Seeing Good
This is the parsha of the spies; the parsha of seeking out, scouting and spying. Essentially, this is the parsha of the Hebrew verb “tur.” Of the 15 times that this verb appears in chumash, 13 of them are in this parsha. But not the first one. The first time the verb tur is mentioned in the Torah is in last week’s parsha, Beha’alotecha.
As we mentioned last week, according to Rebbe what we call Bamidbar is really three separate books. The first book, from the beginning of Bamidbar to perek 10, is the story of the how Bnei Yisrael began their journey after receiving the Torah. This journey was supposed to move us quickly into Eretz Yisrael, but never came to its intended conclusion. Instead, starting in perek 11, we have the third book of Bamidbar, which details the journey that actually occurred, which involved wandering in the desert for 40 years, and ultimately led to all the exiles we have endured. In the middle of these two journeys is the short book, only two verses, that details the journey of the aron kodesh.
It is at the very end of the first book of Bamidbar that we find the first use of the verb “tur”. Pasuk 10:33 describes how the Aron containing the broken luchot would travel ahead of the nation “latur lahem menucha, to prepare for them a place to rest.” Tur here is a process of searching out, of seeking and seeing, but only for the purpose of spiritual preparation. This is what tur is supposed to be.
When Hashem commands, in the second pasuk of this week’s parsha, “Send forth men, and they will ‘tur’ the land of Canaan,” these men are being sent on a spiritual mission. Their forty days of spying out the land are parallel to the forty days Moshe spent on Har Sinai. Moshe brought the Torah from shamayim down to earth. The job of the meraglim was to bring the Torah from the desert, where we lived in a world of miracles, into the land of Israel, where we could live with the Torah in a system of nature.
How were they meant to do this? Rabbi Moshe Shapiro (Reflections and Introspection on the Torah, Volume 4, p. 460) explains that their mission was actually the mission of each and every one of us, from the moment of creation. We were all formed in the image of Hashem, as creators. Specifically, we create as Hashem created on most of the days of creation, but not the way He created on the first day of creation. On the first day of creation, Hashem brought all of existence into being from a state of nothingness. This is, of course, entirely beyond our comprehension. We can’t do this at all.
However, for the next five days of creation Hashem formed the matter he had created on the first day into a usable world. The Torah tells us the process he used was a process of saying and then seeing. For example, “G-d said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. G-d saw that the light was good (Bereisheit 1:3-4).” Hashem used speech to form the world, and then that reality became perceivable as “good.” What does it mean that it was good? It means that after Hashem spoke, the world became a place that could be perceived to be fulfilling its purpose. The world was a place that was visibly moving toward its intended destiny.
On the sixth day, Hashem created mankind, and gave us the power of speech. This is the power to form the raw material of our world. We each create the world around us with our speech. Rav Shapiro tells us that our creation begins with speech and ends in sight. We speak the reality we perceive, and that becomes the visible form of our world.
The job of the meraglim was to use their speech to prepare Eretz Yisrael for us to live in. They were meant to perceive the world through the lens of what Hashem had promised us in the Torah. Then, the meraglim were supposed to use their words to form that perception into reality, so that we could all look at Eretz Yisrael and see that it was good, meaning that is was the place that we were destined to be.
What the meraglim actually did was the exact opposite. They lost the vision of Eretz Yisrael as our destiny, and they used their words to create a perception of Eretz Yisrael as a place that where we did not belong. The result was that we, as a nation, cried. Our vision became blurry and confused with our tears. And we lost our connection to Eretz Yisrael.
The Maharal (Netzach Yisrael Chapter 8) tells us that we were supposed to acquire Eretz Yisrael eternally and unshakably. But when we refused to perceive Eretz Yisrael as the place we were meant to be, that changed the form of the world, the reality of the world. With our words, we created the possiblity for Am Yisrael to live outside of Eretz Yisrael. This is why the weeping of that first Tisha B’av echoes through the generations. It was what made all future exiles possible. As Rav Shapiro says, “Our entrance into the land is no longer imperative. We can be there or not, and consequently, even when we are there, we are not there absolutely; we are not entirely there. p.467.”
This was a national failure, but it was not the end of the story. As we said, this is the parsha of the word tur. There is one more use of the word tur in the parsha after the story of the meraglim. The parsha ends with the mitzvah of tzitzit, where we are told, “lo taturu acharei levavchem v’acharei eineichem, do not explore after your heart and after your eyes (Bamidbar 15:39).” Rav Shapiro tells us that this mitzvah is a response to the disaster of the meraglim. In this constant reminder not to explore incorrectly. And it gives us a path forward.
The essence of the mitzvah of tzitzit is the techeilet, the blue string that is interwoven into the white strings. The Gemara tells us (Chullin 89a) that the blue string is meant to remind us of the sea, the sea is meant to remind us of the sky and the sky is meant to remind us of the Throne of Glory. Rav Moshe explains that these are progressive levels of understanding of the limitlessness of Hashem. The blue string is woven into the white strings, just as the expansive power of Hashem is meant to be woven into the fabric of our lives.
When we stand by the sea, and breathe in the salty air, and watch the waves rolling off into eternity, we can feel the expansiveness of Hashem’s creation, even though we know that ultimately that the sea is limited. We can carry that feeling with us as we look up the sky and experience its expansiveness that appears to have no limits at all. We can take that feeling and remind ourselves that Hashem has no limits at all.
Grounded in this understanding, we can weave the blue string into the white background of our life. If there are no limits, there is no event too small or too big for Hashem. He is with us in the tiny moments of frustration, when we are searching for a parking spot, and He is with us in national moments of crisis as well. The parsha begins with national failure, but it ends with personal redemption, which we create moment by moment in our lives. We expand and redeem our lives when we open ourselves up to experiencing the awesome, infinite power of Hashem. When we speak that truth we can see that reality, and we can experience the good that is our world.