The Torah warns us of a grave danger. Last week, we talked about the process of assembling and dissembling the traveling Tabernacle. The Levites had the task of carrying the pieces from one site to another, and they would never know how long thy would be traveling, or how long they would be camped. So it was important for them to make the process in between assemblies meaningful, and to make it a time of deepening, so that the next assembly would be a deeper assembly.
This week, we see that it is not just good advice on how to live a happier life - but it is a grave warning. If we look ahead too far, if we try to visualize something we are not ready to see, we may not like what we see, we may lose hope and will altogether.
In this week's Torah portion, Israel the people sends spies into Israel the land, to check out what exactly it is that they are working toward. The Gemara tells us God wasn't into it, and neither was Moses, but they let the people go ahead anyway. We need to understand the desire of people to send spies, we need to understand what goes wrong, and we need to understand why God lets us go ahead anyway.
When we peek into what we think is the future, we will see, like they did, a disorienting and surreal world. Were you to take a glance at yourself in fifteen years, were you to see what you would then will be capable of, you would be frozen with fear - I can't maintain this... I could never do that. I don't WANT to do that.
When we peek ahead and ponder what it will be like to come back together like the Tabernacle would come back together, we do not have the tools to understand what it means, or how to maintain it, or what it has to do with us. When we look at the future through the eyes of the present, we see a strange and hostile world.
The Torah tells us that your eyes and your intellect are not the right tools to use when looking toward the future. According to what you see and understand, you are absolutely right - it is a hostile place, and you cannot handle it. But, if we look with the eyes of emunah (faith), it may not seem so hostile.
The Kotzker Rebbe says it best; he writes that the spies came back and said, "We saw the land swallowing its inhabitants - there were funerals everywhere! And there were giants living there!" But they were telling the truth, weren't they? That is, in fact, what they saw! Well, says the Kotzker, the truth doesn't mean reporting the facts. The truth means checking out the facts and then processing them through what you know God told you. God told Israel, "You will inherit the land." That's all you need to know. That should be the main factor in our consideration of events at present and in the future. OK, it seems lousy, and I feel lost, but God told me He is with me and in me all the time. So with that in mind, how do I deal with the situation at hand?
Cynics think they are just telling it like it is. Could your eyes be so pure that they see with true clarity what really is? Your eyes aren't tainted at all by your experience?
Rebbe Natan says the spies thought they were above believing. They thought they could know and understand everything, and that belief is immature. Belief is something simple people do when they can't understand. Belief is a combination of stupid and gullible. That is one way to look at it; another is that belief is what we do after we have used our powers of intellect to the limit, have tried to know as much as possible - and then after that, to believe, to believe there is something more. But, like Rebbe Nachman says, belief is based on truth, on being real and honest with yourself. And then you believe. But never that we should pretend to believe something that we know is not true - like there were no dinosaurs, but the flood made the bones look millions of years old just to fool us. Torah demands of us to use our minds to the highest level - to know the sciences, the world. For those who can handle it, to know art and culture and literature and philosophy and then, guided by the ideals of the Torah, ideas of God's Presence in all aspects of life, God's inherent goodness and desire to do good, to figure out how all these factors work together and paint a complete picture. Faith without thinking is a bit stupid and gullible. Thinking without faith is limited, boring, a mere reflection of one's own limitations.
Faith doesn't mean only faith in God; faith means faith in other people too, faith in process, faith in one's self. Faith is believing that there is something legitimate and worthwhile going on in the universe outside one's self. Faith allows us to let go of running the whole show all by ourselves, not controlling the conversation all the time, not needing to do everything one's self.
The spies did not want to have faith. When they saw the land of Israel with its giants blocking the sun, with its huge grapes, they didn't want to believe that there would be some internal process that would allow them to be ready when the right time came. They did not want to believe in their own greatness, in their own strength.
In my experience, belief is also belief in the unconscious, that the mind is working behind the level of cognitive thought, that when I sleep and wake up I will be better equipped to deal with a problem I could not solve before I lay down. I believe that I am growing and will grow.
So why did God let them do it? Why did he punish them with a 40 year process in the desert until they would all die? Is this something we needed to learn for ourselves once and for all time?
I notice that God cannot force us to have faith, no matter how many seas He splits, how many times He takes us out of exile. There is something which needs to happen in us. He needs us to decide for ourselves to believe. Until we do that, we might as well walk around in the desert for 40 years.
The root word faith (emunah) is the same root as le'hit'amen - to practice. Belief is not a state of mind - it is an action, a skill. We must train ourselves to listen to that wise voice which tells us, because it knows more than us, what we need. One time, and then another. And again. It gets easier, and it gets harder. As we realize that it works out well, we are less reluctant to take those steps. But the challenges get harder, the intellectual information to the contrary gets more convincing, the desire to walk only on our own two feet gets stronger.
This weekend, and always, let us take a risk, don't cash in the chips so soon, don't decide so quick what is, or what you are, ask a hard question.
Rav Gavriel Goldfeder
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Rav Gavriel Goldfeder is one of the first semicha recipients of the yeshiva. A graduate of Drew University in Religious Studies, he came to Bat Ayin after stints in other yeshivot and found a spiritual and intellectual home. Here he met his wife, Ketriellah, who was a student in our short-lived Women's Yeshiva. Upon graduation, Gavriel took the position of rabbi of the Aish Kodesh Congregation in Boulder, Colorado and together with Ketriellah and their growing family, they are busy creating (in Gavriel's words), "a community infused with Torah values, passion for learning and prayer, consideration of one another, and action, as well as deep celebration of the joys of life." |