With this week’s parsha (Torah portion), we have officially moved into the realm of problems for our intrepid ex-slaves.  The parsha is called Shlach which is the command form of the verb, to send.  The parsha starts off with haShem (god) telling Moshe (Moses) to send for himself, men to explore the land of Canaan that haShem is giving to the children of Yisrael.  We read the details of who the spies are, and of their trek, and of their report when they return.  We also learn of the people’s reaction to the report, which bordered on mutiny.

HaShem then shows up in a cloud and is ready to wipe them out and start again.  Fortunately, Moshe convinces god not to, though god does wonder how the people, after seeing all the miracles, can still not trust him.  God then declares that this generation will not enter the land, but the next generation will.

When Moshe tells the people, they are less than happy, and get up early the next day, ready to go into the land.  Moshe tells them to forget it, for god is not with them.  They try anyway, and get crushed by the Amalekites, and the Canaanites that live there.

God now tells Moshe to tell the folk more rules concerning sacrifices after they enter the land.  He also tells them about taking challah, a portion of the bread dough, as a raised offering to god, and about the sacrifices for when the whole nation accidentally does something wrong, and when an individual mistakenly does something wrong.

The parsha ends with a story of a man found collecting wood on shabbat, followed by god telling Moshe to tell us to put tzitzit (fringes) on the corners of our garments and why we should do it.

What is going on here?  I don’t know about all of you, but the whole first part of the parsha reminded me of certain episodes in my life.

Did any of you ever need to do something during a window of opportunity, and not act until after the window closed?  That seems to be the scenario here, so perhaps if we can learn something from what is going on here, we can apply it to our lives and stop missing opportunities.

Let’s take a closer look at what is happening here.  God takes the people out of Egypt, talks to them and they are now on the brink of going into the land god promised them.  Suddenly, we have spies that go out and come back with a report that has everybody afraid to go into the land.  On first glance it seems like the people have lost faith in haShem; they don’t trust that haShem will be able to bring them into the land.

But I think there is something deeper going on.  I mean, how could they lack trust in haShem after haShem took them out of Egypt?  I think, they really were afraid of commitment; they lacked faith in themselves.

When they will enter the land, their whole world changes.  There are many more details and rules and regulations to live by.  The Shabbat year, and the Yoval year (the 50th year), and knowing when they can eat the fruit of a tree, just to name a few things.  No longer could they collect the mon (manna); they would have to plant and harvest.  Could they do all this, year in and year out?  I wonder if they were afraid they couldn’t do it.

And this leads to something deeper:  a lack of trust in haShem.  They did not believe that god knew them well enough to know what they could and couldn’t handle, or loved them enough to not give them more than they could deal with.  This is what led to the spies, and their report and the response to the report.

Now god didn’t deal with them harshly.  She basically said that if you are not willing to trust in me, or yourselves, to grow and fulfill your potential, then you will forever be stuck in a wilderness of your own making, in a wasteland of unfulfillment, until you die.

And of course their trying to go into the land after the fact is a way of pretending that they are not responsible, that it is all god’s doing.

To summarize, last week’s parsha is telling us what frequently happens when we are faced with following our path until the unknown place of fulfilled promise.  We get scared and lose our faith in god and ourselves, and wind up never leaving the doorstep of the now closed door, for the rest of our lives.  Is there any way we can avoid this horrible fate?

The answer, quite simply, is yes.  All it requires is a little trust in our creator.

I am sure that our creator, having created us, must know us better then we know ourselves.  And I am sure that he created us out of love.

If we can believe these two sentences to be truth, then we can be confident that our creator knows what we can handle, and what is too much for us, and that she would never give us more that what we can deal with.

If we believe this, then we can let go of the worry that the responsibilities on the other side of the open door of opportunity is more that we can handle.  Hence, we can now be confident that we can handle whatever responsibilities come with the commitment of walking through that door, and we know that we can go forward with the god that brought us this far.

I bless all of us, that as we enter our personal promised land, the place where we can fulfill our potential, and grow to be who and what we are meant to be, that we can acknowledge our fears of the unknown, and also find our faith in the divine creator, and ourselves, so we can move forward, confidently into our sacred place.

If you care to read what I wrote about this parsha last year, click here.

About the Author

Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.