This has been a special week to travel the Land of Israel.
I am privileged to spend 10 days in the Holy Land with the boys, families and staff of Cherry Gulch. We have seen the hills, vistas and rivers. We have touched the millennia-old stones and visited synagogues and sacred spaces. And we have heard the stories.
It’s a great marvel that the Spies that Moshe sent did not want to enter this land. This week’s parsha Shelach tells of their dreadful report and the near-mutiny that ensued. Why were they so reluctant to enter a land with so much potential?
It’s ironic how nowadays everyone is fighting over this tiny land, yet they despised it.
Perhaps, their greatest fear was leaving their own comfort zone. They had familiar surroundings and were engrossed in a spiritual journey. Sadly, to them that was the only journey they knew of. In fact, it was the only holy odyssey they could imagine. They couldn’t wrap their minds around an earthly existence that was sacred. To them the brute reality of the Mideast meant that it was unredeemable.
G-d’s plan was obviously different. Hashem envisions a land that is sacred – not just holy Heavens.
In order for the land to become sacred we often need to leave our comfort zone and expand our horizons.
The Land of Israel is also called Eretz HaTzvi, the Land of a Deer. One of the reasons Israel is compared to a deer is because just as a deerskin can stretch, so too the land can stretch. We usually think of the land as stretching in the sense that it accommodates more people than usual, that its potential is stretched and that it produces beyond its physical numbers.
But, another dimension of stretching is that it causes others to stretch themselves. It’s a land that demands of those who dwell in it to continue to push themselves. To reach for greater heights. Again. And again.
To be true agents of Moshe, true servants and G-d and to fulfill our truest potential – we need to take a leap.
In the Holy Land you can see that leap happening every day.
Best wishes for Shabbat Shalom from the land in which, “The eyes of G-d are always upon it.”