In this post on Future-Fear, I will ponder the theological implications of what I have been writing about from a Judeo perspective. What inspired me to undertake this journey into how time is understood and used today was reading Rabbi Jonathan Sack's commentary on the Book of Numbers,
"Covenant and Conservation, Numbers and the Wilderness Years." Rabbi Sachs brings the Book of Numbers alive and relevant in our own age. The entire commentary is worth reading, but what caught my attention was his comments throughout this book on Moses sending spies into the land of Canaan that became a turning point for Moses and the Israelites of his generation.
I will not go into all the details of this story, which the reader can do by reading Numbers chapters 13 and 14 along with Rabbi Sach's excellent commentary. What I find intriguing is this particular story's broad metaphorical implications regarding how we deal with the past, cope with the present, and face the future. I say metaphorical because all history, over time, becomes metaphorical in application. It is this metamorphosis into the metaphorical that allows us and allures us to use the past when coping with the what is, the present. I strongly suspect that the authors of the Hebrew scriptures understood this about their history and use it to great effect in their formulating their scriptures.
SPIES AND LIES
What I have not discussed in these posts on future-fear is the element of faith. In this turning-point story of the Israelites' forty year sojourn in the wilderness, we are presented with a classic example of the clash between belief and faith. Of the twelve spies sent to check out the land they were to occupy, only Caleb and Joshua saw the situation for what it was - ready, with God's help (faith), for the taking.
As I mentioned in my other posts, the past is never recalled with precision; particularly, when the past is colored by belief. We see this played out dramatically when the encamped Israelites hear and accept the account given by the ten spies who gave their report about giants and the fortified cities rather than Caleb and Joshua.
What the other ten saw was seen through the lens of what they may have heard about the people who currently occupied the land; an ideological based belief that they were giants descended from the legendary, quasi-divine race called the Nephilim. They also saw fortified cities that recalled power of Egypt during their slavery and assumed the inhabitants were powerful like the Egyptians. It is probable that what they believed about the current residents of the Promised Land was what they were looking for, based on what they had heard. Ultimately what they believed they found is what they believed they would find.
The questions their report raises are:
Had they ever experienced giants? Why the reference to the Nephilim?
Was this a belief handed down through the generations during the 400 year period the Israelites lived in Egypt?
Was the Israelites' acceptance of the worst scenario simply based on the majority of the spies having agreed with each other that entering the land would be a disaster?
Was that a shared belief the spies possessed before entering the land?
Here the writers of Numbers demonstrate the little appreciated fact that it is our beliefs rather than our actual experiences that are more influential in shaping our visions of the future. According to Numbers, the Israelites not only expressed a longing to return to the reliability of past which was most recently their slavery in Egypt but also threatened open rebellion against Moses and Aaron for bringing them into the wilderness. In addition, they threatened Caleb's life for giving them a report that didn't coincide with their fear-based beliefs.
Hadn't they witnessed the plagues, the Passover event that set them free, and walking through the Red Sea? These all required a high degree of faith in God and Moses. Wasn't that enough to convince them that wherever Moses would lead them they would be safe because God was clearly on Moses's side?
Apparently not.
According to Rabbi Sacks, the issue was that these freed Israelites had not yet adapted to their freedom. Up till the the time they reached the border of the Promised Land, they were not responsible for their freedom. Once they crossed the border they would have to take possession not only of the land but also the responsibility to remain free, and they weren't ready to do so. The Book of Numbers backs that assessment. It is their apparent weakness to take responsibility that motivates Moses to plea for them to be spared and results in their wandering in the wilderness for the next forty years.
Beyond that, the authors of Numbers strongly hint that their lack of faith in themselves and God was also connected to their beliefs about the inhabitants of the land - that what caused them to rebel was their belief-based fear that they would face an enemy of super humans who would treat them worse than the Egyptians; a belief confirmed by the report by ten spies who believed they found what they feared.
The important distinction between belief and faith made in this story is defined via reference to the Nephilim, a mythic race mentioned in the Book of Genesis. The authors of Numbers don't question the belief; they merely state it as a major factor in the Israelites' desire to abandon their newly obtained freedom. The distinction between belief and faith may not have been a conscious concern at the time Numbers was written, but one can clearly trace the distinction between the two terms in this story.
