As we move further into the book of Bamidbar, we encounter more incidents of Bnai Yisrael rebelling against Hashem, and the misfortunes and punishments that befell us as a consequence. At the same time, we are entering the summer months, anticipating the especially difficult three weeks preceding Tisha b’Av. This is always a challenging time for the nation of Israel, but this year in particular the stakes seem very high to us.
Ultimately, the purpose of struggling through trying times is to achieve the proper state of mind for doing teshuva, returning to Hashem as we strive to do every year at Elul. The most important thing for us to take away from our misfortunes is the knowledge that it is within our power to bring about more favorable outcomes.
The world was created so that Israel would receive the Torah, and all of the lands were made with the Land of Israel set aside and designated for us to inherit. We must never forget that when the world deviates from its proper state of affairs, it is only because the human race, and in particular the Nation of Israel, is not conducting ourselves in accordance with the Divine Will. In the coming weeks we will examine this idea and how it applies to our present circumstances.
In his classic introduction to Yosef Gikatilla’s Shaarei Ora, the noted scholar Yosef Ben Shlomo summarized Gikatilla’s conclusions about the spiritual underpinnings of the political state of exile and its impact on our security situation. He explained that in light of the principle that everything Hashem created in light and purity has a counterpart in corruption, there are four camps of supernatural agents of the nations of the world surrounding us, just as the Shechina is said to be surrounded by four camps of Heavenly Hosts. Ben Shlomo explains that these nations are not inherently bad or adversarial to us, but they are empowered and impelled to act in accordance with our conduct. When Israel does not live up to the appropriate standard of holiness and service of Hashem, we give the other nations the power and the desire to attack and to harm us. (Ben Shlomo, Intro. to Shaarei Ora pp. 36-37).
This idea is chiefly based on passages from Part Five of Shaarei Ora. There, R’ Yosef Gikatilla explains how, when Israel deviates from the Divine Will, the power is given to the supernatural agents representing the seventy nations (called Archons) to create barriers between Israel and Hashem. Because we lay the spiritual foundation for this severing by removing our hearts and our intentionality from the fulfillment of Hashem’s mitzvot, the nations of the world are given the power – from our own moral failure – to afflict and to persecute us.
Nevertheless, even in the depths of our exile, we are never forsaken by Hashem, and the Gemara teaches that even the Shechina, the Divine Presence on earth, goes into exile to suffer with us until our ultimate redemption. If we truly crave redemption and wish to be freed from the depredations of the many enemies who seek to destroy us, the most important and effective thing we can do is to return to Hashem our G-d. Hashem can and will destroy our enemies, but just as importantly, our commitment to performing His mitzvot will starve the forces of corruption of the power and the legitimacy to find new ways of tormenting us.
Rav Kook saw an aspect of this problem in the story of the spies that is the main topic of our parsha this week, Parshat Shelach. When the wicked spies wanted to discourage Israel from entering the land, they took large and succulent fruit as samples from the Land and they told the people (Bamidbar 13:31) that they could never defeat the nations “because they are more powerful than we are.” Rav Kook explains that the fruit appealed to the physical appetites of the spies; it satisfied their lust and cravings and they wanted to draw Israel into base materialism by seducing them with the same physical pleasures that had confused and led them astray. When they insisted that the inhabitants of the land could not be defeated in battle, it was an extension of this same principle – the preeminence of the physical and its triumph over spirituality. The spies had lost their faith in the unique mission of Israel. They’d become convinced that Israel was doomed to be a nation like all other nations, and from this perspective we could never hope to win such a struggle against ostensibly superior enemies.
Rav Kook emphasizes that the Torah doesn’t disparage this world or its pleasures – the crime of the spies wasn’t in their admiration and enjoyment of the fruits of the land. Their failure came about because they couldn’t see past the physical to the spiritual realms before which the physical pleasures and the physical Land of Israel are only a vestibule. We value our bodies and we value our Land, but this is true above all because they are vehicles for us to experience the higher and purer truth of the spiritual realms that we navigate with our performance of mitzvot and especially our service in the Beit HaMikdash.
Our relationship to this world – whether it is a divine agent instrumental in aiding us to better serve Hashem, or an adversary seeking to hunt and to destroy us – is a function of how we comport ourselves in our relationship to that which is above this world. When our connection to Hashem is pure and righteous, then everything in this world, including all the other nations, exists in order to serve us and to enhance our pleasure and joy. When, G-d forbid, our connection is not as it should be and we waver in our commitment, then the world and everything in it reflects this state of affairs back at us and we feel beset by enemies on all sides.
