Looking Ahead at the Next Step in Our Lives

Rabbi Melanie Aron

May 31, 2002

There is a natural tendency to want to look into the future. Especially when we are on the edge of a major transition, we become curious about what the next stage of our life holds in store.

This week's Torah portion describes the spies who are sent to scout out the Promised Land. The Israelites are less than a year out of Egyptian slavery and are approaching the Promised Land. In our text, Numbers chapter 13, it appears as if God is instigating this mission, but when Moses retells the story in the Book of Deuteronomy, it is the people who first come up with the idea. This second version makes more sense to me. God doesn't need to send spies to learn about the character of the Promised Land, but a wandering people would certainly be curious about their destination.

Most of us are familiar with the story. Ten spies warn of the dangers ahead while Joshua and Caleb encourage the people to move forward. We note that what is important here - as in our own time, is not so much the intelligence information gathered, but the way it is interpreted. The facts themselves are like disconnected dots - the important thing is how we use them to draw our picture.

Whenever we are about to move into a new home or job or community or school - we try and gather information. Later we may discover that the things we expected to be important were not, and the small things that seemed minor as we were collecting information from other people, turned out to be more significant.

In this case the 10 spies are worried about the Anakites and Nephilim - giants who cause Israel no trouble at all in the rest of the Bible - but they do not report on the Philistines, sea people, who are perhaps not yet on the scene, but who will trouble the Israelites for their first 100 years in the Promised Land.

We can see in our text an interesting contrast between humility and lack of self-confidence. Last week we read about how Moses was described as the most humble of men and that was to his credit-- while this week, the people are faulted for their lack of self-confidence! "We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them." Yet we know that the King of Moab was so frightened of the Israelites that he hired Balak to curse them and that the Kings of the other neighboring peoples were similarly afraid.

It is natural to experience fear on the eve of a big change - but we need to make sure that our internal fears don't distort our perception of external realities.