By Marco Del Monte
The weekly parashah tells the famous story of the spies. Many commentators focus on the sin of their slanderous talk about the Land of Israel. Precisely for this reason, Rashi tells us, this parashah is placed alongside the episode of Miriam: they ought to have learned from what happened to Miriam so as not to engage in the same behaviour linked to *lashon hara*.
I believe that Lashon Hara can only be the consequence of a specific root: The view one has of a given event. We see that the verb used in the exploration of the land is "Latur baaretz", meaning to search carefully, to investigate based on visible evidence. Precisely for this reason, many verses and verbs related to sight are used in the parashah, that is, to the evident representation of what is seen: "the people we saw"; "we saw giants"; "we appeared like grasshoppers in our own eyes and so we must have seemed in their eyes". The root of the problem does not lie so much in the consequence of speaking ill, but in failing to interpret everyday situations correctly. As we know, the reality of this world is polyvalent, and therefore subject to various interpretations: In the Parashah, the spies saw many funerals in the land and thought it was a land where it was very difficult not only to live but even to survive; The same event, our teachers explain to us, should have been interpreted from a different point of view: Hashem caused many people to die, right at that moment, to distract the "eyes" of the inhabitants from the spies, so that they would not be discovered and killed. Not disastrous scenes of death, but miraculous events of salvation, of life. It is no coincidence that at the end of the Parashah, tzitzit is discussed, using the same verb that was used for the exploration of the land, "Latur", as it is written: "Velo Taturu acharei levavchem veacharei enechem", meaning do not follow what your eyes tell you! It is no coincidence that in the tzitzit we are commanded to place among its threads a Petil Techelet, a blue thread, which, as the chachamim explain, must remind us of the sky, and thus of Hashem's throne, meaning a reality that goes beyond the visible. Therefore, the message that the Parashah teaches us is: Do not follow only your eyes in seeing, in exploring "the land", meaning this world, because behind everything there is a blue thread, there is a Divine intervention that changes every kind of perspective and appearance!
Good Vision!
Shabbat Shalom Umevorach!
Translated from the Italian with Google Gemini. The Italian text is the original.