Shelach Lecha, God says to Moses:
Send spies to the Promised Land,
which the Israelites are about to enter.
Find out, is the land barren, or fertile?
Inhabited, or empty?
And if there are people living there
will they welcome the Israelites
or will they try to kill them?
That's how Parshat Shelach Lecha begins.
What happens next is,
Moses complies with God's request,
and sends twelve spies,
one from each tribe,
on a recon mission to the Promised Land.
Forty days later,
the spies return with mixed news.
On one hand, they report, the land
is a paradise, flowing with milk and honey
the spies bring back a cluster of grapes
so large it takes two people to carry it.
On the other hand, ten of the twelve spies
say that the land is inhabited by giants,
and the weak Israelites
have no chance of conquering it.
Two of the spies dissent:
Joshua, who would later
become the leader of the Israelites,
and his sidekick Caleb.
They tell the Israelites not to worry
that they can defeat
the hostile inhabitants of the land
and can enjoy all that honey and milk.
But the people don't listen.
They're panic-stricken,
and they cry out in fear.
Based on this reaction, God decides
that this generation of Israelites,
freshly liberated from Egypt,
is not capable of inheriting the Land after all.
God causes them to wander in the desert
for forty years, long enough
for a new generation to be born,
a generation that never lived as slaves,
and thus would be confident enough
to conquer the land.
Of course, if God knows everything,
you might ask, why bother with spies at all?
Why not just tell Moses about the land,
and cut out the middle men?
The answer is that, just like us,
the ancient Israelites
had to learn lessons for themselves.
We're not babies,
and God doesn't give us all the answers –
either today or way back then.
We have to figure things out for ourselves,
because that's what people do.
And sometimes, we get it wrong.
The Children of Israel
let themselves be ruled by fear and panic.
They could've inherited the land
but because they thought they couldn't
well, they couldn't.
The spies weren't really sent
to learn about the land –
they were sent to learn about themselves.
Think about it: what is
a land flowing with milk and honey anyway?
It's not like there were rivers of skim
and ponds of 2 percent.
What the spies saw was a land fit for cows,
bees, goats, and dates – a land of potential.
It's all a matter of perspective.
One person sees a vacant lot,
another a great spot for a garden.
One person sees a potential enemy
another sees a potential friend.
This is what the spies
really had to scout out: themselves.
Maybe that's why the title
of this parsha is "Shelach Lecha,"
which literally means "Send to You."
Because what the spies were really meant
to learn about was themselves.
This wasn't about gathering
military intelligence
Like Jedi Knights in training
the spies had to confront their fears
before they could conquer them.
Maybe it wasn't so bad that the Israelites
panicked at the spies' report.
It's hard to admit that you're afraid,
but it's better than pretending
everything is okay when it isn't.
The Israelites were
a nation of former slaves,
traumatized by violence.
Who could blame them
for lacking the confidence to fight a war?
But in order to gain that confidence,
first they had to see the fear.
The same is true for us.
Sometimes, old habits are so ingrained,
they don't go away easily.
Sometimes, change takes
a long time to happen – sometimes it waits
even for a whole new generation,
one not captive to the fears
and assumptions of an earlier time.
This is what the spies found out
in Parshat Shelach Lecha:
they weren't ready for the challenge.
Forty years later, Joshua would send
his own spies to scout out the same land,
but this time the report was different:
We can do it, they said.
Was the land or its inhabitants any different?
No. But the people,
and their points of view, were.
Producer: Sarah Lefton
Animation Director: Nick Fox-Gieg
Animation: Colleen MacIsaac
Editorial Director: Matthue Roth
Theme Music: Tim Cosgrove
Written and Narrated by Jay Michaelson
Sound Recording: Sarah Lefton