Just when it seems we’re, once again, on the brink of disaster, we should find comfort that our yearly Torah cycle brings us to Parshat Shelach. When it seems we’re being abandoned by our closest allies in our war against the epitome of cruelty and evil, Hamas, whose very name means violence and as rocket attacks from the north, threatening the very center of our spiritual tradition, Tzfat, we read how our top leaders were so overwhelmed by the challenges facing us as we were about to finally enter The Land, that all they could find to talk about was our certain defeat at the hands of enemies greater and stronger than us.

In that historical time, we were, indeed, denied our destinty once we had fallen to the depths of denying it to ourselves, and it was decreed that we’d spend the next forty years wandering aimlessly in the wilderness. But we could be forgiven then, since we hadn’t yet received the lesson, that we fall both in order to ascend, but also to lift those shards of holiness that had fallen from the primal holiness in order to provide us with a holy mission.

Of course, we acknowledge, God could have just as easily created a fully perfect world as He did create the one we, instead, inhabit. filled with imperfections which are also our opportunities to transcend ourselves, to become God-like, as much as possible, by partnering His perfecting Creation. Throughout our individual lives and throughout our journey as Humanity, at least the idealized version of Humanity, Am Yisrael, our task is to find all the fallen pieces, all that was too holy as it first appeared and thus had to fall to the greatest depths in order to become accessible to us and lift them up, repaired and able to take their destined place and role as we transform what merely is to what it can potentially become.

Perhaps our greatest tool in this task is our ability to analyze, the separate the spark from the husk, to see the potential and the path to that potential, to achieve wisdom, da’at. 

In the story of the Spies, Meraglim, in Parshat Sh’lach, only two out of twelve were able to see beyond their own fear, beyond their own individual limits as individuals, and imagine our true potential as Am Yisrael. Likewise, in the months before we were so cruelly invaded and butchered and abused, so many of our so-called leaders, our self-appointed elites, cried out weekly, if  not more frequently, that we were incapable of fulfilig our task of fully settling this holy land. That we lacked the merits to be the true owners of this real estate even though we’d already undergone the miracle of returning and resestablishing a state after two thousand years. So much self-doubt, so much refusal to see God.

But the lesson of this Torah reading is that if we don’t enter the land immediately, we will after a limited period. And even if we didn’t, at that time, take possession once and for all, but, instead, face additional exiles, but after those exiles we will, as we have, return to claim our eternal place in this, our Eternal Homeland.

This time, let’s stop before giving in to despair. Let’s fill ourselves with the Love and Faith, Ahava ve’Emunah, that we are here this time to stay, and not just to barely survive, not just to continuously fight for our existence, but to thrive and lead the world, from the deepest depths, to the highest heights.

Shabbat Shalom

(For more details on these ideas, study carefully the Meor Eyayim by Menachem Nachum Twerski of Chernobyl (1730 – 1787), the founder of Chernobler Chassidut, Parshat Sh’lach L’cha.)