When the Soul Becomes G-d’s Scout

The camp breathes. Dust still hangs in the air — that fine, hot dust you do not notice whilst breathing it in, and only become aware of once it settles in the throat like a question postponed for too long. The cloud does not move. It too seems to be waiting. Then the sentence comes, and it opens something with no outer wall: Shelach lecha anashim. Moshe hears it, and twelve men set out — eyes sent ahead by a heart that does not yet dare to look for itself. Almost as if the promise now had to be tested. Perhaps. The desert alters the rhythm of the heart. One only realizes that once it is already too late to realize it.

The scouts walk through silent hills. In the Valley of Eshkol — and this is no mythical place, this is earth, light, smell — they cut down a cluster of grapes so heavy that two men must carry it together on a pole between them; inside that weight lies the whole promise, unbearably concrete. Abundance does not hide. Life is there. And yet: during the forty days that follow, it is not the land that changes. What changes, slowly and without any of the men registering it, is the angle from which they regard themselves standing before it. At first they speak of fertility, of streams, of what they have seen. Then comes the but. High walls. Giants. Impossibility.

Caleb steps forward and silences the crowd. His voice does not shout; it holds. He says they can go up, that the land has remained good, that the promise has not shifted. Yehoshua stands beside him like a flame no wind can extinguish — and the wind does grow stronger. Fear has already found its echo........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)