Parashat Shlach L’cha

KI Torah Gems, Parashat Shlach L’cha

This week’s parasha features the famous incident of the 12 scouts sent to examine the Land of Israel. Ten of the spies bring a negative report (laced with some truth – that the land is flowing with milk and honey). On the basis of this, the children of Israel panic and to some extent repeat the sin of the golden calf. G-d threatens to destroy them and Moses intercedes on their behalf, again echoing the events surrounding the golden calf. The generation which committed the sins of the Golden Calf and lost faith due to the scouts’ report is destined to die out in the desert. They attempt to force an entry into the land against Moses’ instructions and fail disastrously.

Rashi, the prolific French medieval commentator, notes that in BT Megillah 23b the verse at chapter 14 line 27 is cited as the textual source for minyanim being composed of ten adults. “The Lord spoke further to Moses and Aaron, 27 "How much longer shall that wicked community keep muttering against Me?”. This means that our definition of what constitutes a community for prayer – the number of people that allow us to make the call to prayer, to say the various kinds of kaddish, and conduct a Torah reading – is derived from one of the low points of Jewish history. Indeed, it is traditionally understood that the day of the scouts’ negative report was the 9th of Av, the day that became the saddest day in the Jewish calendar.

I wonder if on some level deriving the minyan from the number of scouts who delivered the bad report represents a takkanah; an effort to repair our ancestors’ mistake. Every time we gather to daven in a minyan whether it is to bentch the birkat ha-mazon after kiddush or three times daily in the Rabb Chapel downstairs we’re undoing some of the damage done by the minyan of scouts who caused B’nei Israel to lose faith. A community of people can do damage or it can do mitzvot and acts of loving-kindness (gimilut chesed). In and of itself a community is a neutral entity, what we do with that community and the strength that it gives us is what counts.