Hello everyone and welcome once again to the Temple Institute Parsha class.
My name is Gedalia Meyer and I am podcasting from Maale Adumim in Israel.
We live in a world in which unexpected things happen with disturbing regularity.
We may like to believe that we have everything under perfect control all the time.
We may have our finances in order, our career going according to plan, our social interactions
very much clicking with what should be expected, and pretty much everything else fitting into
place exactly as we wish.
There may seem to be no reason that this remarkable equilibrium should ever be disturbed.
But then it does.
These earthshakers come out of nowhere, like a lightning bolt from the ancient gods.
They hit us when we aren t looking, and always where we feel it the most.
What causes these eruptions of instability?
What deity is responsible for their sudden appearance in our otherwise programmed lives?
Is it fate?
Is it God?
Is it some random inexplicable force that just does these sorts of things?
We don t know, but we certainly wonder about it.
It could be the death of someone we are close to.
It could be the onset of some life-changing illness or condition in the body.
It could be some financial upheaval, like losing a dependable job or the entire economy
crashing.
It could be a trusted relationship falling apart, and our emotional state falling apart
with it.
It could be any of these or any of dozens of other bolts out of the blue that shake
up what we thought were the firm foundations of everything we relied upon.
This is life, and anyone who hasn t experienced this, hasn t really experienced life.
What is to be done about this universal state of affairs?
The real truth is nothing.
We really cannot plan for the unexpected because that is what it is - unexpected.
We may stick with harboring the illusion that none of this will happen to us because we
prepared in advance to fend off this very possibility.
But this insistence, many of us know, only makes the inevitable all that more unexpected.
The only thing we can really do about all this is to expect the unexpected.
This simple formula is probably the best and the most time-tested advice to deal with this
fact of life.
It is not as if this is a new state in the human condition.
This has been with us ever since we learned to understand the concept of the future.
It has been one of the handful of constants in the ever-changing world.
If anything people in ancient times probably were better equipped to deal with the unexpected
since so much in their lives was totally unexpected.
They had no idea what tomorrow would bring - if they would live to see it or not.
They knew in their bones that so much of life was totally out of their hands that they could
only look at nature or fate or whatever deities they believed in and hope that things would
turn out ok.
It is probably only in relatively recent times that we have shaken off this fatalistic attitude
and convinced ourselves that we are somehow in control of everything.
But in this regard, unfortunately, we are quite ignorant.
The Bible has its share of unexpected events shaking up the lives of its protagonists.
No less a figure than Abraham hears a voice come out of nowhere telling him that he must
leave his homeland and everything he knows and travel to a land he has never seen and
has only the vaguest idea of where it is.
Jacob s life was forever so caught in a web of unpredictable events that could be described
as nothing less than chaotic.
Even somebody as in touch with God as Moshe also had to deal with a series of confrontations
that seemed to come out of nowhere and which challenged everything that he had come to
expect about his role in the destiny of the Israelites.
This week's Parsha is called Shelach.
It is a small and simple word for a Parsha with a good deal of action.
This is the Parsha of the spies and the title word means 'send'.
It is a word which foretells much of what takes place in the Parsha.
This was the command which Hashem gave to Moshe telling him to send out men who would
spy out the land of Canaan.
They were to clandestinely infiltrate the southern portion of the land to determine
the state of things for the upcoming Israelite invasion to conquer it and to control it as
a national homeland.
The subsequent events of this bit of Biblical espionage take up a good deal of this Parsha.
The spies returned after 40 days with their report.
It began with a short description of the great potential of the land, but it also told of
certain problems that would come about.
Specifically, they noticed that the cities were fortified and that the people were certainly
not submissive and would fight against any invasion.
While there was unquestionable truth to these observations, as borne out by the several
years of warfare required to conquer the land, the report had a decidedly negative impact
that would put a damper on the general enthusiasm for the journey to the Promised Land and the
whole purpose of the Exodus.
Immediately, one of the spies, Caleb, tried to quell this negativity by saying that they
should stick to the plan since they would succeed despite any challenges.
Ten of the twelve spies rejected this advice and doubled down on their complaints.
They said that the people were too strong to be overcome.
They also then stated that the land itself was not really worth the trouble, claiming
that it consumes its inhabitants . With this last bit of negativity, the stage was set
for the entire assembly of Israelites to wholeheartedly reject the plan of going to Canaan.
