Shelach Lecha | Is the Universe Friendly?

שְׁלַח־לְךָ֣ אֲנָשִׁ֗ים וְיָתֻ֙רוּ֙ אֶת־אֶ֣רֶץ כְּנַ֔עַן אֲשֶׁר־אֲנִ֥י נֹתֵ֖ן לִבְנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל אִ֣ישׁ אֶחָד֩ אִ֨ישׁ אֶחָ֜ד לְמַטֵּ֤ה אֲבֹתָיו֙ תִּשְׁלָ֔חוּ כֹּ֖ל נָשִׂ֥יא בָהֶֽם׃

Send for yourself men, that they may scout out the land of Canaan that I am giving to the children of Israel.

Numbers 13:1 (Tr. Everett Fox)

 

This week's Torah story presents a pivotal moment in the human journey from enslavement to true freedom. It shows how fragile and vulnerable we humans feel when we live close to the possibility of getting what we want in our lives. We have to be willing to step into the unknown to taste freedom. And Torah asks, can we find freedom in the midst of this human vulnerability without shaming ourselves or making enemies of "the other?"

In the story, the children of Israel have arrived at the edge of  the wilderness where Eternal Presence led them in their escape from enslavement in the narrow place Torah calls Egypt. They have persevered and survived in this new wilderness at the will of and dependent upon this same Presence. The Presence provides manna for their subsistence, a white substance that falls from heaven to nourish their bodies. They source water from rocks and acts of faith in the Presence. They camp in the desert wilderness and move forward only when they follow a cloud from which the Presence beckons. They are dependent on the Presence that freed them from physical slavery.

And throughout the journey the people waiver and equivocate. They do not recognize or trust the freedom promised to them. The vulnerability of living in the possibility of this freedom is too much for them. In this week's chapter, they are at the edge of the midbar, the wild place from which words and things have the potential to arise. They are looking out into a land that promises fulfillment.

As instructed, Moses sends representatives from each tribe into the land to see its living reality for themselves and to report back what they see. Eternal Presence has Moses send a scouting party, rather than a marching army, to encounter the land and its inhabitants.

But the leaders return and say this:

וַיֹּצִ֜יאוּ דִּבַּ֤ת הָאָ֙רֶץ֙ אֲשֶׁ֣ר תָּר֣וּ אֹתָ֔הּ אֶל־בְּנֵ֥י יִשְׂרָאֵ֖ל לֵאמֹ֑ר הָאָ֡רֶץ אֲשֶׁר֩ עָבַ֨רְנוּ בָ֜הּ לָת֣וּר אֹתָ֗הּ אֶ֣רֶץ אֹכֶ֤לֶת יוֹשְׁבֶ֙יהָ֙ הִ֔וא וְכׇל־הָעָ֛ם אֲשֶׁר־רָאִ֥ינוּ בְתוֹכָ֖הּ אַנְשֵׁ֥י מִדּֽוֹת׃

We came to the land to which you sent us. It flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.

However, the people who dwell in the land are strong, and the cities are fortified and very large… We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are… The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height… We seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.”

Numbers 13:27-33  (Hebrew 13:32) (my emphasis) 

And the people respond with this:

וְלָמָ֣ה יְ֠הֹוָ֠ה מֵבִ֨יא אֹתָ֜נוּ אֶל־הָאָ֤רֶץ הַזֹּאת֙ לִנְפֹּ֣ל בַּחֶ֔רֶב נָשֵׁ֥ינוּ וְטַפֵּ֖נוּ יִהְי֣וּ לָבַ֑ז הֲל֧וֹא ט֦וֹב לָ֖נוּ שׁ֥וּב מִצְרָֽיְמָה׃

"Why is Eternally Present taking us to that land to fall by the sword? Our wives and children will be carried off! It would be better for us to go back to Egypt!”

