Some say that a road to hell is covered with good deeds. The heroes of the today chapter of Torah, the Jewish scouts sent to the Land of Israel come back and say that Jews will not be able to conquer the people who live in that land. This brings despair, Jews loose their faith in G-d’s help and G-d sentences them to wander across the desert for 40 years.
Chassids explain that those scouts did what they did with holy motivation. Jews in the desert did not work, obtained food from heaven and had no need to wash their clothes. So they were focused on Torah and spiritual growth.
Talmud tells us a story by a wise an whose name was Raba bar bar Chana. The story tells that he was once shown the people of Israel who died in the wilderness. He describes them as drunk giants lying on their backs. The wise man took a tsitsit from one of the giants and wanted to leave it but realized that he cannot walk. They said to him that if one takes something from the giants he then can not walk so the wise man had to return the tsitsit to the giant.
The Lyubavitch Rebe explains this mysterious passage as follows. The Jews of that generation were giants in a spiritual sense – they saw the great thing of G-d in Egypt, they crossed the Red Sea on dry land and heard the voice of G-d and learned Torah from Moshe himself. They were drunk with the spiritual and divided from the reality of this world. Their worldview was not focused on the physical world but on spiritual things. That is why they were described lying on their backs face up.
The scouts understood that in the Land of Israel they will have to get “sobre”: they will have to make war, built houses, to plow and sow… And they decided to make everyone to refuse to enter that Land. That was a dramatic mistake. Just thoughts and spiritual explorations cannot make us grow in spirit. G-d does not want a Jew to live like an angel divided from this world. A Jew must realize his spirituality in real deeds sanctifying the material world.
Shabat Shalom!
rav Slomo Willhelm.