OK, that’s a dream, a mirage.
But who even thinks of speaking to a grasshopper?
A grasshopper is close to being inanimate. It has basically no brain. It is almost weightless and it looks like a twig. It gets blown around by the wind.
The mighty leaders of Israel, who had recently stood at Mount Sinai and heard the Voice of God uttering the Commandments, now felt that they were grasshoppers. Can you imagine?
When you know you are a servant of the Almighty, Who created and rules the world with unlimited power and understanding, you absorb part of His Torah and you become empowered to the extent you absorb it. You become righteous. You become wise. You become invincible.
If you are a grasshopper, you are like a leaf. Your moral and spiritual powers are null; you are nothing.
As soon as Eve saw things from the snake’s point of view, she became like the snake. She was reduced from an exalted state to the condition of a lowly creature slithering in the dust. In fact she and her children now are condemned to the dust.
Created as beings who would never taste death, through their catastrophic miscalculation Adam and Eve brought death upon themselves and their children.
They listened to the snake.
The meraglim became afraid. Immediately they began to see the world through the eyes of the Nephilim, giants who rely on their own strength and do not know what it means to stand at Har Sinai and become servants of the Lord of the Universe. These giants are in the end no more than snakes slithering in the dust or grasshoppers sitting on a twig. They will all end up in the dust.
And so the mighty meraglim were reduced to the status of grasshoppers.They saw a world of gashmius, a world of nature, bounded by dust. From dust they came and to dust they returned, for “in this wilderness shall your carcasses drop” (Bamidbar 14:29).
From that perspective, there was no way they could conquer the Land of Israel.
The entire history of the Children of Israel is a history of accomplishing the impossible. It is logically impossible to do what we have done.
How could we have escaped from Egypt?
How could we have spoken with Hashem at Har Sinai?
How could over a million men, women and children have survived forty years in the desert?
How could we have conquered Eretz Yisrael from the giants?
How could we have built a Beis HaMikdash in which the Presence of God descended to earth?
How could we have survived the destruction of two Temples, dispersion to the four corners of the earth and two thousand years of relentless persecution while maintaining our ancient Covenant with God – and then have returned as an intact nation to the Land of our Heritage?
Is any one of these things logically possible?
Do we operate under the laws of nature?
The entire basis of our national existence is that we are outside the realm of reason and nature. Our existence can be understood only on that basis. If we see the world through the eyes of the snake or the Nephilim, we are nullifying our ability to carry out the Will of Hashem and the destiny assigned to the Children of Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov.
Of course it’s not logical that Am Yisrael could conquer the Land of Israel.
How could we conquer even Jericho, let alone the entire country?
When the meraglim first desired to spy out the Land, they “approached” Moshe Rabbeinu (see Rashi on Bamidbar 13:2). At that very moment the motive became clear.