The distinction is simply this: Faith is a matter of the human spirit - an act of trust exercised in the moment. Beliefs are matters of the human mind - thoughts that shape our understanding of the past, our perceptions of the present, and our vision for the future. Beliefs can serve to define the basis of one's faith, but faith is not dependent on belief. Humans can act from faith without the thought of belief and frequently do.
Living through the plagues, the Passover event, and the parting of the Red Sea involved acts of faith. The Israelites in those moments did not have time to form beliefs about what was happening. Those moments required trust in coping with "what is" - with what was happening at the time. When they fled Egypt they didn't have time to think, they had to flee as they were eventually pursued. They didn't have time to squander in doubt, they had to exercise faith in something they were just getting to know.
After spending a few weeks in the dessert wilderness of Sinai before arriving at the border to the Promised Land, they had forty days (the time allotted the spies to check out the Promised Land) to think and talk about what to expect once they crossed that border. The expectations they had were clearly shaped by their preexistent beliefs about the inhabitants of the land, a belief shared and confirmed by ten of the twelve spies. Only Caleb and Joshua were able to set aside these beliefs and see things for what they were.
As Rabbi Sachs points out in his commentary, fortified cities were not considered a sign of strength, but rather weakness and I would add a sign of division. Neither Caleb nor Joshua mention giants that eat their own, which begs the question why the others did. Were they intentionally lying?
The saying, "Seeing is believing," holds true if one does not possess an
a priori belief one is seeking to see. In most cases, people tend to see what they believe. For example, if one believes in the paranormal one is more likely to experience and see the paranormal at work. If one believes in conspiracy theories, one sees all kinds of speculative evidence to support them. Such beliefs can and frequently do alter perception on both a personal and a societal level to "what is" occurring at the time.
FOUR CENTURIES, FORTY DAYS, AND FOUR DECADES
You would think that a book called Numbers would indicate that numbers means something. I would venture to say that is correct. As I have mentioned in past posts, numerology was readily used in scripture as a code to broaden its meaning without having to resort to lengthy commentary as we can easily do today. Numbers mean more than their simple numeric value. In numerology, numbers 1 through 9 and multiples thereof have cosmic and mystical connotations.
The Torah uses the number 4 and multiples of 4 to suggest formation or what I have referred to as transfiguration in past posts. In Genesis, there are the forty days and forty nights of the flood. There is Abraham being informed that his descendants would dwell in Egypt for four hundred years. This presumably happened, and we can assume that for most of those years the Children of Israel lived in peace and prosperity until a pharaoh came into power who did not know their history.
How many generations lived in slavery is not known, but what we can deduce from this story in Numbers is that it was not too many generations as they can recall a history of the good times their ancestors enjoyed in Egypt; a time in history they thought possible to return to while waiting at the border of Promised Land. What led them to think so is a mystery, but I suspect it is that the hardship of the traveling in the desert for several weeks, causing generalized fatigue and anxiety with regard to what to except when the spies returned.
Then there was a forty day waiting period at the border to allow the spies time to check out the land. There is an implicit question that forms in one's mind as to why there was a need to check the land out before crossing the border. After all, didn't God lead them out of Egypt and swallow the pursuing Egyptian cavalry in the Red Sea? Why stop now? Why the hesitancy?
The answer is coded in the use of 40 days. They were made to pause in the liminal edge between present and future. This was meant to be a moment of transfiguration, but were they ready? Up until this point God had provided them everything, but this overt intervention is not God's usual way of doing things (or so the writer's of Numbers are suggesting).
According to the Book of Exodus, God kick started the exodus from Egypt by utilizing a new pharaoh who took the throne of Egypt and did not know about Joseph or his association with saving the known world from starvation during his time. This new pharaoh's enslavement of the Children of Israel put them in a position to accept the Exodus.
As you recall, it was God who hardens Pharaoh's heart. Why?
One likely reason is that the Children of Israel had become complacent in their slavery. They accepted it as their lot and were not motivated to leave it. I am not suggesting they liked it, but rather that they became disempowered by it and could not realistically see a way out of it, at which point they became like a domesticated animal to the Egyptians; totally dependent on them for survival. As such, they took the position of not trying ruffle the feathers of their task masters. They found themselves on the fringe of civilization. What gets lost in such an environment is the ability to desire, to remember a better but lost past or hope for a better future.
