With their tongues in their belly buttons. That’s right. That’s how the princes from ten of the twelve tribes died. Moshe sent them into Eretz Yisrael to scout out the land and come back with a report for the people before entering to conquer it. When they returned, their report wasn’t very encouraging. They told stories of powerful giants with huge walled cities, of a land that devours its inhabitants and teems with arch enemies. Not very good for morale! As it turns out, their report wasn’t 100% true. True, the inhabitants there were many and large, but they weren’t so powerful that G-d couldn’t turn the tide in our favor. It was on this perversion of the truth and the ensuing panic amongst us that the account of their death is based. They spoke “loshon hara” (literally: evil speech) against the land. In death, their tongues were returned to the speaker’s life source, while in life, they flagrantly abandoned the connection they could have had to the life source of Israel.
The Lubavitcher Rebbe brings an insightful question on these princes. How was it that after being freed from Egypt and sustained in the desert, the entire people could be swayed by these ten men (Joshua and Caleb didn’t report such things) to abandon their faith in G-d? Did they fear a military defeat? It seems that wasn’t the case. What these princes, these spies, were really afraid of was a spiritual defeat. In the desert, with their food raining down from heaven and their water bursting forth from a traveling well, they had no worries of being physically supported. They were free to build on their connection to G-d, to purpose, to love. In Israel, it would be a different story, There they would have to farm to eat. They would have to dig to make wells. With such a lifestyle, it would indeed be easy to get “devoured” by the land, to get caught up in the daily 9 to 5 grind, to forget that things are not necessarily as they appear. They figured that G-d would check out, and all the miracles would end.
Funny, comments the Rebbe, that Caleb doesn’t reassure the people that the miracles will continue. Instead he gives a cryptic reply, “Up, up we will go and conquer it!” What, is he Superman? What’s with the, “up,up?” Seeing G-d through miracles is only the first level of understanding. The second level, the higher level, is seeing G-d in the natural world. What is truly miraculous is that the infinite can conceal itself in a finite world.
When we’re faced with a new challenge, often our immediate response is to pull up the covers and pretend it isn’t there. We’ve become experts in rhetoric, able to talk ourselves out of anything by convincing ourselves that it’s not worth it, that it was a dumb idea, that it’s impossible. When we do that, we do the same thing our holy brothers did in the desert, we create our own limits. Our world is only as “natural” as we deem it. The consistency with which our hearts beat and our lungs breath is no less amazing than oceans splitting in two. As the only speaking species on this planet, we have an incredible power to effect the world with our speech, to ascribe limits, or to open up new worlds of possibility. That’s what it means to speak “loshon hara” about the land. When we deny the infinite, all that’s left is the constricting world of the finite.
It’s been a few years (at least!) for most of us, since we were last connected to the life source of our mother’s womb. May our journeys in life, though, draw us ever closer to the life source that is Israel.