להתעורר ליראה מאותות השמים
To awaken awe from the signs of Heaven
שְׁלַח לְׁךָ אֲנָשִׁים וְׁיָתֻרוּ אֶת אֶרֶץ כְׁנַעַן אֲשֶר אֲנִׁי נֹתֵן לִׁבְׁנֵי יִׁשְׁרָאֵל אִׁיש אֶחָד אִׁיש אֶחָד לְׁמַטֵ ה אֲבֹתָיו תִׁשְׁלָחוּ כֹל נָשִׁיא בָהֶם: (יג:ב)
Send for yourself men and let them spy out the Land of Canaan that I give to Bnei Yisrael; one man each from his fathers’ tribe shall you sed, every one a leader among them. (13:2)
Rashi explains: ‘Why was the passage of the spies placed next to the passage of Miriam? For she was stricken over matters of speech which she spoke against her brother, and these wicked ones [the spies], saw what happened to her, yet did not take a lesson.’
Let us expand a little in order to understand what Rashi is informing us with his teaching, what is the point in Avodas Hashem that we have to take from his words?
It is brought down in holy seforim that every day HaKadosh Baruch Hu teaches the person how to economize his actions through countless hints. These hints are in the things we see and hear, for all these things come our way through hashgacha, therefore the person must consider well every detail of the things that happen before his eyes, in order to understand through them what Hashem Yisbarach wants from him.
It is brought down in the Gemara (Arachin 16a) that afflictions [tzara’as] come about because of the sin of lashon hara, and the reason for this is because HaKadosh Baruch Hu conducts Himself with the person midah kineged midah – measure for measure. Just as the person speaks badly about another and causes him distress, so they punish him by his flesh produces something bad to cause him distress. This is why the one who is afflicted is called a ‘metzora’ which is a contraction for ‘motziy rah’ – brings out bad.
In light of what was said, we can understand quite well the complaint against the spies in particular and against the Jewish nation in general, for the end of the last parsha (12:15) the Torah relates that when Miriam was afflicted with tzara’as, all of Israel waited for her and did not travel until she was cured. 'ותסגר מרים מחוץ למחנה שבעת ימים, והעם לא נסע עד האסף מרים' – ‘Miriam was closed away outside the camp for seven days, and the people did not journey until Miriam was brought in’. If we look carefully at the language of the Torah we see that it does not say, ‘and Hashem did not make the people travel until Miriam was brought in’, rather it says ‘the people did not journey...’, for had it said ‘and Hashem did not make the people travel’ we might have thought that the people did not know why they were not traveling, since all journeys were always dependent on the will of the Creator, by His will they journeyed and by His will they camped. Even now when they camped they did not know that had Miriam not contracted tzara’as that these days would be travel days. But now that it is written ‘and the people did not journey’ it shows that their not traveling was dependent on their view, as if they had decided not to travel, since they knew the reason why they were not traveling.
How did they really know that not traveling was dependent on Miriam’s tzara’as? Evidently, at that time an announcement went out throughout the camp that they had to wait until Miriam was cured, and they knew that this was the reason for not traveling!
But you can ask, at all the other encampments we do not find that they knew the reason why they were encamped, if so, then why now did they have to know why they were encamped?
Was this not because it was the will of Yisbarach that every one of Israel should understand the difference between himself and the sin of Miriam, and why the Creator Baruch Hu also wanted him to stop traveling because of her sin, is this not because HaKadosh Baruch Hu also wanted him to consider her distress?
And the reason for her arrival was for him to know what they want from him now, and since the tzara’as comes for the sin of ‘lashon hara’ it is a sign for him from Heaven that they want to arouse awe in him from that sin.
And so we see that this was the intent of HaKadosh Baruch Hu, for HaKadosh Baruch Hu knew that in a short time Bnei Yisrael would have to overcome a difficult challenge linked to ‘the sin of the tongue’, and HaKadosh Baruch wanted to first implant the prohibition within their hearts so that they do not stumble with it. However, in actuality, they did not consider the matter of Miriam as they should have, and the result was that they stumbled greatly and they reprimanded the conduct of HaKadosh Baruch Hu as we see in our parsha (14:1-4), and the matter reached a level where they were not ashamed to say outright 'בשנאת ה' אותנו הוציאנו מ ארץ מצרים' - ‘Because of Hashem hated us He took us out of Egypt’ (Devorim 1:27).
The Torah tells us all this for as we have said, even generations ago it is incumbent on every person to understand from every incident that presents before him to see and to hear, and to understand from it what HaKadosh Baruch Hu wants him to hear, he just has to pay attention to it, and he can be saved from sin in the future and he will earn Teshuvah for the past.
We find a hint to this conduct in Avos (2:6) where the Mishna brings an incident that happened to Rabban Gamliel son of Rebbe Yehuda HaNasi: ‘He also saw a skull floating on the water, he said to it, “Because you drowned others, they drowned you; and those who drowned you will eventually be drowned.”’ I once heard an explanation of the meaning of the word ’even’ which seems superfluous, since this word could have been left out. However, the Mishnah wanted to let us know that a Jew is different from the other nations, for the other nations who do not have emunah have no concept of hashgacha pratis, and they do not comprehend what every incident and occurrence wants to tell them. Therefore, most gentiles who see a skull floating on the water while they are walking on the shore, do not think about it at all. It never enters their mind that Heaven wants to tell them something. This was not so with Rabban Gamliel, even if with gentiles he saw the skull, yet he was different from them because he understood that Heaven wanted him to think about it and connect it to an avodah, and really Heaven wanted him to think about midah kineged midah, that this person was killed because he killed someone else, and those who killed him will ultimately be killed.
In our time, we can see that everything that happens in the world is to awaken us to Avodas Hashem, for today we can literally the world is small for in a minute we can know something that happened on the other side of the world unlike in previous generations, why did Hashem do this? Then people feared Hashem more, so they only needed a small nudge. However, now that fear has decreased, we need a larger push, Therefore, HaKadosh Baruch Hu made all kinds of technology to inform us of all the punishments in the world, perhaps we will wake up.
