By Rebbetzin Lauren Levin
Parshat Shelach is where the fate of the Jewish people is sealed following the return of the spies:
“Your children shall wander in the desert for forty years and bear your defection until the last of your corpses has fallen in the desert. According to the number of days which you toured the Land forty days, a day for each year, you will [thus] bear your iniquities for forty years; thus you will come to know My alienation.”
A harsh punishment, yet it seems fair in the way it is presented measure for measure. The sages highlighted that this was not the only fate that was sealed at the time. Following the spies’ report we see the immediate collective reaction was one of mass hysteria: “The entire community raised their voices and shouted, and the people wept on that night.” The Talmud considers this cry one that cursed future generations and paved the way for collective national calamity: “The verse states: “And all the congregation lifted up their voice and cried” (Numbers 14:1). Rabba says that Rabbi Yoḥanan says: That day was the eve of the Ninth of Av, and the Holy One, Blessed be He, said: On that day they wept a gratuitous weeping, so I will establish that day for them as a day of weeping for the future generations”.
Indeed Rabbi Ḥayyim ben Moshe ibn Attar, writing in Morocco in the 18th century reads this decree into the verse itself. He notes that the first clause describes what happened that evening in the desert when it says, ‘the entire community raised their voices’. ‘The people wept on that night’ refers to Tisha B’Av in the future and the collective weeping of Bnei Yisrael across the ages.
What was so wrong with crying? We see crying frequently in the Bible. We are told of Joseph crying seven times through his story; the Jewish people have cried before without such strong reprimand, and we even see descriptions of God crying out of empathy for His people. In today’s society telling people to ‘stop crying’ is considered to be invalidating their feelings. Crying is a cathartic and critical process for preserving wellbeing.
A fascinating Midrash contrasts this cry with two other ‘cries’ that also altered the trajectory of Jewish history. The one was on the rivers of Babylon. As they wept for Jerusalem, they vowed: ‘If I forget you O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its strength’. Their cry conveyed their pain, but was also a mantra, and expressed their resolve to remain true to themselves. The second significant cry was that of the matriarch Rachel, as her descendants passed by her gravesite when they were being led into exile. The description given is ‘Rachel is crying for her children’, denoting a mother full of empathy, pleading in the heavenly courtroom that God show compassion to her children. In the merit of such a cry, God promised that one day ‘the children will return to their borders’. These cries are ‘cries of substance’ and highlight just how empty the cry of Bnei Yisrael in the desert was. Their cry was not a call to action, nor a way of processing difficult news, internalising and building resilience. Rather it marked their moment of total despair. Upon hearing about the giants that inhabited the land and viewing the giant fruit that had been brought back, they felt the only thing left for them to do was to lament their fate, crying ‘if only we would have died in Egypt’.
There are cries…and there are cries. They look the same but are worlds apart. The one smacks of frustration, anger and despair and leads nowhere. The other is a desperate cry to achieve one’s destiny despite the circumstances, a call to faith, and when there is faith there can be hope.