(Numbers 13:30)
Sivan 22, 5777/June 16, 2017
"Send out for yourself men who will scout the Land of Canaan... " (Numbers 13:1) So begins perhaps the grimmest and most infamous episode in the lives of the generation of the desert, an episode so profoundly and existentially ill-fated that its ramifications and reverberations continue to impact the nation of Israel to this day. What went wrong?
A spy mission went awry and of the twelve righteous men chosen by Moshe to lead a reconnaissance mission into the land of Canaan and report back to the people, ten returned with an evil report, stating that the inhabitants of the land were too strong and their cities too well fortified, and that any attempt to dislodge them would surely end in disaster. Only Calev ben Yefuneh and Yehoshua bin Nun, of the twelve spies, categorically disagreed and emphatically stated otherwise: "We can surely go up and take possession of it, for we can indeed overcome it." (ibid 13:30) But their minority opinion was to no avail. The people's spirits were crushed by the report of the spies and they wept, cursing the day they left Egypt, even trying to rally their fellow Israelites to return en masse to the land that had enslaved them for more than two hundred years.
It is easy to become
impatient and upset with the things and people that get in the way of what we
are trying to accomplish. We should learn a lesson from Balaam.
