Shlach Lecha

 

 

The people mourned greatly.  They rose up early in the morning and went up to the top of the mountain, thereby saying: “We are ready to go up in that place which God has described, for we have sinned.”  Moses said, “Why do you now transgress the command of God?  This will not succeed.  Do not go up, for God is not in your midst…The Ark of the covenant of God and Moses did not depart from the camp.  The Amalekites and the Canaanites who dwelt on that mountain came down and they struck them and crushed them all the way to Chormah…

14:39 – 45

 

 

Once Moses told them that their efforts to go up the mountain were doomed to failure, their insistence upon doing so became utterly provocative – and the punishment in such cases is swift and harsh.

Sforno (16th Century)

 

 

Since repentance induced by fear, duress, does not wipe the slate clean, the people did not deserve the presence of the holy ark in their midst in the campaign they now planned.  The very fact that they dared to go ahead without it, showed that they still had not appreciated who it was that alone would guarantee their success…

Akedat Yitzchak ( (15th Century)

 

 

 

 

 

Their (the Israelites) inability to go and occupy the land became clearly manifest in the statement: “Let us appoint a leader and let us return to Egypt”, in that weeping that they wept on that night.  Now matters could not be remedied without them accepting what had been imposed on them.  Their words constituted no repentance unless they accepted their sentence, humbled themselves and bore their punishment.  Divine punishment is itself the cure for their ills, the path of repentance.

Nechama Leibowitz (contemporary)

 

Why is this story taken as an added transgression rather than as an act of repentance, the repair, or tikkun, for the major transgression of the desert?...Moses tells them not to ascend themountain to Israel because God is not in their midst.  They are Israel oriented rather than God oriented, committed to occupying a land rather than to fulfilling Divine will.  Indeed, they barely seem to recognize the relationship between the physical soil of Israel and the Divine soul of Israel…Apparently they were completely secular Zionists who may have been committed to the land but were blind to its Divine mission and messages…

Shlomo Riskin (contemporary)

 

The Baal Shem Tov reads the last five words of Chapter 14, verse 40 as one phrase:  “We don’t think that we did anything wrong.  All we concede is that God thinks that what we did was wrong.” …If we sin against God, we can ask God to forgive us.  If we sin against an individual, we can apologize and try to make up for it in some way.  But if we commit a sin against the Jewish people, we cannot ever do teshuvah.  Even if we truly repent and want to atone for such sin, we cannot ever fully do so.

Hillel Cohel (contemporary)