When We Enter – Parsha Shelach 5786

Bamidbar 14:31: וטפכם אשר אמרתם לבז יהיה והבאתי אתם וידעו את הארץ אשר מאסתם בה 

As for your infants, whom you said will be taken captive as spoils, I will bring them there, and they will come to know the land that you despised. 

There is one constant throughout the Jewish story.

Yes, Gd and Torah remain our eternal source of life. But on a human level, there is another enduring presence: children.

They accompany our every chapter; every miracle, every tragedy, and every moment of triumph and uncertainty.

Children are easy to overlook when we read the accounts within the Torah and throughout our history.

But throughout slavery and the exodus, Sinai, the pogroms, and the Shoah, a new generation was always there watching, absorbing, bringing joy, and awaiting their time.

When the meraglim, the spies sent into Eretz Yisrael, returned with their false report, the consequence was that their generation would not merit entering the Promised Land, but their children would.

The children who had not endured and escaped slavery, who had not experienced the miracles and sinned in the wilderness, and who had not spread the false report of the meraglim would inherit the future.

Like leaves that bloom in the spring after a harsh winter, Jewish children have always risen to the occasion of embracing our immense responsibility.

There’s no greater reassurance in troubling times, such as these.

We can speculate that this is the reason the meraglim were tempted to mislead.

Perhaps they knew, consciously or sub-consciously, that their generation was too tainted with awe and trauma, too exhausted physically and spiritually, to claim this destiny, but they could see with their own eyes that a new generation would.

The future of the Jewish people has never depended on perfect generations. It has depended on faithful ones, generations willing to hand the covenant to their children, trusting that they will carry it farther than they themselves could.

Jewish children become Jewish men and women, who raise the next generation of Jewish children, carrying us across new thresholds in pursuit of eternal destiny.

Shabbat Shalom.