וַיֹּאמְר֖וּ אִ֣ישׁ אֶל־אָחִ֑יו נִתְּנָ֥ה רֹ֖אשׁ וְנָשׁ֥וּבָה מִצְרָֽיְמָה׃

And they said to one another, “Let us head back for Egypt.”

Numbers 14:3-4

What do you Fear?

Something has backfired badly. Perhaps the leaders intuited that the people weren't ready to step into freedom, and so wisely set this up for another forty years of wandering. The people's perception was still so shattered by their traumatic experiences that they saw themselves as powerless separate beings. As long as we think of ourselves as separate beings and groups whose survival depends on dominating and conquering others, the land will devour us. (Stay tuned for next week's chapter, where this happens!)

The view of self that can inhabit a Promised Land is self as interconnected with the chain of life and all creation.

This is how I read the Lubavitcher Rebbe's teaching on this episode. The leaders, called spies or scouts, understood that the people were still perceiving the world within the paradigm of slavery and domination:

The most remarkable by far of all the commentators on the episode of the spies was the Lubavitcher Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson. He raised the obvious question. The Torah emphasizes that the spies were all leaders, princes, heads of tribes. They knew that God was with them, and that with His (sic) help there was nothing they could not do. They knew that God would not have promised them a land they could not conquer. Why then did they come back with a negative report?

His answer turns the conventional understanding of the spies upside-down. They were, he said, not afraid of defeat. They were afraid of victory. What they said to the people was one thing, but what led them to say it was another entirely.

What would be their situation in the land? They would have to fight wars, plough the land, plant seed, gather harvests, create and sustain an army, an economy and a welfare system. They would have to do what every other nation does: live in the real world of empirical space. What would become of their relationship with God? Yes, He (sic) would still be present in the rain that made crops grow, in the blessings of field and town, and in the Temple in Jerusalem that they would visit three times a year, but not visibly, intimately, miraculously, as He (sic) was in the desert. This is what the spies feared: not failure but success.

— Rabbi Jonathan Sachs, posthumous blog on Shelach Lecha

 Shame

The people heard the report from the land and saw themselves as they believed the "others" saw them. They saw themselves as "grasshoppers "and the inhabitants as "giants." From this they jumped to seeing the land as a place that would "devour" them. They missed the beauty of grasshoppers, the harbingers of summer, part of the beautiful interconnected web of life.

They are caught in the cycle of shame and blame, their self regard and image of the world  so constricted that they make meaning of their fear from this constricted consciousness. As Brene Brown says, “Shame is that warm feeling that washes over us, making us feel small, flawed, and never good enough.” When shame overtakes us, we are lost in an experience of unworthiness. I did something that I now regret and I've been conditioned or trained to turn it against myself. This also can happen when someone else says or does something that that is painful or scary for me and I hear in it, and believe, a message of unworthiness.

Blame

Blame is the mirror of shame turned out toward the other. I make sense of my suffering by attributing wrongness and badness to the other person. I make them a powerful enemy, a giant, by giving them the power to frame how I see myself and giving them the power to create my feelings and responses to challenges.

How do we take back the power to overcome blame and shame and center ourselves in self acceptance and compassion even toward those who cause harm?

Our Perception of Ourselves and the Universe

Albert Einstein said, "The most important decision we make is whether we believe we live in a friendly or hostile universe." Seeing ourselves and all peoples as integral facets of the web of life is how we partner with Eternal Presence to inhabit a Promised Land. Each element in the web needs to be in balanced and healthy relationship with all the others.

Grasshoppers are in fact an essential part of the living universe. They stimulate plant growth, participate in nutrient cycling, and play important role in food chains. Some grasshoppers are proposed as ecological indicators of ecosystem qualities and efficacy of ecological networks. And, when their populations grow to catastrophic dimensions, grasshoppers can completely disrupt the balance of nature that includes us humans in the food chain.

