“And God spoke to Moses saying: Send for you men that they may spy out the Land of Canaan which I give to the Israelites.”[1] The Hebrew root of the word Shelach (which literally means “send”), the name of this week’s Torah portion, interestingly appears in the names of two other portions as well: Vayishlach, when Jacob sends messengers to Esau before re-entering the Land of Israel,[2] and Beshalach, when Pharaoh sends the Jewish people away after years of slavery.[3]
Not only do all three portions share the same root word in their names, they also have coming to the Land of Israel in common. Jacob sends messengers to Esau, hoping to appease him before re-entering the Land. Pharaoh sends the people from Egypt thus sending them on a journey that will ultimately culminate in the Promised Land. In our portion, Moses sends spies to assess the lay of the land and its inhabitants in order to devise a plan of conquest.
A Spark of Mashiach
Another word stemming from the same root as the name of our parashah, Shelach is shaliach, meaning an emissary with a specific purpose or mission. The value of shaliach (שְׁלִיחַ) is 348. The Lubavitcher Rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, taught that the difference between the value of shaliach, 348, and the value of Mashiach (מָשִׁיחַ), 358, is 10. The 10 alludes to the letter yud, whose value is 10, and represents the hidden point of pure potential, the spark of Mashiach, within every Jew.[4]
The prophet Isaiah summed up the Jewish people’s mission with great brevity: “to be a light unto the nations.”[5] This holy light is initially hidden within every Jew, but when it is activated, the dormant spark of Mashiach and a Jew’s hidden leadership potential are activated. When a critical mass of individual sparks is awakened, the energy of Mashiach will descend into the world.[6]
The Ten Spies
The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s suggestion that adding the letter yud, equaling 10, to the word shaliach, makes a great deal of sense in the context of this parsha, due to the fact that the letter yud and its numerical equivalent of 10 appears repeatedly in Shelach. Moses chose twelve spies, one from each tribe to spy out the land.[7] Ten of them banded together and returned with an evil report, while Caleb and Joshua urged the people not to listen to them, to trust in God’s promise to conquer the land. From the fact that the Torah refers to the ten spies as an “evil assembly,”[8] the sages deduce that an assembly or congregation is composed of at least ten men and therefore ten men are required to form a minyan, a prayer quorum.[9] In essence every minyan rectifies the potential power of “an evil assembly” of ten people, by forming an assembly that is focused on doing good.
On a deeper level, 10 is the first number whose factorial, written as 10! is greater than 600,000 (10! = 1 · 2 · 3 · 4 · 5 · 6 · 7 · 8 · 9 · 10 = 3,628,800), the archetypal number of souls in Israel. Thus, when 10 men join together in prayer, the spiritual origin of all Jewish souls are present in potential.[10] This helps rectify the divisions and lack of faith that were unleashed by the evil report of the ten spies.[11]
A Name Change
As Moses sends the spies on their appointed way he adds a letter yud to the name of Joshua, who was known as Hoshea until then.[12] Every name change in the Torah signifies a change of spiritual status and identity, as well as the attainment of a new level of consciousness. Based on the Talmud, Rashi explains that the additional letter yud next to the first letter of Hoshea forms God’s two-letter Name pronounced Kah (י-ה). Thus, Joshuah’s new name can be understood to mean, “God will save you” [from the plot of the spies].”[13]
The addition of the yud, which has a numerical value of 10, alludes to Moses’ intuition that Joshua would need this letter’s extraordinary energy to ward off the power of the ten spies. As mentioned above, the yud also symbolizes the spark of the Mashiach and inherent leadership qualities; thus, Moses was fortifying Joshua by activating his deepest potential, his inner spark of Mashiach and his potential for leadership.
There is a tradition that the yud added to Joshua’s name was taken from Sarai’s name (שָׂרַי) when God changed her name to Sarah (שָׂרָה), He essentially, as it were, removed the letter yud from her name and gave it to Joshua. He then added the letter hei to her, tuning her into Sarah.[14] In general, the letter yud is considered masculine energy whereas the letter hei represents feminine energy. When her name was changed, Sarah had yet to give birth. Adding the letter hei and removing the letter yud symbolized a certain feminine lack in her physical and spiritual makeup that needed to be filled in order for her to give birth, as she subsequently did.
Before his name change, Joshua’s name Hoshea began with a hei (הוֹשֵׁעַ), a feminine facet, whereas now his name began with a yud (יְהוֹשֻׁעַ), a masculine aspect. With his name change, the first two letters of his name now spelled the name of God (י-ה) but also incorporated in perfect union both his masculine and feminine aspects. All teachings of Kabbalah and Chasidut emphasize that every individual has both masculine and feminine qualities. This is the secret of Adam being created as one being with the male and female components separated only later. Despite their separation, all humans maintain the qualities of the opposite gender within them on conscious and unconscious levels.