According to the Book of Exodus, things had to get tougher for them in order to rekindle the fires of desire, which brings back the memories of a promised land. The ten plagues serve not only to convince Pharaoh to release the Israelites but also ( and more importantly) demonstrates to the Israelites that God is with them and is their defender. They needed a reason to hope and move beyond their victimhood. Witnessing plagues repeatedly leveled against the Egyptians replanted the seeds of hope.
Camped on the border of their future, at the edge of the Promised Land, the question became a matter of their readiness to face the blank page that was their future. Did they have enough faith in themselves to exercise faith in God to carry them through in their own endeavors as a free people?
They didn't.
They were physically freed from their enslavement in Egypt, but remained spiritually domesticated by that experience. They remained mentally enslaved; fearful of the unfettered other and remained dependent on the strongman like Moses or God for sustenance as exhibited in wanting to Moses replaced by someone who would lead them back to Egypt. To remedy this ingrained enslavement to the past, we are told that the Israelites of that generation and of a certain age would not be permitted to cross into the Promised Land. As such, they had to remain in the wilderness for forty years. Ultimately, the only two people of that generation to be allowed to do so were Caleb and Joshua who saw the present for what it was and were willing to engage the future faithfully.
RELEVANCE
The Hebrew scriptures transcend the merely historical. History, the past, is recorded in scripture only if it has a meaning and presents a continuum of relevance in each and every age it is read and studied. This is particularly true of the Hebrew scriptures. What one encounters in the Hebrew scriptures is an exploration of the human experience juxtaposed against an evolving theology of Being (God) in the story of a particular group of people called the Chosen People. The point of their story being told is its relevance for all people of every age.
The story of the spies is a window into the universal difficulties all humans have in dealing with our past, in coping with the present, and in facing the future. What is obvious in their tale is less obvious in the unfolding story of our own time.
All of us stand on the liminal boundary between today and tomorrow, the present and the future. All of us are challenged by the beliefs we possess or that are in possession of us. All of us are tethered to a past that shapes our understanding of the present and that colors our vision of the future.
Like the freed Israelites, we find ourselves, throughout our history having to contend with our beliefs, which particularly avail themselves during moments of uncertainty. Fear magnifies the unkown and the unexperienced possibilities that our minds struggle with; the blank page of the future, the void, that is yet to be filled, but how and with what?
As mentioned in my last post, fear produces two seemingly polarized responses, despair or hope. The generation of freed Israelites had learned to live with despair. Despair became their "go to" emotion. Their ingrained feeling readily confirmed their beliefs as they did not fully understand nor had they experienced or acquired an understanding of hope's strength or the motivation of faith to act. They never had to deal with themselves as a free people. As such, they had to incubate and inculcate such abilities into the fabric of their being as a people during their sojourn in the wilderness. It was in the wilderness that they began to become a community of hope and faith and a place where they would form the bond of love between themselves and their God that would enable the next generation to cross into the Promised Land.
APPLICATION
Reacting to the future remains a polarizing experience of despair and hope in every age. The story of the spies becomes a metaphor for our own age on how are coping with the present and how we perceive the future. Hope and faith appear at low ebb right now as lying has become a tool of government in creating a sense of despair; particularly in the United States were enslavement to the past is evident.
"Making America Great Again" is a fallacious lure that suggests an unfounded problem with the recent past. It appears on the America's landscape as a play for power by a scheming few. It has caused those who subscribe to it to fear the trajectory of progress that has been made throughout the world in the last several years and abandon principles and principled behavior that is the hallmark of any well established and secure democratic nation, such as the United States. It has enabled its adherents to ignore the present, and long for a past that cannot be returned to and most likely never existed as they believe it did. It is a meme intended to mentally and spiritually enslave a following in order to secure the reins of government by a few - a meme that has to be fueled by conspiracy theories and outright lies in order to maintain its hold on the enslaved.
How long this fear will keep us in the wilderness of an isolating nationalism remains uncertain, but standing on the border between the what is and what's next is not the place or the time to react preemptively from despair and abandon principles and principled behavior - to fight fire with fire. Such a conflagration may take generations of healing.
Rather, it seems to me, to be a time and a place to act from faith and with hope in the goodness that has always been part of who we human beings are and are meant to be.
Until next time, stay faithful.
