By Marco Del Monte
“Their shadow has departed from them”
Every Tisha B'Av, the Jewish people weep. They weep for the destruction of the Bet HaMikdash, they weep for the exile, the suffering, the darkness of history. But what is surprising — and unsettling — is that it all began much earlier, with another weeping. In the desert, precisely on Tisha B'Av, the people wept upon hearing the report of the spies.
They wept out of fear, out of a lack of trust, out of rejection towards the Promised Land. And G-d decreed: "You have wept for nothing… I will give you a reason to weep." But what connection is there between those two events? What relationship exists between the weeping of the spies and the destruction of the Temple?
How is it possible that a slander against the land of Israel triggered centuries of destruction? We shall seek to penetrate beyond the veil of history, and discover the invisible thread that unites the tears of the desert to the collapse of the holy stones of Yerushalayim, a thread made of "shadows", of roots in the upper worlds; the secret that forever guides the people of Israel, namely the union between the material and spiritual universe.
We will look primarily at two visions: that of Rabbenu Bechaye and that of Rabbi Chaym of Volozhin.
Faced with the defeatist report of the spies, Caleb and Joshua seek to explain that the heavenly protective influence of the Canaanites, defined as "shadow", has faded away. Just as the shadow protects from the sun, the tutelary angel protects its people, that angel which the Talmud (Megillah 3a) calls "Mazal", or what is commonly called the Guardian Angel, a spiritual entity that, in addition to protecting, makes one perceive things that the person themselves does not see (see the passage in the Talmud on the prophecy of Daniel). When it is said "their shadow has departed from them", it is being said that the spiritual force that defended them has ceased to be, and therefore there is nothing more to fear, neither in the earthly world nor in the celestial one. Rabbenu Bechaye also brings a Midrash according to which the fading of the shadow is a sign of imminent death, as manifests on the night of Hoshana Rabba: whoever casts no shadow in the moonlight is destined to die. The "shadow" is a sign of spiritual existence and of the right to a place on the earth; if it vanishes, the body too loses its right to existence. Finally, Rabbenu Bechaye concludes that Caleb and Joshua were not only referring to the fact that God was with Israel (which would already suffice), but that the angelic powers of the other nations have also now declined. When the shadow disappears, the sentence has already been written in heaven. These peoples seemed strong and invincible, but their strength was only an appearance: in the upper worlds they had already been struck down. To reinforce this reading comes Rabbi Chaym of Volozhin, in his masterpiece "Nefesh HaChayim": "Every material reality has a spiritual root. When the spiritual part is destroyed, the material one also collapses." Thus, the Canaanites appeared like giants, but they were like empty shells: without a root, without support, without a shadow. And this principle — that spiritual reality precedes and determines physical reality — is also the secret of the destruction of the Bet HaMikdash. It was not the Babylonian or Roman legions that destroyed the Temple. It was the people themselves, with their sins, their divisions, lashon hara, who shattered the spiritual structure of the Mikdash in the heavens. And when the upper sanctuary fell… even the one on earth could no longer stand. As Rabbi Chaym of Volozhin says: "The enemies ground flour that was already ground."
When one does not realise that every material force is sustained by a spiritual one, the Temple is destroyed, just as the tablets of the law become heavy matter if the letters fly off to heaven, just as the body does not function without its soul. I always tell the story of the Baba Sali when he prayed to weaken and defeat the angel of the terrorists of a well-known event at an airport, and so it was. Jacob fought the "angel" of Esau, in Egypt they fought the "angel" of Egypt and so in everything. Today, in a world that believes only in what is seen, the Torah teaches us: "Do not fear the visible force, if behind it there is no spiritual shadow."
And vice versa: "Even that which is fragile on the outside, but firm in the heavens, will not fall."
Walk under the shadow of Hashem, as Psalm 121 says: "Hashem is your shadow, upon your right hand."
And even if the whole world seems to tremble, whoever has the shadow of the Shechinah above them will never falter, just like the people who sit in the Sukkah, fragile and open, but firmly protected by the shadow of faith.
Translated from the Italian with Google Gemini. The Italian text is the original.