Our parasha tells the fateful story of the mëraggëlim, the “spies” sent by Moshe on the eve of the planned invasion of the Holy Land to scout out the land.
The men selected for this mission were not lightweights. In His instructions, G-d tells Moshe that if he would choose to send them, שלח לך אנשים כו' איש אחד איש אחד למטה אבתיו תשלחו כל נשיא בהם וגו' (“Send for yourself men [anashim]... one man each per the staff of his fathers will you send, every nasi’ [“prince, president”] amongst them....”; XIII, 2) At the time they were selected for the mission, Rashi tells us in a comment on ibid. 16, they were kashér, i.e., “suited to the task.”
Moshe instructed the mëraggëlim to infiltrate the country: וראיתם את הארץ מה הוא ואת העם הישב עלי' החזק הוא הרפה המעט הוא אם רב: ומה הארץ אשר הוא ישב בה הטובה הוא אם רעה ומה הערים אשר הוא ישב בהנה הבמחנים אם במבצרים: ומה הארץ השמנה היא אם רזה היש בה עץ אם אין והתחזקתם ולקחתם מפרי הארץ וגו' (“And you will see what the land is, and the people who dwell upon it, are they strong or weak, are they few or many. And what is the land in which they dwell, is it good or bad; and what are the cities in which they live, are they open or fortified? And what is the land, is it fat or thin, are there trees in it or not; and you will strengthen yourselves and take from the fruit of the land....”; ibid., 18-20).
Certainly part of Moshe’s instructions are reasonable, given that they were on the eve of a military operation, and also given the general perception that they were about to leave the cocoon of open miracles in which they had dwelt since leaving Egypt, with their food descending from the sky, Miriam’s well following them about, the clouds of glory protecting them from the sun’s heat, noxious creatures swept out of their path, etc., back into the derech ha-teva‘, the dispensation which we are pleased to think of as the “laws of nature” (עיי' ביחוד העמק דבר בענין זה). Under such “normal” conditions, the state of the enemy’s fortifications, his numbers and dispositions, the lay of the land, and so on, are things necessary to know. As Ramban points out in his famous comment on parshath Noah, we are not to depend upon open miracles; rather, we have to do the best we can within the “natural” framework, and pray that what we have done, and our merits, will suffice for G-d to look with favor on our enterprise.
But the instruction to note if the land is “good or bad,” “fat or thin,” is harder to understand. After all, G-d had already told them: וארד להצילו מיד מצרים ולהעלתו מן הארץ ההוא אל ארץ טובה ורחבה אל ארץ זבת חלב ודבש וגו' (“And I shall come down to rescue [Israel] from the hand of Egypt and to bring them up to a good and wide land, to a land flowing with milk and honey....”; Exodus III, 8), a promise which had been repeated again and again (ibid., 17; XIII, 5; XXIII, 3; Leviticus XX, 24, inter alia). Why should Moshe ask the question? And why should he make the peculiar demand that they “strengthen themselves” in order to take from the fruit of the land? What was the real charge given the mëraggëlim and in what did they fail?
B.
We begin by again noting that human beings are unique creatures, composed of a physical nature, the body and the nefesh which animates it and serves its needs and urges, and a spiritual, metaphysical nature, the nëshama which has the capacity to exercise control over the former and direct its urges. The inherent conflict between these two elements enables us to earn rewards, when the nëshama’s capacity is used properly to control and direct the body’s passions into constructive channels, or, halila, punishments, should the nëshama abdicate control and permit the nefesh to override it.
Hazal picture the physical universe, ha-‘olam ha-ze, as the end of a long process of “thickening” or “coarsening”, such that original, ethereal, metaphysical energy, or, becomes manifest as gross matter, or homer; how much or this thickening or coarsening locks up in homer may be gauged from the vast amount of already “thickened” physical energy present in any mass, demonstrated by Einstein’s famous equation E=mc², in which the physical constant c represents the speed of light (186,000 km/sec), and m the mass itself; the square of their product is E, the amount of energy.
The term used in the Holy Language to describe this phenomenon is hithgashmuth, and its end result is gashmiyuth, “materiality,” as distinct from ruhniyuth, “spirituality.” The body, formed of the material extruded at the end of the process, is compared by Hazal to a “shoe,” in that just as a very small, lower extremity of a relatively large body is inserted into a shoe, so is a small, lower extremity of a far larger metaphysical structure inserted into the body (עיי' נפש החיים ש"א פ"ה, פי' ובחרת בחיים שם אות ה' המבוסס על מאמרז"ל בברכות נ"ז:). The nëshama is thus inserted or infused into a body which is inherently part and parcel of the materiality of this world of gashmiyuth, whence it derives its nourishment and sustenance. It is this which underlay the discomfort felt by the bënei Yisra’él with the miraculous food from the sky, the man, about which they tellingly complained ונפשנו קצה בלחם הקלקל (“...and our nefesh is revolted by the ethereal [qëloqél] bread”; Numbers XXI, 5, Rashi ad loc.), presumably so called because, less materialistic than “normal” food, it was absorbed directly into every limb of the body and did not generate any waste products (עיי' עבודה זרה ה.). The word qëloqél, a hapaxlegomenon, appears to be a reduplicated, very intensive form of the more common word qal, “light.” We have here an illustration of the obstacles to be overcome in the unceasing struggle to assert the primacy of ruhniyuth over gashmiyuth.