The again rang up the familiar complaint of we wish we had died in Egypt, we should have
died in this desert.
Why is God bringing us to this land to die by the sword .
Things quickly went from bad to worse.
Despite the efforts of Caleb and his fellow spy, Joshua to nip the rebellion in the bud,
everything fell apart in an instant.
Moshe and Aaron couldn t hold things together, as the people wanted to kill them.
At that point, the glory of God enters the picture.
God told Moshe that this rebellion was an unforgivable sin that could only be rectified
by destruction of the entire Israelite population who had taken part in it.
Moshe managed to quell God s anger but the divine decree had already been issued.
The entire generation of the Exodus would have to die in the desert and never come into
the Promised Land.
They had brought it upon themselves by declaring that it would be better to suffer death in
the wilderness than to die fighting for their own land.
The result of all this was the famous 40 years of wandering in the desert until that entire
generation was gone.
The punishment fit the crime.
They had rejected the opportunity to take part in the epic battle for Israel, so they
would not play any role in the ultimate victory.
As harsh as this may have seemed to them, there was no getting around it.
Their children would be the ones to make history, while they suffered the eternal infamy of
having rejected the promise of God.
Was all this inevitable?
Was it somehow in the cards of destiny that this was to take place?
It certainly doesn t seem like it.
It is hard to imagine Moshe suspecting that a rebellion was silently brewing that would
erupt when the spies returned.
The command to spy out the land was issued by none other than Hashem.
Moshe himself, in the section of the book of Deuteronomy when he recalls these events,
states that he supported the mission.
Were both God and him clueless about any of this before it happened.
There is a slight hint that this was not the case.
Before the spies were sent the Torah lists them by name.
The spy representing the tribe of Ephriam was Hoshea, the son of Nun.
Right after this listing, it states that Moshe changed Hoshea s name to Yehoshua, or Joshua,
as he is forever known as.
It was a very small change in the name, simply adding the tiny letter nun to the beginning
of the word and then changing the vocalization a bit.
Both names mean something on the order of salvation . But the new name puts a decided
twist of the future on the word.
Instead of meaning save it means will be saved
While this may not seem like much of a change, there has to be a reason why Moshe did it
right at this moment, right before the spies set out on the fateful journey.
Jewish tradition has it that Moshe had a certain amount of foresight in change this name.
He sensed that this man Hoshea could be swayed in a negative direction by pressure from others.
He wanted him to remain firm in his convictions and not succumb to any negative influence
that may come about.
By giving him this new name, he was inspiring Hoshea to withstand this negative pressure.
In the end, Hoshea, or Yehoshua, was one of the two spies who stood their ground and stuck
with the original plan.
The rest became known throughout history as the spies .
So it seems that Moshe, in some very hidden manner, suspected that something bad could
come about from this mission that he himself backed.
He changed Hoshea s name for this reason.
While this didn t really amount to any great changes to the fate of the Israelites, it
did bring about an enormous change for Hoshea.
He became Yehushua, or Joshua, of whom an entire book of the Bible is devoted.
What would have happened to him if Moshe hadn't changed his name?
To this we have no answer, but we do know what did happen.
Because Moshe, to some small degree, expected the unexpected, Joshua became the next leader
of the Israelites, the person who led the invasion of the land.
Perhaps Moshe should have done more if he harbored these suspicions.
Perhaps he should have nixed the whole mission of the spies from the outset.
But this may have been going too far.
It was necessary to send out spies, as God s command to Moshe indicates.
But it was a necessity with certain risks.
Moshe knew these risks and hoped they wouldn t cause major problems.
But he inserted his own little insurance policy just in case things went totally awry, which
they did.
He changed Hoshea s name to Yehoshua to warn him to be aware of problems.
This single verse in the story, which is easily overlooked in the course of the dramatic events,
shows us that Moshe at the very least, had the foresight to expect the unexpected.
This counter-intuitive but perfectly reasonable notion is something that should be a guide
for all of us as we go through the roller coaster that is our lives.
We never know what s coming down the pipeline, so we must forever be on the lookout for the
unexpected.
Some may consider this to be a form of paranoia, but neither they nor us are in control of
our own fate.
Shabbat Shalom!