How to Find What We Are Seeking This Summer (Shelach 5780)

As this summer opens our country is reeling from the corrosive impact of centuries of racism from which many of us have looked away too often. The shadows of anger, resentment, shame, and fear are long. Those shadows cross with the more recent, shorter ones of anxiety and disruption coming from a worldwide pandemic. Alone or taken together these shadows threaten to swallow the light of summer. 

Perhaps an insight taken from this week’s Torah portion, can help us find light in the midst of these shadows. The Torah portion is suffused throughout with a single Hebrew verb latoor -- to explore, scout, or seek out. The Torah portion describes the assignment of selected scouts to confirm the divine promises awaiting our ancestors as they come close to crossing into Canaan.


The great scouting mission of Torah, however, fails to confirm the promises. Instead a huge majority of the scouts return from their mission terrorizing the generation of the Exodus about what perils await across the border. Their fear is so crushing they wish themselves dead, erased, zeroed out. Because of this botched scouting report our ancestors are set to wandering in the wilderness as punishment -- one year for every day of that failed 40-day mission. 

As a result, we sometimes ignore the Hebrew verb in this week’s Torah portion as a basis for naming the scouts. Instead we look toward the end of the Torah to find a different root word for the scouts. There Moses reflects on the scouts’ behavior this week by using the word la’regel. When put into noun form, it becomes “spies.” 

Which is it, “scouts” or “spies”?!?

Yaakov Tzvi Mecklenburg (19th century Germany) offers a helpful insight into these terms. Mecklenburg taught, the verb latoor is rooted in the “searching for the good” while the term “laregel” is rooted in “searching for the bad.” He bases this interpretation on the fact that regel is the Hebrew word for foot, the lowest part of our anatomy, the most base. When we are tourists in a foreign place on vacation, we are scouts in that sense of searching for the good. To keep ourselves safe, however, we need to have an awareness of the bad, not just ignore it. 

Similarly, when an army sends spies across enemy lines in times of war, they are searching for an enemy’s vulnerabilities or weakness - the bad. But if they only exploit the vulnerabilities of their enemies without any commitment to the overarching good they are seeking, they are doomed to failure too.  

As with the scouts in this week’s Torah portion, the power to choose what to see is within each of us. And while each view is important, neither is sufficient by itself. To pursue good in our lives we need to be clear-headed about the obstacles we face. To rid our society of the bad, we need clarity about the good that should replace it. 

If we give up on seeking out the good, then we will be enveloped by dark shadows. Our challenge in the summer ahead is to identify the bad we seek to overturn while keeping our eyes lifted to see the good we want to replace it. If we permit ourselves to be swallowed in the shadows, then like the spies in this week’s Torah, we will be paralysed by fear. If we can keep our eyes on huge, seemingly unattainable at times, good that we are pursuing we can find the light of inspiration to persevere and preserve hope along the path of our lives.