במדבר הזה יפלו פגריכם וכל פקדיכם לכל מספרכם מבן עשרים שנה ומעלה אשר הלינתם עלי “In this wilderness shall your carcasses drop; all your counted ones in any of your numberings, from twenty years of age and above, whom you provoked against Me.” (Bamidbar 14:29)
People who were either younger than twenty or past the age of sixty at the time of the census did not die as part of the collective punishment for the aveirah [sin] of the Meraglim.
Rav Yaakov Kamenetsky in his sefer Emes L’Yaakov asks a very practical question: Does this imply that no one over sixty, without exception, went along with the Meraglim and believed their negative report? How can the Torah make such a statement?
Rav Yaakov shares a very interesting idea, which teaches us an important lesson. He says the people who were over sixty did not believe the Meraglim. The reason they didn’t believe them is that the people over sixty were past the draft age. They knew that they were not going to need to fight. The Meraglim‘s pessimistic report centred around the fact that the Canaanim were stronger than the Jews. “We are not going to be able to fight them; we are not going to be able to defeat them. They are too strong for us, therefore let us not go into Eretz Yisroel.”
For people who were of draft age and who were destined to need to take part in such a war, this was a message that resonated with them. “I don’t want to fight. I don’t want to be drafted. I don’t want to take part in such a war.” Such a person was ready to listen to the message of the Meraglim. But a person over sixty, who was not going to go into the army anyway, was able to look at what the Meraglim were saying objectively: “On the one hand, the Ribbono Shel Olam is saying ‘We can go in and win’; on the other hand, the Meraglim are saying ‘No. We can’t defeat them.'” The people who were not directly affected were prepared to believe Calev and Yehoshua and rely on the promises of the Ribbono Shel Olam.
A person without negiyus [personal motivation] can listen to a message and judge its merits without bias. All those people who believed the Meraglim did so because they had an agenda. Their agenda was “I don’t want to fight.” It is the old maxim “We hear what we want to hear and we believe what we want to believe.”
