Look inward, not outward. The parsha begins with the story of the spies and ends with the mitzvah of tzitzit. It begins with the sending out of spies latur et ha’aretz, to scout out the land, and it ends with the enjoinment – lo taturu – that same verb, latur, but in the negative – don’t go following after your hearts and your eyes, but instead look at the tzitzit you are wearing and remember God. Putting these together, the story of the scouts shows us the dangers of looking outwards on the one hand, and the mitzvah of tzitzit offers us the alternative of looking inwards instead.
Like Grasshoppers
So beginning with the scouts, with one very telling statement they make upon their return from their scouting mission: “We felt like grasshoppers compared to everyone else. We felt like they were all giants, all so much bigger and stronger than we were, almost super human (paraphrase of Numbers 13:33).” Whether or not there actually were people of large stature in the land, this statement is deeply resonant psychologically. We so often do view others as “more than” or “better than” we are, smarter, more capable, more put together – especially when we enter a new situation as the spies did here – and we feel ourselves to be small by contrast, like grasshoppers crawling around under foot, almost less than human.
This comparative mode of thinking is common for us and corrosive. It works both ways; sometimes we feel superior and sometimes inferior; the two are intertwined. Either way, there is this habit of looking outward and judging ourselves in comparison to those around us.
Don’t Compare
The Torah says emphatically – lo taturu – don’t scout around, looking outward, following others. I take this as an admonition not to compare. Just don’t do it. Comparing doesn’t work out well, the Torah shows us. Look what happens. You end up immobilized and frightened like the spies, unable to fulfill your potential and your destiny, unable to move forward to a new land out of a misconception about who you are and what you can accomplish. Lo taturu. Don’t compare.
Tzitzit: Turning Inwards Instead
What can you do instead? Center yourself. Turn inward. Shore yourself up and know that it’s all right here inside you. I believe this is part of the message of tzitzit. Tzitzit is a garment with tassels that sit at the four corners of your body, as if demarcating your own boundaries, creating the sense of a wholeness, marking out the edges of this whole person that you are, as if the tassels are arrows pointing back inward towards yourself. Lo taturu, don’t look out; look inside these four walls, this container of yourself.
Our eyes naturally look outward, to the sparkling gold in other people’s appearances, but tzitzit asks us to turn our eyes inward and trust that we have all the gold and the light we need right here inside. We can be content, complete and self sufficient in ourselves, and nothing and no one outside – no matter how giant – can touch this knowing
Each An Entire World
The tassels of the tzitzit are said to sit on the four corners, the arba kanfot, of your clothing. This word kanaf, corner, is the same one we use to refer to the four corners of the world, arba kanfot ha’aretz, implying that we are each an entire world, marked off by these four corners of tzitzit.
Each of us is indeed an entire world. There is a famous mishnah in Sanhedrin (4:5) that says that anyone who destroys one person is considered as if they have destroyed an olam male, an entire world, and anyone who sustains one person is considered as if they have sustained an entire world. The mishnah explains that this is the reason that the first human was created as a single human – in order to make it clear the value of each and every human being as an entire world of possibility and potential.. We are also all descended from one human so that no one person can say to their neighbor – my father is greater than your father. We all come from the same ur human. There is both a radical equality and a radical completeness in each one of us.
What would it feel like to think of yourself as a complete world in and of yourself, a microcosm of the whole, replicated inside you in its entirety? We don’t normally fully inhabit this completeness and so we spend a lot of time looking outwards, desperate to fill up from the outside. That makes sense – of course we do also need each other; we are both complete and incomplete. But remembering our own completeness is essential to interacting with each other with integrity.
Returning to Self Through Tzitizit: A Story
The gemara (Menachot 44a) tells the following story about tzitzit:
There was once a man who was meticulous about one mitzvah, the mitzvah of tzitzit. One time, he heard about a beautiful prostitute in Rome who charged 400 zuz. He sent 400 zuz and made an appointment. On the appointed day, he arrived and was ushered into her room. She had arranged 7 beds, six silver beds, one on top of the other, and at the top, a seventh bed of gold upon which she was lying waiting for him. He began to climb the ladders and as he did so, the tassels of his tzitzit slapped him on the face and he fell backwards and sat on the ground and realized he needed to leave.
I think this story illustrates visually what happens to us. We are enticed by the ladder of hierarchy, comparison and desire, by the illusion of something better outside us, something silver or maybe even gold that we believe we don’t have in ourselves. But then the tassels of the tzitzit come and knock some sense back into us. They throw us back to the ground. The ground may be low, but it is ground, it is back to our essence, to our ability to stand on our own, to know that we have everything we need right here. We are grounded in ourselves instead of climbing the ladder.
Blue Thread of Divine Connection
When I imagine that story, what I imagine is that it is the petil techelet, the special blue thread of the tzitzit tassels (Numbers 15:38), that was the one that returned him to himself. This petil techelet, blue like the heavens, represents our divine essence, the seed of the divine that was planted inside us. We are made up of many strands and threads, but our essence is this one central petil techelet, this single blue thread of the tzitzit, this divine essence. When we lose ourselves in comparison and ambition, what we are forgetting is that there can be no comparisons among divine essences. We each have this petil techelet, this blue thread, deep inside us. When we remember it and return to it, we remember our true value, our true light, not earned, but always already there. Maybe you can feel the tug of that divine thread of blue inside you, like a cord of connection pulling you into alignment with the blue heavens above and with the divine inside yourself, your own true blue essence.
From this place, comparisons with others make no sense. The world’s ladders of silver and gold are a mirage, not ultimate reality. We are all sitting on the ground together, each with our own blue thread. I see a field of bright colored flowers and your flower and my flower are blooming among them. They each stand tall, plenty of room for each one to shine. They cannot be compared. They are each simply stunning.
Lo taturu. Don’t compare. Know your own value. You are neither a grasshopper nor a giant. We are each a whole world onto ourselves.
Photo by Porapak Apichodilok at Pexels
