You’ve Got This (Shlach)

At the center of Parashat Shlach is the story of the spies who are sent to scout the land. Ten of the twelve spies return with a negative report. Two of them see something else: possibility, promise. They see a future that can be entered, not because the road ahead is easy, but because the people are not alone.

One phrase in the negative report calls for extra attention. When the spies describe the people they saw in the land, they say, “We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we must have been in their eyes.”

Devastating.

It begins with the way they see themselves: small, overwhelmed, unequal to the task before them. That part is deeply human. We know what that feels like. We know what it is to stand before something large and important and wonder whether we are enough.

But then they take a second step. They assume that because they feel small, others must see them that way too. They turn their own fear into reality. They take an inner wound and project it onto the world. They decide that their self-doubt is the truth.

How could they possibly know?

This is one of the dangers of fear. Fear can make us honest, but it can also distort our vision. Fear can tell us that a task matters. It can also whisper that we do not matter enough to meet it. Fear can make us cautious. It can also make us forget who we are.

It is not arrogance to stand at our full height in the world. It is faithfulness.

Each of us is here to become the person we were placed here to be. The sacred question is not whether I can become someone else. I cannot. I am not asked to be Moses. I am not asked to be Sarah. I am not asked to be Elie Wiesel z”l, whose tenth yahrtzeit is today. Only Elie Wiesel could be Elie Wiesel. I am asked to be myself, fully and faithfully. You are asked to be yourself, fully and faithfully.

That is the question the spies could not hold. They were not asked to be giants. They were asked to be faithful to themselves, to tell the truth about the challenges ahead without surrendering to fear. They were asked to see danger and still remember promise.

Jewish tradition is not gentle with them. The ten spies were leaders of their tribes, and they lost heart. They were wrong. Their fear became contagious. Their self-doubt became communal despair. Their words diminished the people’s capacity to imagine a future.

And yet, perhaps we can learn from them with compassion as well as judgment. Their failure is not foreign to us. We also have moments when our confidence collapses. We also have moments when the world feels too large, the challenge too great, the opposition too strong. We also know what it is to feel like grasshoppers.

But feeling small is not the same as being small.

There are people bigger than we are. There are people stronger than we are. There are people smarter than we are. There are people who have resources, platforms, and power we do not have. That is true. But their size does not determine our worth. Their opinion does not define our reality. Their interpretation of who we are is not who we are.

Our dignity is deeper than their gaze.

Even if others look at us and see only smallness, that is their failure of vision. It does not have to become ours. We are allowed to hear the voice of inner fear and answer it with tenderness. We can say, “I hear you. I know you are worried. This matters, and that is why I am afraid. But I am still here. I am still called. I am still enough to take the next faithful step.”

That is the work.

And there is another aspect to this lesson. We must not become the voices that make others feel small. We must not be channels for cruelty, belittling, othering, or contempt. The world has enough of that already. There are enough people who mock, diminish, and dehumanize. We are here for something better. We are here to amplify dignity. We are here to help each other stand taller.

The spies teach us what happens when leaders forget their own strength. They also teach us what happens when words become vessels of fear instead of courage. So perhaps our task is to honor what they could have been by becoming what we can be.

We can see the giants and still move forward. We can acknowledge fear and still refuse despair. We can admit that the world is demanding and still trust that we have work to do within it. We can remember that being small in our own eyes is not humility when it prevents us from fulfilling our purpose. Sometimes it is a refusal to believe that our lives matter as much as they do.

And they do.

Your life matters. Your voice matters. Your presence matters. No one else can be you in the world. No one else can offer precisely what you have been placed here to offer.

So let us drop the grasshopper story.

There is promise ahead. There is work to do.

May we have the courage to stand at our full height, to see ourselves and one another with generosity, and to enter the future with faith.