Machshavot HaLev - Yeshivat Lev HaTorah

178
Shelach
Driving on a Two-Way Street
Rav Michael Siev
T his week’s parsha famously contains the episode of the meraglim and the
devastating impact of their sin on the Jewish people. As a result of their report, the
people cry and complain, Hashem gets angry with them, and the entire nation spends
an extra forty years in the desert. A whole generation loses its right to enter Eretz
Yisrael with the exception of Yehoshua and Kalev, and, according to the midrash,
Tisha B’av is established as a yom bechiya le-dorot (See Gemara Ta’anit 29a).
There is one famous personality whose fate is not explicitly discussed in our parsha:
Moshe Rabbeinu. It seems quite clear that he did not participate in the sin of the
meraglim and in fact it is Moshe who pleads with Hashem for mercy, invoking the
middot ha-rachamim (see 14:18) to fend off the complete destruction of the nation.
And yet, in Sefer Devarim (1:37-38) when Moshe reminisces about the historical
process of traveling through the desert and the sin of the meraglim, he seems to
indicate that Hashem became angry with him because of the incident of the spies! In
fact, Moshe claims that it is because of this event that it is Yehoshua, and not Moshe
himself, who would lead B’nei Yisrael into Eretz Yisrael. How could this be? Don’t we
know that it was the incident of bringing water from the rock at Mei Meriva (Chukat,
20:1-13) that prevented Moshe from entering Eretz Yisrael?
To amplify the question further, what exactly was Moshe’s role in the story of the
meraglim? Clearly he disapproved of their report, yet he was the one who sent the
spies on their ill-fated mission. The midrash (quoted by Rashi, 13:16) relates that