“And Caleb quieted the people before Moses, and said, Let us go up at once, and possess it; for we are well able to overcome it.”Calev creates a dream, a goal for the Israelite nation; one that the other spies believe is simply unattainable. The other spies have no hope, no desire to enter the Land that they had thought about for so long; they have no dream for the future of their people.
We see another example of problematic visioning later in the parshah. After the people see that those who spoke badly about attempting to enter the Land of Canaan die, some of them seek to remedy the mistake. They wake up early in the morning, and tell Moshe that they want to enter the Land, that they want to fight the current inhabitants of the Land. But Moshe says to them, No, now is not the time. They do not listen to him, and they go and fight, and they get killed. These people have a concrete action in mind; but they do not have a clear vision for the future of the Israelites.
The great Jewish thinker Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel writes in a similar vein about prayer:
“Prayer is no substitute for action. It is, rather, like a beam thrown from a flashlight before us into the darkness. It is in this light that we who grope, stumble, and climb discover where we stand, what surrounds us, and the course which we should choose.” (Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, pg. 342)Heschel advises us, as the parsha does, to combine dreams and actions, to determine a vision, and then follow it through with action. What are your dreams? For this summer? For the next school/fiscal year? What do you want to accomplish?
I wish all of us a summer full of big dreams, hopes, and goals, and the ability to follow it up with appropriate action.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi David Russo
