Rabbi Ari Khan has written an excellent article on last week’s Torah Portion (Shelach – Numbers 13-15)

To start with he argues that:

“Of all the sins which the children of Israel perpetrated in the desert, the one with the most far-reaching consequences was the sin of the spies. While other offences generated a local’ concentrated response, in the case of the spies, while the perpetrators perished, the entire nation suffered for the next 40 years by being forced to languish in the desert.”

So why was this sin so great? What did they do that was so wrong. Very simply, they failed to appreciate what the purpose of their mission was and hence they totally failed to trust God and rely on Him and His deliverance. This sounds harsh. Surely they did not break any commandments or did they?

The core commandment, the most foundational instruction in the whole Bible is the Shema, and that is a recognition of the God of Israel and a call to love Him with your all. All your heart, strength, mind and soul. To do so is to trust Him. To fail to trust Him; to see this mission in critical terms; to only see the challenges and barriers; the giant enemies that occupied the Land, was to reject this commandment and trust. [But from our comfortable existence today, it still seems very harsh! Sometimes the lessons were need to teach our children require consequences that can seem very harsh as well.]

Moses did not send these great leaders of the 12 Tribes as spies, but rather he sent them on a spiritual journey to ascend the mountain of their homeland, to ascend to Hebron where the great Patriarch Abraham had purchased the first portion of the Land. The Land of Promise. These great leaders were supposed to fall in love with the Land.

According to Rabbi Khan, the Talmud contains a most sensible ruling that a man should not marry without first meeting his wife to be (arranged marriages were very common). So likewise here, Rabbi Khan argues that Moses is offering these representatives of the 12 Tribes an opportunity to tour the Land, to see it, to embrace it and to share a love of the Land with the people of their tribes. If they had done this, they could have entered the Land without conflict as the Almighty would have opened all the doors for them and removed their enemies before them.

The Almighty was with them, but they rejected His providence and instead only saw impossible odds. Once the people recognized their error they even reacted with bravado and said they would enter the Land and fight off their enemies, but Moses informed them that the Almighty would not now be with them and so they would fail.

This is a most salutary lesson for all of us.

We are to seek the direction of God; we are to trust Him even when the odds seem insurmountable. He will protect us and deliver us (often at the 11^th Hour), if we heed the Shema and place our full trust in Him. But if instead we act on our own initiative, yet against His will we are most likely to fail.

Clearly, we need to learn to hear His Will, to heed His Instructions, His Torah. And to trust. True faith is trusting Him.

I highly recommend this great article by Rabbi Khan for the insight it provides – https://aish.com/48944726/