Allowing ourselves to see beyond the obvious
The night my son gashed his forehead in the shower, I was supposed to be at a bar mitzvah.
Sara and I had the babysitter arranged, the clothes pressed, and we were walking out the door when we heard the cry. Eitan had slipped, and within minutes I was Facetiming a doctor friend out of state who looked at the wound and told me to get medical glue that night before scarring set in.
I drove to urgent care in what felt like a race against a closing clock, walked in with Eitan just as they were locking the doors, and they took him in. The glue worked. The healing was clean. Had we arrived 20 minutes later, we probably would have spent hours waiting in an emergency room.
I missed the bar mitzvah. The family was incredibly gracious. And somewhere that night, after Eitan was settled and the adrenaline had worn off, I caught myself thinking that the timing was almost perfect. Not perfect in the way we usually mean it. Perfect in the way things sometimes are when Hashem is quietly arranging the pieces.
That thought stayed with me as I learned the parshiyos of these weeks. I realized that there is a pattern running through them, one that reveals one of the most honest and uncomfortable truths the Torah teaches us about ourselves.
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It begins in Beha’aloscha. The people complain about the manna, remembering Egypt and its cucumbers, watermelons, leeks, onions, and garlic. The Sifri, cited by Rashi to Bamidbar 11:5, explains that those flavors were withheld for a reason — they are harmful to nursing mothers; Hashem had designed the manna with their health in mind but all they could see was what they were missing.
The pattern reaches its fullest expression in Sh’lach. The spies return from Canaan with their frightening report. The land, they say, consumes its inhabitants. Everywhere they went they saw funerals, mourning, and people burying their dead.
But that is not the whole story. Rashi to Bamidbar 13:32 explains that Hashem had arranged those deaths deliberately. The inhabitants were so occupied with their grief that they paid no attention to the strangers walking through their cities. The funerals were not evidence that the land was cursed; they were the very means through which Hashem was protecting the spies.
The same event that was saving them became, in their eyes, proof that everything was wrong.
In their 2001 paper, “Bad Is Stronger Than Good,” Roy Baumeister and his colleagues reviewed decades of psychological research and found that negative experiences generally have a greater impact on us than positive ones of equal size. Criticism stays with us longer than praise. One bad event can outweigh many good ones.
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People naturally scan for danger before they notice blessing. That tendency is what allowed our ancestors to survive long enough to build a civilization. The person who noticed the predator hiding in the grass lived to see another day.
But what helped us survive physically is precisely what made it harder for the spies to see spiritually. A mind wired to search for what is wrong will often struggle to recognize the quiet ways Hashem is taking care of us.
That night with Eitan, my first reaction was frustration. Why couldn’t we just stick to the plan? The simcha we had looked forward to, the evening we had arranged, all of it flipped upside down. I sat in that urgent care waiting room feeling the disruption, the sense that nothing had gone the way it was supposed to.
But the longer I thought about it, the more I noticed the details I had overlooked. The doctor who happened to answer his phone. The urgent care that happened to still be open, arriving literally as they were closing. The treatment that spared Eitan a much harder experience.
The cut was real. Missing the simcha was real. Seeing Hashem’s hand does not erase the difficulty.
But there is a quiet kindness running underneath the difficulty itself, the same kindness that withheld the flavors the people craved, the same kindness that filled a foreign land with funerals so that twelve men could walk through unnoticed.
That, perhaps, was the tragedy of the spies. There really were funerals. They were not wrong about what they saw. They were wrong in how they interpreted what they saw.
Sometimes faith is not seeing different facts. Sometimes it is seeing the same facts and trusting that Hashem may be telling a different story than the one we first imagine.
Rabbi Benny Berlin is spiritual leader of BACH in Long Beach www.bachlongbeach.com.
Write: Columnist@TheJewishStar.com
