The Pshat Heard 'Round the World

בס"ד You Care Wrist Parashat Shelach 5768 So the people are on the brink of absolute despair. After having fallen prey to the trust-dissolving fear sown in their hearts by the spies and their evil reports of a land which devours its inhabitants, after hearing the unimaginably crushing words of Hashem’s measure for measure punishment of wandering and death for forty years, “A year for a day, a year for a day”, after seeking to regain Hashem’s favor by impulsively initiating a sortie to conquer the land, despite Moshe’s warning – “Hashem is not in your midst” and being summarily routed . . . what could possibly comfort and console them? What could possibly motivate them to pack up camp, hit the trail, and resume a journey to a promised land never to be seen, entry having deferred for a whole generation. I know! Bread and wine, that always does the trick! What? Are you crazy? A whole people is in existential crisis of the most profound and threatening nature, and...

Patience, Young Grasshopper Parashat Shelach, 5767 "And we seemed in our eyes as grasshoppers, and thus we seemed in their eyes". With these words, the party of the majority amongst the spies seal the "debate" with the two dissenters, Calev and Yehoshua, thereby both implanting the spark and fanning the flames of mutiny amongst the distraught masses of Am Yisrael. The people had their doubts before (see commentators especially on the presentation of the story in Devarim), but now, they are terrified. The image of giants toying with their masses before crushing them arises in their minds, and all the benefit of a land described so lavishly at first become detriments in their minds. The Gemara asks, how did "this evil assemblage" of ten slanderous spies know how they appeared in the eyes of the inhabitants of the land? It answers that they heard them remarking upon looking upon them, "what are those grasshoppers doing there?". When Rashi commen...