Word: לתור, latur, to scout out
Context: This root is used 13 times in this week’s parsha: a poetically perfect 12 times to refer to the scouting of the 12 tribal representatives who explored the land of Israel, and once, at the end of the parsha, with reference to tzitzit: in the negative form, lo taturu, you should not go scouting out after your heart and your eyes (Numbers 15:39).
Elsewhere: The only other places in the Torah that use this root are once in Devarim (1:33), also with reference to the meraglim, the scouts, and significantly, one other time very close to our parsha, in last week’s parsha, with reference to the aron, the ark: “The ark of the covenant of the Lord traveled in front of them a three days’ journey” latur lahem menuchah, “to seek out a resting place for them” (Numbers 10:33).
Interpretation: At times we feel a lot of fear and doubt about the future, about what lies ahead of us and about our capacity to handle it. We feel like tiny grasshoppers looking ahead at the task of conquering giants; we are overwhelmed and terrified and full of doubt, both self doubt, and also, to be honest, doubt about God’s plans for us, whether we are in fact on the right road, and sometimes, whether there even is a God who will protect us. We shake and we quake in our fear and our doubt, and it becomes difficult, at times, to move forward.
What lies ahead also often has the fundamental quality of being unknown and unfamiliar, especially if we allow ourselves to be on a path that continues to unfold in new directions, to places, to lands, we have never been before. In order to quell the fear and the doubt and the terrible feeling of not knowing, the groundlessness of uncertainty, we try to gain some certainty. We try latur, “to scout out” information, to send out messengers to probe and ascertain – what’s it like up there in that next place, good or bad, large or small, hard or easy, hot or cold. Tell us. We want information. We want to be able to know the unknown, to have something to hold on to, some ground to stand on in this groundless place we are in.
But no matter how much information we get from our scouting excursions, we will not be able to allay the fear and the doubt, the relentless gnawing anxiety of not knowing. And so the Torah shows us a case of scouting gone awry, of scouts who come back with information but no fortitude. On the contrary, information obtained through the lens of fear only increases, escalates and validates fear. The large grapes become signs of a country that is abnormal in some creepy unnatural way, the grapes oversized, the people giants, and the land itself one that “eats its own inhabitants.” This kind of scouting excursion does not help us deal with our fears and doubts, but only feeds into them.
And so the Torah, in the very same parsha as the scouts, also tells us lo taturu, “don’t scout.” Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t try to solve an emotional problem with information. If you are sitting in a place of groundlessness right now, if you are feeling the anxiety of an unknown future, if you are feeling doubtful of your own capacity to handle it, don’t put your trust in humanly scouted information. It won’t help.
What does help? Finding some way to access the sense that there is this aron, this ark, the presence of God in the world, that is going forward three days before you, always three days ahead, “scouting” out not information but menuchah, rest, for you. This is the way of rest, of peace, of deep inner calm and relaxation, trusting and coming to know that there is a divine path unfolding in front of you – you can’t always see it very far ahead – but coming to trust that there is such an angel of God leading you along the way, that you don’t need to know what will happen, that it is okay not to know, merely to trust and to allow the peace that comes from such trust, that what needs to unfold will unfold exactly as it should.
What happens to our fear and our doubt then? They don’t go away. And we don’t try to banish them. Instead we learn to hold them in this aron, this divine container of peace. The aron in the desert actually housed, among other things, the pieces of the tablets broken by Moshe at the sight of the Golden Calf. That sin, too, was caused by this anxiety of an unknown future – where did Moshe go? what will happen to us now? – the fear and the doubt involved in setting off on a new path. The aron holds the pieces of all that brokenness, all the shattered pieces of ourselves that shudder and shake and feel lost and uncertain – the aron can hold all of that in its peace. There is something that can hold all that shakiness of ours, all those gnawing shards. It is a divine container of peace.
Where do we find this container? How do we access it? We build it inside ourselves, or perhaps better, we continually find it and uncover it inside ourselves, a divine container in which we can rest our most fearful parts. Perhaps that is visually what the tzitzit (four-cornered fringed garment) represent, four corners around a person that mark off a divine container, ourselves, in which to hold the panic, the doubt, the terror, the uncertainty. We forget again and again that it exists, which is why the same passage enjoins us uzekhartem, “you should remember,” remember again, find again, return, continually discover anew that when we are feeling uncertain, we don’t need to be human scouts for information; we don’t need to know; we can lay our fears inside the aron, and trust that it will search out for us the peace that lies ahead, trust in the angel riding ahead looking out for our resting place.
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