At the beginning of parshas Vaeschanan Moses begs God to allow him to cross the Jordan to enter the Promised Land. God refuses but seems to offer a strange 'consolation prize'. Actually, as more of a command than a granting of permission, God tells Moses to go up to the peak and cast his eyes upon the length and breadth of the Land, "look with your eyes, for you will not cross this Jordan".
I wonder whether it wasn't cruel to make Moses look at the Land upon which his foot would never tread...so can God really have intended this as a comforting gesture? And why was it commanded if so? On the other hand, it seems quite clear that God was indeed giving Moses this concession in response to his request, so we need to understand what Moses was wishing and praying for...
Let's take a little digression and then we'll come back to this question.
This Shabbat, the one immediately following Tisha B'Av, is known as Shabbat Nachamu, and always coincides with the parsha reading of Va'eschanan. We read the words of the prophet Isaiah that bring a message of comfort on the heels of the three week period of mourning for the destruction of the Holy Temple and the end of Jewish sovereignty in ancient Israel.
Chaz'al connected the destruction of the Beis Hamikdash to the Sin of the Spies, pointing out that God's decree on that generation that they should wander the desert for forty years was meted out on the 9th of Av, the very same day on which the Temple was destroyed, according to the Mishna in Maseches Ta'anis.
The rabbis emphasise this in order to show that somehow the sin of the spies set in motion a process that would climax many hundreds of years later with the destruction of the Temple and the ensuing exile. Somehow perhaps the root cause of that sin would play out its tragic consequences generations later. We know that the major blame for the second exile in which we still find ourselves, was the prevalence of sinas chinam, baseless hatred between people and I want to show you that embedded deep within the sin of the spies is the same character flaw that gives rise to hatred between friends and neighbours. This societal ill is what we need to fix in order to once again invite God's revealed presence to dwell among us as the ultimate comfort for the mourners of Jerusalem.
Parshas Shelach Lecha begins with the tragic story of twelve spies who go to scout out (latur) Eretz Canaan for the Jewish people in the desert. They came back with the most terrifying reports that dissolved the will of the people and sunk them into dark despair.
The sedra likewise ends with the prohibition of scouting out (ve-lo taturu) with one's eyes and heart in search of sin and corruption. As the spies of the body, the eyes and heart go out looking for some action (asher atem zonim acharehem), each according to it's nature. The eyes seek physical pleasures, in particular those derived from intimacy, while the heart steers the intellect towards a theology that will allow the indulgence that the body longs for.
It is no coincidence that the Hebrew word for prostitute is zonah, from the same root as zonim. In rabbinic colloquy, znus is the word for promiscuity. Whereas intimacy between man and wife is holy of holies, unchecked promiscuity is vanity of vanities, empty and corrupt.
There's a strange law in the Torah (Deut 23:19) that the prostitute's fee and the payment for a dog may not be used for sacrificial purposes. God doesn't want the money earned by prostitution, neither does He want money given in exchange for a dog. We could readily understand the former, but why the latter? What's so bad about buying a dog? How is it similar to buying personal services?
Well they do have something in common - both can be a solution for a person who wants the pleasures of a relationship without putting in the effort to build a real, lasting relationship, and I think this is the key to understanding the law, and the sin of the spies.
Sacrifices to God are prescribed precisely for the purpose of bringing man close to God, and they represent the idea that a person has to quite literally sacrifice himself in order to do this. The prostitute's fee is the antithesis of the kind of closeness that we seek. Someone once quipped that you don't pay the prostitute to be with you...you pay her to leave you when you're done. That sums it up. At root, we engage in these relationships for ourselves - it is all about me, my needs, my pleasures.
When we indulge in pleasures with no commitment, we take ourselves as far away from holiness as possible. When we seek the joys of love and intimacy without the hard work, we lower ourselves and cease to be worthy of real relationships.
So perhaps this was what brought about the tragedy of the spies. As representatives of the Jewish people, they went to scout out the potential of Canaan as a land of free opportunity. Was it possible to enjoy the goodness of life without effort? They wanted to continue living as they had become used to in Egypt, where they received as much as they needed for free. Instead they found a land flowing with milk and honey but that required sweat, blood and tears to realise it's potential. That wasn't what they bargained for and so they came back with their damning report.
