There we saw the giants, the Children of Anak who come from the giants – we were in our own eyes like grasshoppers, and thus were we in their eyes!
[Numbers 13:33]
In this week’s Torah reading, when the scouts returned from looking around at the Land of Israel, they brought back this negative report, which the Israelites accepted. God responded by decreeing that no one from that generation would live to make it into Israel proper.
Rabbi Menachem Mendl of Kotsk said that it’s all right to say that we feel like a grasshopper in our own eyes – that means that we’re alert – but when we start guessing what we look like to someone else, we’ve given them permission to define us, and abandoned an aspect of our independent agency as adults.
[See Rabbi Lawrence Kushner’s comments on this week’s parasha in his lovely collection, Five Cities of Refuge, co-authored with David Mamet.}
Judaism asks us to “be a mensch” – to be a full person of integrity – accepting the responsibility for our actions and taking a realistic approach to our own self-assessment. We can get paralyzed should we go down the road of “I imagine that person thinks I am…”. The responsible, adult, “menschy” thing to do is act with the best of principles and listen to honest feedback when it comes. We don’t need to imagine anything worse than that!
Wishing everyone an honest and optimistic week,
Jonathan