, I finally push the “enter” button.
Truth be told, I envy people who seem to have no problem with planning ahead. If it works, good; if it doesn’t, they look for the next available opportunity with nary more than momentary disappointment.
As the song goes, “The future’s not ours to see, que sera sera.”
And yet—we can’t help it. We want to—we need to—look towards, make plans, push ahead.
In this week’s Torah portion, “Sh’lach” (Numbers 13:1—15:41) God tempts Moses to look into the future—to send spies into the Promised Land and bring back a report to the people. And Moses takes the bait.
Comfortable at this point with doing everything God tells him, Moses does just as God instructs and sends twelve spies, one from each of the Tribes of Israel.
Forty days later, the spies return.
But along with examples of the rich produce of the Land, they also bring with them frightening tales of giants, huge armies, and well-fortified cities. Ten of the spies conclude that the Land cannot possibly be overtaken by the Israelites. Only Joshua and Caleb—representing the tribes of Efraim and Judah respectively—add words of encouragement: “Do not fear the people of that land for they are as our bread; their protection is removed from them, and Adonai is with us. Do not fear them” ( Numbers 14:9). Unfortunately, by now, having heard and come to believe the frightening vision of the first ten spies, the Israelites are ready to stone Joshua and Caleb, as well as Moses and Aaron. Only God’s interference saves them, while God condemns the faithless and rebellious people to be wanderers in the wilderness for forty years—one year for each day that the spies were touring the Land.
According to the Rabbis, that fateful day was the Ninth of Av, the day ordained for all the major disaster to befall the Jewish people. History, it seems, is written by the victors, but God determines the date.
So why fight it? Why look forward at all? Why not just live one day at a time?
Because we are human beings, endowed with imagination, with fears as well as hopes, with dreams as well as nightmares.
Yet what this Torah portion teaches us is that as we look ahead, we have to do so judiciously, combining equal measures of practicality and optimism.
Today, as we listen to the talking heads on the various media, the future is indeed painted in grim hues. Between climate change, costly cyberattacks, and the possibility of deadly pandemics erupting in hot spots all around the globe, we are totally doomed.
Yet while—yes—there ARE giants in the sky, and while the earth does indeed hurtle into darkness at unimaginable speed, we don’t have to give in to defeatism. Our vision as human beings goes in two directions: past and future. We can take lessons from the past and apply them to everything we do going forward. That of course does not eliminate the random events that punctuate our lives, both happy and sad moments. But to give up hope a priori, from the get-go, is no solution.
What Joshua and Caleb remind us is that faith is valuable armor.
Jewish existence would be nothing more than a short-lived dream if it weren’t for the practical, hands-on philosophy that the Rabbis devised. The Maccabees taught us that if our people is to survive our enemies, it is OK to fight even on Shabbat. Or even on Yom Kippur.
Yet what we also learned along our long path is that Judaism without meaning is nothing more than hevel—so much hot air, steam or vapor that disappears in the morning sun. (Ironically, Hevel is the Hebrew name of one of Adam and Eve’s first two children, the one who was murdered by his brother, Cain. Perhaps the Torah’s first lesson about survival is contained in this famous tale of fratricide).
During the Shoah, the Holocaust, Judaism underwent the cruelest example of auto-da-fe, a test of our people’s faith. And out of the horror, what we also witness are some of the most uplifting stories: of Jews saving bits of wax to make Shabbat or Hanukkah candles, or finding ways to smuggle flour into the ghetto, for making Passover matzahs; or insisting on saying Kaddish—the mourner’s prayer—on behalf of a murdered parent, child or brother.
Hope and faith are more than the invention of feverish minds. They actually give us untold strength.
Maybe that’s why God ordained those forty years of wandering in the Sinai Wilderness. It was exactly the amount of time we needed to learn the lessons vital for our ongoing existence: Hands-on practicality along with glorious visions of justice and equality; dreams of sun-lit green pastures along with the all-too-real darkness that surrounds us while walking in the valley of the shadow of death.
Our days on the earth may be numbered, and none of us knows exactly when we might be called to return to the Maker of all. But even as we look forward, along with all the anxieties and uncertainties, we can fortify ourselves with our traditions. We strengthen ourselves not only physically but also with our faith, with that vision of a Promised Land first offered us so many thousands of years ago.
May we continue our march forward, undaunted by the challenges ahead, fortified with the knowledge that God is at our side—as long as we keep God there, close to us, in our hearts, minds, and in the deeds of our hands.
© 2021 by Boaz D. Heilman
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