Lo taturu. Don’t look outward and compare yourself to others. The scouts did that and all they could see were giants all around and themselves as grasshoppers by contrast. That’s the way it is for us when we live in the shadow of comparison. But the end of the parsha offers us an alternative way of living — in the form of the tzitzit whose tassels point back inwards towards ourselves, marking out the four corners of this entire world that we each are. In this meditation, we use the story of the scouts and the mitzvah of tzitizit to help us practice feeling into our own self containment and completeness as an alternative to our habitual comparative mode of thinking. We practice turning inwards instead of outwards and living into ourselves as each an olam male, an entire world onto ourselves.
Sources:
Numbers Chapter 13, especially verse 33
Numbers 15:38-39
Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5
Talmud Menachot 44a
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