When you arrive in the Land

Numbers 15:2 Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: When you arrive in the Land of your dwelling place, which I am giving you… ki tavo el eretz…

The Torah portion Shelach is famous for the episode of the spies – the 12 delegates of every tribe of Israelites are sent by Moses to spy on the land of Israel. They see the land, they bring the fruit, and 10 of them complain that the land is impossible to conquer, it is inhabited by giants, “a land that consumes its inhabitants” (13:32). Moses and Aaron fell on their faces before the entire congregation, Joshua and Caleb tore their clothes (14:5-6), the entire congregation threatened to pelt them with stones (14:10), and the Lord appeared in all His magnificent glory and anger.  Moses pleaded before the Lord, invoking His attributes of Mercy, and Hashem relented “I have forgiven them in accordance with your word – salachti ki’dvarecha” (14:20).  However, the errant generation who perceived Divine glory and witnessed the miracles in Egypt is doomed to wander and die in the desert.

14:33 your children shall wander in the desert for forty years and bear your defection until the last of your corpses has fallen in the desert.

How then can we understand ki tavo el eretz – when you arrive in the Land, and all the laws of living in Eretz Israel?  Whom does G-d address – is He talking to the children who will arrive in the land, is he talking to Joshua and Caleb, the two spies who spoke well of the land and were allowed to enter it after 40 years of wandering, or is He addressing the entire nation, listing the whole set of agricultural laws that are only applicable in the land? The chapter starts with:

The Lord spoke to Moses saying: Speak to the children of Israel and say to them: When you arrive in the Land of your dwelling place, which I am giving you (Num. 15:1-2)

Depending on who is listening, this statement sounds either like a cruel sarcasm, or like a glimmer of hope – maybe He does not really mean it, maybe there is a chance to turn back the wheel…

Just as the curse of corpses dropping in the dessert is repeated twice in 14:29 and 14:32, so is the implied promise “When you arrive in the Land to which I am bringing you” is repeated in 15:2 and 15:18, and the second implication is even more generous than the first:

15:2-3 when you arrive in the Land of your dwelling place, which I am giving you, and you make a fire offering to the Lord…

15:18-19 when you arrive in the Land to which I am bringing you and you eat from the bread of the Land…

It is so easy to slip into an anguished despair: what do You mean “when you arrive”? You said that our corpses will drop in the desert, we are walking through this desert for so long already, and we will never reach the Promised Land!  That was the common thinking of many people, including the man who went to gather wood on Shabbat, snapping in disregard for everything sacred, giving up, not giving a damn, throwing a party, a drunken orgy, a Woodstock in the shadow of the nuclear Holocaust. 

But here we are, we still exist, we call ourselves Jews, for better or worse.  We are descendants of those who went through fire and water, who survived and preserved the identity, who did not convert into coercive religion backed by the power of tyrannical state, nor married foreign women to dissolve into the ocean of nations. We persevered, because those ancestors, doomed to die in exile, chose to cling to the glimmer of hope, to believe in the promise of prophecy, to hold on to the blue thread of techelet connecting a Jew to the source of holiness. 

Speak to the children of Israel and you shall say to them that they shall make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments, throughout their generations, and they shall affix a thread of sky blue [wool] on the fringe of each corner.  This shall be fringes for you, and when you see it, you will remember all the commandments of the Lord to perform them, and you shall not wander after your hearts and after your eyes after which you are going astray. So that you shall remember and perform all My commandments and you shall be holy to your G-d. (Num. 38-40)

In the darkest time when all hope is lost, when the deepest strongest desire is out of reach, we can still choose to retain our connection to G-d, because when everything else is lost, this is all we have.