The Night the People Wept for Nothing

It had only been fifteen months since they walked out of Egypt. The manna still fell every morning. Mount Sinai was still close enough that older people said they could remember the smoke. They were camped at Kadesh, on the southern edge of the Land they had been promised. It was a few days' walk away, not weeks. And the people themselves had asked Moshe to send scouts up first.

Moshe picked twelve important men, one from each tribe. Before they left, he took his young student Hoshea aside and added a letter to his name. From now on he would be called Yehoshua — 'may God save you' — a quiet blessing that Moshe hoped would protect him from what the other ten were about to do.

Forty days later, near evening, the scouts came back. They had walked as far as Chevron. They came in carrying a single cluster of grapes so heavy that two men had to hold it up on a pole between them. They also brought pomegranates and figs.

But no one asked about the fruit. Ten of the scouts stood in front of the whole nation and said: the cities have walls up to the sky. There are giants there. 'We felt like grasshoppers,' one of them said, 'and that's how they saw us too.' The Sages read that line and hear the whole disaster inside it. The problem wasn't that they were grasshoppers. The problem was that they had agreed to be grasshoppers.

Caleb tore his clothes and pushed to the front. Yehoshua tore his clothes and stood next to him. 'The land is very, very good,' they begged. 'If Hashem is happy with us, He will bring us in. Don't be afraid.' The crowd picked up stones to kill them. A cloud of glory flared over the Tent of Meeting just in time and stopped them.

That night the whole camp cried. Not one short cry — a long, loud crying that lasted all night, in every tent, along every row of the camp. Fathers and mothers and children weeping for a land they had never seen because ten men had told them it would eat them alive. Someone shouted the sentence that showed how sick everything had become: 'Let's pick a new leader and go back to Egypt.'

By morning the punishment came out of the Tent. Every man over twenty who had been counted in the census — six hundred thousand of them — would die in this desert. One year in the desert for every day the scouts had walked in the Land. Only Caleb and Yehoshua and the children too young to have joined the crying would ever cross the Jordan. The ten scouts themselves dropped dead of plague before nightfall.

And with the punishment came the words the Sages hear inside every kinah — every sad song — that Jews will ever write. 'You cried a cry for nothing. So I will make this night a night of crying for all your children after you.' Every burned Temple, every broken wall, every ship packed with people being sent away, every train that will one day cross a Polish forest — the Talmud says the seed of all of it was planted on this night, when a free people chose to be afraid.