Yehoshua and Caleb, of the twelve, saw things differently: tova ha'aretz me'od me'od. Why not just tov? Because they wanted to echo God's own celebration of the completed Creation on the sixth day - vehineh tov me'od (Genesis 1:31). The Ramban explains that this means that God saw it as mostly good, and that this was the greatest cause for celebration! The fact that there remained an element of Evil makes it possible to fully reveal and appreciate Good.
In a deeper sense, chaza'l say that me'od is the yetzer hara - the evil inclination, for the only way for man to truly reach God is to engage in struggle with his inclination.
So the sin of the spies was at root a sin of selfishness - the despair that the spies expressed and the people were so quick to believe in was the pain of facing up to the fact that life in Canaan would require them to totally reimagine their way of life. They were no longer going to be on the receiving end of a one-sided relationship, for they would now have to come to terms with life in which you reap that which you sow, a life in which the physical and emotional benefits of a relationship could only be enjoyed by one who is prepared to make the investment into the "other" - whether that is God, another person or the Land itself.
Sinas chinam, hatred among people, is the direct consequence of pursuing relationships for selfish reasons, for what "I" can get out of the "other". It is what happens when we see other people as mere opportunities for personal gain, when we are indifferent or even hostile towards their own wants and needs. It causes us to look upon others with envy, to covet their belongings and cast an ayin hara on them.
The Tikun - corrective therapy, if you like - for sinas chinam is to do the very opposite of ayin hara. We all think about this concept as something we want to avoid - some unseen malevolent power that we do all sorts of things to deflect. On the other hand we tend to see eyes as simply an organ that absorbs and assimilates stimuli, but there is a sense in which the eyes are also a proactive organ, transmitting something from within us almost like the mouth does when it forms words.
The evil eye is a symptom of hostility, and its opposite, ayin hatov is a symptom of brotherhood and fellowship. To undo the sin that caused the exile, we need to totally reimagine the way we relate to the "other". We need to look upon our relationships and see, not what we can gain from them, but what we can give. We need to look at the "other" with a generous eye, using our powers of observation to find out what he or she needs that I can give, and using our eyes themselves to express love and friendship by wishing only good to all those "others".
Going back to our original question then, Moses begged God to see the Land to which he wouldn't enter in order to "fix" the sin of the spies to which he was an unwilling but yet culpable party. He begged to be able to "cast his eye" upon the Land in order to bestow the blessing of ayin tov - to summon all his love for the Land and transmit that to the best of his ability. God responded in the affirmative - "indeed you shall look upon the land, but in order to make it the most perfect tikun you shall not set foot upon it's soil, but look from afar. That way, you shall bless the land with utter selflessness, since you will have no benefit from the blessing." Moses would enact the most complete correction by reversing the selfish act of the spies with the the selfless blessing of Eretz Yisrael.
Let me conclude with a strange halakhah that is mentioned in gemara Brachos (p.7). There is a mitzvah encumbent on wedding guests to actually say something to the bride and groom in order to bring them joy and happiness. The gemara says that one who does this is credited as if he rebuilt one of Jerusalem's ruins. We often think about how the wedding of a Jewish couple is a rebuilding of our people but we need to understand why the wedding guest is credited with such a reward for his role in this.
I think this gemara goes to show exactly the point I'm making. There is hardly a greater thing that we can do as individuals than rejoicing in another persons joy. To do that sincerely, we need to look at that person with the purest ayin tov - looking into his heart and getting to know his soul, his loves and hates, his passions and fears, what he yearns for and what he tries to avoid like the plague. Only by looking totally beyond our selves can we come to truly appreciate another person for who he is and rejoice in his joy as if it is your own. For one who can do this truly merits to rebuild the ruins of Jerusalem that were destroyed by selfishness, and he is the greatest consolation for the mourners of Jerusalem. Shabbat Shalom.
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