In the uncertain world of today, where we are so far from the safety and dreams of how we want the world to be, it is scary to imagine that the world is friendly. It can even seem like a betrayal to those who are suffering so much. And yet, teachers and leaders encourage us  to keep alive hope and faith of the possibility of achieving our dreams of a better world.

Working with Perceptions

In the Torah portion, the leaders who scouted the land came back with a giant cluster of grapes. They showed the grapes to the people as proof that the land was dangerous. The people see only the danger. Their perceptions are controlled  by their fears and history of persecution.

Year ago I spent three months on a Buddhist retreat with Thich Nhat Hanh. It was a relatively small group so we were invited into his "hut," a small house on the property of the California retreat center. A few dozen of us followed him to the house, doing the practice of walking meditation. With each step we breathed in, and with the next step, we breathed out. I was walking quite close to him as we walked the narrow path between tall flowers. He stopped, and we all stopped. (Like the cloud in Torah, the people stopped when the cloud stopped.)

He said, “We can look at the world as friendly, or we can look at the world as threatening. The choice is ours.”

I looked at the mass of tall wildflowers flowers that encroached on both sides of the path. In that moment, it was within my power to see them as friendly or scary. In the sunlight they were winking at me. On a gray day, or in a garden I wanted to tame, or if I was in a depressed mood, their unruly crowded mass would have reflected something totally different to me.

This teaching has followed me over the years. When I sink into a sense of alienation or despair, blame and shame, I stop and breathe, looking around for beauty. I might recite words with each in-breath and out-breath, to bring myself back to the present moment:

Breathing in, I know I am breathing in
Breathing out, I know I am breathing out
Breathing in I see the shape and form of flowers
Breathing out I smile to the flowers
Breathing in I feel my heart beating
Breathing out I smile to my beating heart
Breathing in I know this is the present moment
Breathing in this is a wonderful moment

What is it that prevents me from stopping and returning to this moment as a wonderful moment? Mostly a fear that I'm ignoring real suffering. And yet, if I don't refresh and refill my own connection to life, I will be paralyzed by guilt and fear, locked in the trance of despair. That's when I resort to making sense of the world through blame and shame, continuing the cycle of fear and suffering.

After restoring my connection to the present moment, I use another practice from Thich Nhat Hanh,  the practice of asking, "Are you sure?"

If I'm thinking I am inadequate, I am unworthy, I want to stop and ask myself, "Are you sure?" And keep asking, over and over, until I at least get to a place of answering to myself, "I'm not sure." And then feel curious to explore, what is so important to me, or what healing do I need, so that I don't see myself as a grasshopper. (Apologies to the noble grasshopper, whose magnificence through the warm summer night calls out summer, fertility, oneness with surroundings…)

Torah says, go and see for yourself. Look again, send scouts, see that more is here than your fear.

In Nonviolent Communication, we practice learning to differentiate observations from our interpretations. We don't want to ignore our experience of what happens; we value everyone's experiences. And we want to empower ourselves with greater and greater clarity about what actually happened.

Were we grasshoppers in their eyes? There is no way we could know this. Were we grasshoppers, or is this the story we told ourselves? Knowing the difference is crucial to standing in our power. And beyond that, how do we free ourselves from taking on others' beliefs about ourselves?

Torah is telling us that if the leaders did see the land as too dangerous for them it was because the people hadn't yet gone through the transformational journey necessary to befriend and transform guilt, shame, violence and hatred.

There is no promised land until we know, individually and collectively, how to befriend and give empathy to the feelings of anger, guilt, shame and depression that arise inside our very beings when we are scared, tired, hungry, envious. If we don't know how to befriend them, they become tendencies of shame, blame, revenge, violence and hatred.

When these tendencies have power over others, over land and resources, the Promised Land becomes hell.  The task of the leaders in the desert, and of each of us, is to lead to fundamental transformation so that our fears and vulnerabilities become our allies in creating a respectful and harmonious society.

 

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