By adding a yud to Hoshea’s name, his first two letters include both positive masculine and feminine aspects, and as mentioned above, form a name of God. Thus, Joshua was able to incorporate a full range of qualities that helped make him the great leader that he became.[15]
Although we see that Joshua was called upon to lead the battle against Amalek soon after leaving Egypt,[16] the main impression we have of Joshua is the description of him as Moses’ loyal student, who the Torah testifies, never left the tent of Moses for 40 years.[17] This indicates a much more receptive role. Yet it would be Joshua who would lead Israel into the Promised Land; thus, his need for an additional yud to his name to give him the strength, fortitude and leadership qualities for his new role in life.
Magnifying God’s Name
When the people responded to the spies report by complaining and threatening to go back to Egypt, Moses prayed to God to forgive them nonetheless: “And now may the strength of my God be magnified as You have spoken saying: God, slow to anger, abundant in kindness, forgiver of iniquity and purposeful sin….”[18] In a traditional Torah scroll, the Hebrew word for “magnified” (יִגְדַּל) begins with an enlarged letter yud. Paradoxically, the yud in its usual form is the smallest of the letters; as the Midrash states, it is “the little that contains much.”[19] Moses realized the severity of the sins committed by the ten spies and the people. The enlarged letter yud symbolizes Moses beseeching God to go beyond the letter of the law by magnifying whatever small merit the people had in order to offset their obvious deficiencies.
One of the foundational teachings of Kabbalah and Chasidut, especially of the Arizal, is that the energy of creation continues to animate all reality and thus influences everything that happens in the material world below, including of course the existential reality of human beings. Since God created the world in a balanced manner, as expressed in the verse, “this against this has God made,”[20] these energies of creation channeled through the ten sefirot also play out in the ongoing inner battle between man’s good and evil inclinations. Yet, while we are influenced from Above, man’s thoughts, speech and actions have an effect and influence on the sefirot and the upper worlds. Thus, Moses’ plea that God be magnified and manifest His compassion, in and of itself helped draw that energy into reality.[21]
In response to his plea God answered Moses’ prayer in the affirmative—“I have forgiven as you have requested”—but then seems to hedge His acceptance with the following bitter rebuke of “all the men who have seen My glory and My signs that I performed in Egypt and in the wilderness and have tested me these ten times and have not heeded my voice.”[22] Once again, we find the number ten in this parashah, in this instance, to denote that this is the tenth time the people have “tested” God. Moses, knowing this, prayed when saying “yigdal,” that the aspect of yud (ten) should be magnified so that God could forgive the people.
According to tradition, God tested Abraham ten times.[23] Abraham’s final test was the Akeidah, the Divine command to sacrifice his son Isaac.[24] The Midrash states that after the ordeal was over, Abraham, who had not protested even once during the test, turned to God and strongly requested that He show his descendants mercy as his reward.[25] Abraham’s merit in passing his ten tests gave God, as it were, the strength, patience, and compassion to endure his descendants’ ten tests.
In Conclusion
As the multiple connections in this parshah between the number ten and the letter yud indicate, the Torah’s stories are linked on many levels. These same connective forces occur and reoccur in our private lives, the history of the Jewish people, and world history. The letters of the Torah represent the building blocks of creation and the fabric of history as it unfolds. Our actions create harmony and redemption or dissonance and disaster; their consequences may be felt immediately or sometimes only generations later. Even now, millennia later, we are still trying to rectify the failings of the spies. Even now the prayers of Abraham and Moses are assisting us in ways we do not fully comprehend.
[1]. Numbers 13:1-2.
[2]. Genesis 32:4.
[3]. Exodus 13:17.
[4].
[5]. Isaiah 42:6.
[6]. Awakening the Spark Within, p. 31.
[7]. Numbers 13:3.
[8]. Ibid 14:26.
[9]. Megillah 23b.
[10]. The Hebrew Letters p. 164.
[11]. Yaiyn Yitzchak, parshat Shelach, #1.
[12]. Numbers 13:16.
[13]. Ibid., Sotah 34b.
[14]. Genesis 17:15; Bereishit Rabbah 47:1 .
[15]. See The Hebrew Letters, p. 230 for more on Joshua’s name change.
[16]. Exodus 17:9.
[17]. Ibid 33:11
[18]. Numbers 14:17
[19]. Bereishit Rabbah 9:7
[20]. Ecclesiastes 7:14
[21]. Yayin Yitzchak, parshat Shelach, #4.
[22]. Numbers 14:20-22.
[23]. Pirkei Avot 5:4.
[24]. Genesis 22:1.
[25]. Bereishit Rabbah 56:15.