The high drama of this struggle is present at every së‘uda, as Hazal tell us: בעל הבית בוצע כדי שיבצע בעין יפה ומשלים ברכתא ולבתר בוצע ואוקמוה רבנן דמתנית' דאין המסובין רשאין לטעום עד שיטעום המברך ולית הבוצע רשאי לטעום עד שיכלה אמן מפי המסובין וגו' (“The master of the household cuts [bread] in order to cut it generously, and completes the blessing, and afterwards cuts [it]; and the Rabbis of the Mishna established it that the guests are not permitted to taste [it] until the one reciting the blessing tastes [it]; and the one cutting [the bread] is not permitted to taste [it] until amén dies away from the mouths of the guests....”), concluding ולית חד אכיל אלא מאן דנצח קרבא איהו אכיל ובוצע לכולהו (“And no-one eats save he who is victorious in the battle; he eats, and cuts [it] for all the rest”; זוה"ק ח"ג רב"ע.). Only after all the steps have been taken to elevate the gashmiyuth to a sublimely ethereal level of ruhniyuth, by reciting the appropriate blessing or answering amén, does it become safe for us to partake of it.
C.
An allusion to this struggle may be found in the very word for which our parasha is named, shëlah – “send.” As a glance at the Targum Onqëlos on XIII, 2 shows, the root has the identical meaning in both Hebrew and Aramaic. However, if we turn, for instance, to Numbers XX, 28, we read: ויפשט משה את אהרן את בגדיו וגו' (“And Moshe stripped [va-yafshét] Aharon of his clothes...”); Onqëlos there renders the verb vë-ashlah, the Af‘él (equivalent of the causative Hif‘il in Hebrew) of our verb, i.e., “cast away” or “off.” The word is used similarly in the Talmud: Commenting on the phrase שלח אחוי, Rashi writes: אם אינך בעל מום הפשט בגדיך ונראה (“If you are not blemished, take off your clothes and we shall see”; קידושין ס"ו: רש"י שם דה"מ שלח אחוי וע"ע תוספות שם דה"מ שלח).
And so, says the Birkath Tov: וזהו "שלח" שיפשוט "לך" כאשר אתה הולך "לך" לאכול ולשתות אז תפשוט "אנשים" כלומר את בחינת "אנשים" האנושיות תראה להפשיט שלא תכוון לתענוג ולהנאה הגשמיות וגו' (“And this is ‘shëlah,’ that you strip away the ‘you’; when you go for yourself to eat or drink, then you should strip away the anashim, the category of ‘men’; human frailty [enoshiyuth] should you seek to strip away, that your intent not be physical pleasure and enjoyment....”), but rather strive to elevate the physical necessity of consumption to a higher, spiritual level by “stripping away” the physical man and exposing instead the inner or of the metaphysical nëshama. The true sense of the word enoshiyuth, from enosh, “human being,” becomes clear when one realizes that it is derived from a root signifying “weak, sickly, mortal” (cf. its uses in, e.g., Psalms LXII, 21 or Daniel VI, 8, 13).
This, I believe, is why such great men were designated the mëraggëlim, rather than mere foot-soldiers, and what Moshe sought to warn them against: That as they descended back into the derech ha-teva‘, they not forget that the ‘olam is ma‘alim [“conceals”; the root meaning of the word], actual, metaphysical reality behind the physical façade. He knew that the fruits of the Holy Land would be prodigious (cf. XIII, 23-24), and bade them strengthen themselves, that they resist the urge of their physical nature, once out from under the metaphysical cocoon in which they had been traveling, to rush to rejoin the more familiar, more “normal” physicality which they would find around them.
Alas, only two of the mëraggëlim were able to stand the trial: Yëhoshua‘ bin Nun, protected by the zëchuth of the additional letter from the Tetragrammaton which his teacher, Moshe, had added to his name (cf. ibid., 16, במדבר רבה פט"ז סי' ז' וע"ע ירושלמי סנהדרין פ"ב ה"ו דגם זכות שרה אמנו עמדה לו שהרי היו"ד ניטלה משמה ונוספה לשמו ), and Kalév ben Yëfunneh, protected by the zëchuth of tëfilla at the qivrei avoth of Hevron (עיי' סוטה ל"ד:), were able to resist the descent into gashmiyuth which, for the others, led them to forget that G-d was on their side, and to panic at the sight of the prodigious “Fortress Këna‘an” on whose conquest they were considering embarking.
D.
Read in this way, the account of the mëraggëlim is indeed a cautionary tale for us, both with regard to the dangers of immersing ourselves too much in the ‘olam ha-gashmi, but also concerning the things which will serve to rescue us from it: Tëfilloth, bërachoth, and zëchuth avoth.
Forewarned is forearmed: Knowing what we face during our sojourn in this world, we can strive to have the proper kavvanoth when we have to take sustenance. This recognition, for instance, underlies the custom many people have, before partaking of the special delicacies which grace our shabbath and yom tov tables, of saying first לכבוד שבת קדש or לכבוד יום טוב, that eating them be in honor of shabbath or yom tov, and not, as the Rebbe reminds us, simply לתענוג ולהנאה הגשמיות, for the physical pleasure and enjoyment.
Another stratagem to secure victory in our battle with the yétzer ha-ra‘.
