Connecting Heaven and Earth

By Moshe Feiglin

18 Av, 5770
July 29, '10

Translated from Ma'ariv's NRG website

At the beginning of the Book of Deuteronomy, which we began reading last week, Moses reminds Israel of the most serious crime that the nation committed - the sin of the spies. When the spies returned from their reconnaissance tour of the Land of Israel with a negative report, the Children of Israel wept. That day was the ninth day of the month of Av. G-d said to Israel: You have cried needlessly (on this day), but I will give you something to cry about on this day for generations. (Tractate Ta'anit). And sure enough, it is the Ninth of Av that time and again provides us with reason to cry. Both the first and second Holy Temples in Jerusalem were destroyed on that day and many additional catastrophes, including the recent expulsion from Gush Katif, took place on or around the Ninth of Av.

What is so terrible about the sin of the spies? What is it about this sin that prevented the Israelites from entering the Land of Israel, sending them instead for a desert trek that lasted forty years? And if that is not bad enough, why do we continue to pay the price of this sin until our very own times?

In Hebrew, the word for "sin," chet, also means to "miss the mark." With the sin of the spies, we missed the mark - the mission that Abraham started and that continued with the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the receiving of the Torah at Mount Sinai. We were simply unprepared to carry out the mission for which we set out on this journey. The forty year delay in the desert was not a punishment. It was a consequence of the dismal reality that surfaced with the sin of the spies.

To understand how this happened and how the sin of the spies is connected to the Ninth of Av and the destruction of the Holy Temple, we must understand the Jewish mission. We must understand why G-d directed Abraham to establish the Nation of Israel, why He brought us through the crucible of Egypt, miraculously redeemed us from there, gave us the Torah at Mount Sinai and brought us to the Land of Israel.

Our mission as Jews is to connect heaven and earth; to live our physical lives in the most natural and realistic manner - but with G-d ever-present in our midst - as individuals and as a nation. This is how we testify to the presence of the Creator in our world and to the manner in which humanity is expected to conduct itself.

A skeptical Frederick the Great once asked his court chaplain for proof that G-d exists, to which his chaplain replied, "The Jews, your majesty, the Jews." "The Jews are the conscience of the world," said Hitler, may his name be blotted out," and thus must be destroyed."

The purpose of our journey is to create a modern and completely relevant nation that conducts itself morally and whose very existence and way of life points to its Father in heaven: a nation that is predicated on G-d. In the past, this was called an "exemplary society." In our prayers, we express this idea as "perfection of the world in the Kingdom of the Almighty." The pinnacle of this mission is embodied in the Holy Temple - the royal palace of the King of the world, the place where the physical and metaphysical converge; a place where all the inhabitants of the world can come to touch the eternal.

In the desert we lived like angels. Our war with Pharaoh was conducted by none other than the Creator, Himself and our sustenance fell daily from Heaven. When it came time to enter the Land of Israel and to work for our bread, to fight our wars and to conduct ourselves on the basis of earthly reality, we turned our backs on our national mission and preferred to remain in the desert. We preferred to be "religious" and to leave the responsibility for reality to others. We attempted to prove the complete opposite of our destiny -to prove that a nation is incapable of living in this world with G-d in its midst.

When the entire generation of the desert died, we entered the Land of Israel and later built the Holy Temple. But then the opposite problem surfaced. We clung to simple routine and surrendered our connection to holiness. In the Land of Israel, we preferred to be strictly "secular." The Holy Temple was no longer the means to connect the holy and mundane. On the contrary - the religious rituals in the Temple took place detached from the corruption outside its walls. The Temple became a fig leaf for life devoid of holiness. Thus, it was destroyed.

We are still motivated by our Jewish destiny: to connect heaven and earth. Without this destiny, we cannot exist. The lesson of the Ninth of Av is that in order to carry out our mission we must be simultaneously secular and religious - responsible for reality and firmly ensconced in holiness. The separation between the two is the sin of the spies. The destruction of the Temple is its consequence.