Dear Friends,
The land of Canaan is bounteous, it is full of good fruits!
The Parasha states that in the 40th year, in the 11th month, on the first day of the month Moses spoke the following to the
Israelites: “You asked for me to send out spies to investigate the land and so I did, taking twelve men, one from each tribe. They went as far as the Valley of Grapes and brought back good fruits, saying ‘Good is the land that G-d, our G-d, is giving us.’
Nearly 40 years earlier, Moses recalls, an earlier generation of Israelites had listened with horror to the spies, who reported the presence of “a people stronger and taller than we, large cities with walls sky-high, even Anakites.” Deuteronomy 1:28 These Anakites were so large, the spies had warned, that “we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.” Numbers 13:33 The land of Canaan was bounteous, the spies confirmed, but this bounty was itself threatening—a single cluster of grapes required two people to carry it. How could the Israelites possibly hope to defeat those who could casually grasp those grapes between their fingers?
This view was not accepted by the minority. What was difference?
Moses and Joshua might have intuitively understood that to succeed as a “giant killer” one must be willing to go against the grain and to voice unpopular truths.
This requires courage and the willingness to spend time a respectable time in the dessert, an odd 40 years for that matter.
Moses and Joshua understood that ''we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves....and so we must have looked to them.''
The inward perspective is translated to the outer.
The spies looked at themselves like grasshoppers, so there was no chance.
It took the willingness of the minority to go against popular believes and voice unpopular truths to take the leap of faith and arrive in a land of honey, milk and abundance.
Shabbath Shalom
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