A Sin, Something Missed, and a Mistake

When the spies returned from spying out the land and spoke slanderously about the land, all the Jews wept. That day was Tisha B’Av. Hashem said to Israel: “You have wept for nothing, but I will give you something to cry about for generations” (Tractate Taanit). And indeed, on that bitter and hasty day – both the First Temple and the Second Temple were destroyed, and many other destructions took place around that day, including, for example, Gush Katif.
The question is, what was so terrible about the sin of the spies – even more terrible than the sin of the calf – that because of it an entire generation was condemned to die in the desert. And if that was not enough, we continue to pay the price of this sin to this day. Why was the apparently much more serious sin of the calf not punished with such total death?
It seems that it wasn’t exactly a punishment, but rather reality.
Let’s imagine an elite unit that didn’t train properly, messed up on navigation and missed the target. What would the commander do? He would dismiss the commander, send the unit back for more training – and eventually send them back to their mission.
But what would happen if all the soldiers were to start crying and refuse to go on a mission in the first place? In such a case, this unit would be unsalvagable. We would need to get rid of it and build another one in its place. When the people refused to enter the Land of Israel, they did not commit a more serious sin, they simply made themselves irrelevant to the Creator’s will.
A sin means something that was missed; i.e., a mistake. With the sin of the spies, it became clear that we missed the whole thing, which began with our father Abraham and continued with the exodus from Egypt and receiving the Torah. We simply missed the point and we were still not ready to carry out the mission for which we set out on this whole journey. The forty-year delay in the desert did not come as a punishment, but rather a requirement of the grim reality that was discovered through the sin of the spies.
In order to understand what is happening here, and how all of this is related to Tisha B’Av and the destruction of the Temple, we need to go back and understand what the task was for which the Creator of the world decided to assign Abraham to establish the nation of Israel, and for which he brought us into the melting pot of Egypt, and brought us out of there with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, and gave us the Torah in Sinai and brought us to the Land of Israel. What is the purpose of the journey?
Our mission as Jews is to unite heaven and earth. To live our earthly life in the most natural and realistic way, but with God present and with us, both as individuals and as a nation. This is how we bear witness both to the presence of the Creator in His world and to the manner in which humanity is expected to conduct itself.
The German emperor, Frederick the Great, quarreled with the French prince Jean-Baptiste De Boyer on theological issues: “Bring me, please, one clear proof of the existence of God,” the king demanded. The prince answered him: “Indeed, I have for his majesty a compelling and irrefutable proof. Proof that is one word: the Jews.” (from the Hidabrut website). “The Jews are the conscience of the world,” said Hitler, “and therefore they must be destroyed.”
We testify to God’s presence through our very existence and our miraculous history. In order to testify to what He wants for humanity – we have to make a little more effort. And it’s not exactly up to us; our ancestors made a covenant with the Creator of the world. It was for that purpose that He took them out of Egypt, and we and our descendants are a part of this covenant. Whenever we try to ignore who we are, our neighbors will remind us.
So the goal of the journey is to produce a modern and completely realistic nation that conducts itself in a moral manner and points in its very existence, and in the manner of its conduct, to its heavenly Father. A country that has a God. In the past, this was called a “a model society”. In our prayers, this task is worded like this: “To repair the world in the kingdom of the Almighty”. The apex of this mission is embodied in the Temple – in the royal palace of the King of the world, a place where the physical and the metaphysical meet, a place where all the inhabitants of the world can come and touch the infinite.
In the desert we lived as angels. The war with Pharaoh was conducted by the Creator of the world in His own honor, and our daily livelihood was also heavenly. When the time came to enter Israel, to work for our living, to fight our wars and conduct ourselves according to the rules of reality, we turned our backs on our national mission and preferred to remain in the desert – to be only “religious” and leave the responsibility for reality to others. It might be said that we decided to prove exactly the opposite of our mission – in other words, to prove that no nation is capable of living in this world with God in its midst.
When that whole generation passed, we entered the land and later also built the Temple – but then the opposite problem began to arise. We stuck to the practical life and gave up the connection to the Holy. We preferred to be in the land – “secular” only. The Temple was no longer a means of connecting the holy and the ordinary; on the contrary, in the Temple, the religious ritual took place in isolation from the life of the people outside it. The Temple became a fig leaf for a life without the Holy, and was therefore destroyed.
We are still driven by the power of the Jewish purpose – to unite heaven and earth. Without purpose, we have no existence. The lesson of the case of the spies is that in order to carry out this task, we need to be both secular and religious – at the same time – responsible for reality and involved in the sacred. The separation between the two is the sin of the spies, and the destruction of the Temple is its result.
Shabbat Shalom