Last week, I wrote about the human propensity to complain unceasingly.  (Based on my kids' ingratitude despite receiving supernaturally large Power Ranger popsicles; see previous Insights for all the sticky details.)

This week, I want to expand that point somewhat. Not only do we human  beings tend to stick our noses up at past or present blessings, as we gaze  fixedly on whatever future wish or fantasy we now want fulfilled, but we also often view those very blessings themselves as curses! Our mind (or, more precisely, the evil inclination that tirelessly works to sway that mind) "plays tricks on us," manipulating--or shredding--the data, and we end up deceived as to the ultimate truth of our situation.

The great Torah ethicist, Rabbi Moshe Chayim Luzzatto (in his classic, Mesilas Yesharim, or Path of the Just), memorably discusses this tragic moral blindness as he examines a Talmudic statement that compares this physical world to a dark night:

"How wondrous is this truthful commentary to him who concentrates on understanding it. For the darkness of night can cause two types of errors in relation to a man's eye: it may either cover his eye so that he does not see what is before him at all, or it may deceive him so that a pillar appears to him as a man, or a man as a pillar. In like manner, the materialism and physicality of this world is the darkness of night to the mind's eye and causes a man to err in two ways. First, it does not permit him to see the stumbling blocks in the way of the world, so that the foolish ones walk  securely, fall and are lost without having experienced any prior fear…The second error, which is even worse than the first [my emphasis], stems from the distortion of their sight, so that they see evil as though it were goodness itself, and good as if it were evil, and because of this, strengthen themselves in clinging to their evil ways. For it is not enough that they lack the ability to see the truth, the evil staring them in the face, but they also see fit to find powerful substantiations and empirical evidence supporting their evil theories and false ideas. This is the great evil which embraces them and brings them to the pit of destruction." (Chapter 3; translation based on S. Silverstein's, Feldheim edition)

A remarkably profound psychological analysis, in my humble opinion, and one which has such wide-ranging application to human experience. (Luzzatto goes on to tell us that the only hope we have of defeating our evil  inclination, and achieving true insight and self-knowledge--not to mention freedom--is through the study and practice of Torah, combined with regular  periods of searching introspection.)

So, we are either busy bumping into pillars, or mistaking them for people. The latter is worse, he tells us, for though you may have gotten a nasty bruise, you can resolve to look more carefully and walk more slowly the next time. But once you have decided the pillars are really people, you will find (or invent) plenty of evidence to support that conviction. You will already be invested in that cognitive schema. (Had to find a way to get some jargon from social work school in there!)

This week's parsha provides us with one famous example of Luzzatto's pillar-as-person paradigm. It takes place in the context of one of the most tragic incidents in the Torah (and, indeed, in our whole history as a nation): the sending of the scouts to survey the Land of Israel.

In deference to the wish of the Jewish people for such a reconnaissance  mission--which itself, as some sources point out, revealed a blemish in their bitachon (trust in G-d), for He had assured them that they would miraculously triumph over the Canaanite inhabitants--, Moshe sends 12 righteous men to gather information about the Land and its population. They return after 40 days, having journeyed the length and breadth of Eretz Yisrael and bearing specimens of its fruit. With the exception of Yehoshua and Calev, the scouts bring a disheartening message: although the Land is flowing with milk and honey, "the people that dwells in the land is powerful, the cities are very fortified and large, and we also saw there the offspring of giants." As Ramban points out, the language they use (efes, in Hebrew) clearly conveys their feeling that it would be impossible to conquer the Canaanites. And indeed, after Calev bravely tries to lift the spirits of the people, the spies openly proclaim: "We cannot ascend to the people, for it is stronger than us."

What follows in this public debate is a veritable smear campaign by the scouts against the Land of Israel itself (which, as mentioned above, they had begun by praising). "The land through which we have passed, to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants!" Citing the Talmud, Rashi explains what the spies meant with their frightening assertion:

"'In every place where we passed, we found them [the Canaanite inhabitants] burying the dead.'

Funerals were all we saw, they tell the Jewish people! And funerals are bad, no? Are they not an unmistakable sign of poor air quality, or some other unhealthful condition in this Land? (We know the difference between a pillar and a man!) Ah, but Rashi goes on in his comment to give us the  punch line:

"And the Holy One, Blessed be He, did this [i.e., caused the Canaanites to be busy with funerals] for [the spies'] good, in order to distract [the Canaanites] with their mourning, and [thus] they would not notice these [spies.]"

What Hashem had brought about for the good of the spies and the Jewish  people--the propitious timing (so to speak) of many Canaanite deaths to take away attention from the travels of the scouts--was perceived by them to be a very great evil. So, too, with the immense fruits (bigger than Power Ranger popsicles) the scouts brought back with them from the Land to show the people: they tried to convince them that "just as its fruit is unusual [in its size], so are its people unusual" (Rashi). The blessing of the unique  fertility of the Land of Israel that G-d wanted us to enjoy became, in the minds of the scouts (and then the rest of the Jewish people), the evidence
of some fearsome curse concocted by our Creator. The pillar had become a man!

The scouts succeeded with their propaganda. Mass hysteria resulted:

"The entire assembly raised up and issued its voice; the people wept that night…

'Would that we had died in the land of Egypt, or would that we had died in the wilderness!

Why is Hashem bringing us to this land to fall by the sword? Our wives and young children will be taken captive! Is it not better for us to return to Egypt?" (14, 1-3)

G-d decreed that this generation--whose trust in G-d had so quickly dissolved under the torrent of slander against the Land by the scouts--would die in the wilderness. I should be more precise. The men (between 20 and 60) alive at that time would die in the desert over the next 40 years, G-d decreed, but not the women, who (as usual in our history) showed themselves stronger in their faith in G-d and in their love of Eretz Yisrael, and refused to swallow the scouts' report. (Women know the difference between pillars and people better than men do, I guess.) 40 years in the desert, then, was our fate, rather than the speedy entry into the Land we could have experienced.

What the exact underlying (or even subconscious) motivation of the 10 spies themselves was is an interesting--and important--question. The Zohar explains that they feared they would lose their prominent standing among the Jewish people upon entering the land, and this perverted their objectivity. In any case, our focus here is on the distortion of their perceptions itself: for whatever reason, their eyes and minds deceived them. They reached a conclusion that was the very opposite of the truth.

The Jewish people complained and wept for no (good) reason whatsoever.

One of my teachers, Rabbi Gershenfeld, would always tell us that the brain is (in its ideal state) a precise computer that will give accurate results if fed the correct data. The problem, though, is that there is an enemy called the yetzer ha'ra (evil inclination) who is usually in control of the hard drive, and he is most biased in the results he wants to obtain. Even the clear and unmistakable data we think we are entering yields a false result through his machinations. Or, if you prefer, he is the virus that is always sneaking into our mind's operating system. The only anti-virus program that will work is Torah study and intense striving for truth…and then, with G-d's help (no insignificant factor there), we may succeed.

Rabbi Luzzatto explains (again in Path of the Just) that everything
that comes our way in this world is, ultimately, a test. Will we see it as
a blessing or a curse? Will we use it to grow closer to G-d, or to distance
ourselves from Him? Will we have the insight--or at least, humility--to not
pass judgment on G-d even for the things in our lives that seem like the
greatest difficulties or dark areas? In fact, it is the darkest areas
themselves that provide us with the most sublime opportunity to search
(inside and out) for the (divine) illumination. May we illuminate our minds
and souls with Torah and mitzvos, so that we can safely navigate our way
through the pillars of this dark world.

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