cellio | a torah bit (Sh'lach L'cha)

I had a thought about Parsha Sh'lach L'cha that I want to record. (Yeah, yeah, I know -- that parsha is half a year away. But our torah-study group doesn't follow the parsha of the week; it started at the beginning and covers a few verses a week. We're currently in Sh'lach L'cha.)

What's Sh'lach L'cha? This is the part of Numbers where the Israelites, a year or so out of Egypt, are getting ready to enter the promised land. So they send twelve spies (one from each tribe) to spy out the land first, but ten of the spies come back with a bad report ("we're doomed!", roughly) and convince the people that they can't take this land. No one wants to listen to the other two (who are more positive) or to Moshe and Aharon. As a consequence of this lack of faith, God decrees that this generation (except for those two spies) will die in the wilderness and it will be their children who will go into the land.

(Aside: the text says only Calev and Yoshua, but we haven't yet had the incident where Moshe is denied entry. Of course God knows this already at the time of the spies, but Moshe doesn't. Are Moshe and Aharon implicitly included among those who are told they'll get to go in at the time of the spies? But Aharon dies beforehand too, and he didn't do anything to obviously bring that on. Hmm.)

But that's not what I wanted to talk about here. The group has spent a lot of time talking about how the generation that had been slaves wasn't ready for this transition. (So nu, why should we be any different than the rabbis? :-) ) You've got a people who -- even though they witnessed miracles in the exodus, at Sinai, and in the desert -- have only known slavery until recently. They may be physically free now, but they still think like slaves. Slaves are used to being beaten down, so when they hear that the occupants of the land are strong, they don't say "God is on our side; let's go" but rather "we can't do that!". The people aren't ready to follow God into battle.

There's a detail I just noticed on this reading. When the people rebel and refuse to go into the land, they don't say "we'll find another land". Rather they say "better that we go back to Egypt" (to be slaves again). So not only do they not believe in God's ability to deliver them into this land (which, given the slave mentality, isn't too surprising to me), but they also don't even believe in the promise of a land. They are ready to chuck the whole enterprise because the first land they considered requires effort. It's not a rejection of the land; it's a rejection of living anywhere as a free people.

Random note: I had an aside to my aside, but I couldn't make it flow smoothly. If you've ever wondered why the talmud rambles the way it does, it's because of stuff like that. :-)

(Apropos of nothing, the first time I chanted torah it was from Sh'lach L'cha.)