Shelach (Numbers 13:1-15:41) Do We “See” What We Wish To “See”?

Porte de Damas à Jerusalem

It is very easy to lose sight of oneself. The world in which we live is so filled with distractions, temptations, and easy avenues for gratification that so many often just get lost. I, of course, mean spiritually lost, a loss of a sense of who am I? We can be easily distracted by what we see or want to see. Thus, the central theme of this week’s portion which has Moses sending scouts to assess the land. The familiar story has ten of the scouts returning with a negative report and only two, Joshua and Caleb, returning with the positive report of a “land flowing with milk and honey”. The “stiff necked” people see fear and, as a result, wander for forty years. While some saw fear, others saw opportunity. The old expression “perception is reality” really is a theme of this portion.
But, like all of Torah, the texts speak to each of us and our experience. All of us, at different times in our lives, have “seen” things a certain way, only to discover, maybe years later, that what we saw was not the truth. What we saw was, for many, what we wished to see at that time in our life. Looking back on our own life and the choices that we have made; we can sometimes honestly reflect on the “if only I had seen this then”! Life, however, is not like that. We reflect the times in which we live and have lived and a message again from the portion is that the contexts of where we are in life so often determine how we “see “things. The test of all of this is how we adapt to new circumstances and growth which may, we hope, allow us to “see” things from a different vantage point. Sometimes this is called maturity, or the lifelong process of maturing.
In an interesting way this portion also gives us a very easy way to remember to check the contexts of when and how we make choices as we grow. How can we remember to try and see life and our choices that should be grounded in an ethical and moral foundation? At the end of the portion, we read of the command to “make fringes on the corner of their garments” (15:38). This is a tangible visible reminder that we need to be grounded in a faith tradition, so that when we look at the fringes on the “tallit” we can be reminded that we are part of a sacred tradition and that when we look to make a decision, we need to “see” that the choices we have need to be based on the ethical and moral traditions of Jewish life. The fringes remind us that after we “see” things, we need to “look” deeply at the context and implications of what we see.
Shabbat shalom
Rabbi Richard F Address

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