Shelach: 5785 - "And it also flows with milk and honey, and this is its fruit": Why did the spies open with praise of the Land of Israel, when they came to speak ill of it? Rabbi Shimon Zonnenfeld,…

00:02 Speaker 1 Parshas Shelach, the parsha of the spies. The spies return to Moshe Rabbeinu. What is the first thing they tell him? “We came to the land,” and they say, “It truly is a land flowing with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.” The question is, they set out intending to speak badly of the land. Yet the first thing they do is praise Eretz Yisroel. They say it is a land flowing with milk and honey, show its fruit, and say, “This is its fruit.” That seems to contradict what they say afterward. Rashi addresses this right there: a falsehood cannot endure unless it contains a little truth. So they included something true. But the question remains: it would seem they should have said that at the end. First they should have spoken badly of the land, saying that we cannot conquer it because there are mighty people and fortified cities there, and only afterward said something good about it too. Instead, they begin with what sounds like the very opposite of what they planned to say. That is one question. Another point: when Moshe Rabbeinu gives them their mission, he tells them to see what the land is like—whether it is fertile or lean, whether there are trees in it or not. That seems to be the same thing: if it is fertile, it has trees. But Rashi explains that “whether there is a tree in it” means whether there is a worthy person whose merit will protect its inhabitants. How would they find such a person? They do not know the people there. Where would they look? How

02:09 Speaker 1 could they find a worthy person? Who is a worthy person, and where would they look for him? To answer all these questions, the Gemara in Kesubos tells of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi, who went to Gavla, the name of a place. There he saw clusters of grapes as large as calves. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said, “Land, land, for whom are you producing such fine fruit? For the Arabs who came upon us because of our sins? For whom are you bringing forth such fruit?” The question is, why was he making a complaint against the land? Hakadosh Boruch Hu created it to produce fruit. It makes no difference for whom; producing fruit is what it was created to do. But Eretz Yisroel is different from every other land. The fruit it produces depends on who lives there. When those who do Hashem’s will live there, it produces fruit; otherwise, it does not. The Torah says so explicitly: “If you walk in My statutes, I will give your rains in their time, and the land will yield its produce, and the tree of the field will yield its fruit”—and, G-d forbid, the opposite can happen too. Then there is no fruit. Eretz Yisroel is different from other lands, and that is why he asked, “For whom are you producing fruit?” With this, we can answer the questions we asked about the spies. When the spies came to Moshe Rabbeinu and said that the land was flowing with milk and honey, “and this is its fruit”—look at the fruit there—what did they mean? They meant that if the land produces such fruit, there must be worthy people there. If there are worthy people there—if there is a “tree”—their merit will protect them. So we really will not be able to

04:10 Speaker 1 conquer them. That was their bad report about the land: we will not be able to conquer it. Just look at the fruit there! That was their intention. Even that part of their report was meant to show why we could not conquer the land. It also explains the exchange that follows between the ten spies and Yehoshua and Calev. The spies say, “We cannot go up.” We cannot conquer Eretz Yisroel. What do Yehoshua and Calev say? “We will surely go up and conquer it.” Why? Because “they are our bread.” The land is producing fruit now because of us. It is not because there are righteous people there. Hakadosh Boruch Hu does not want to bring Bnei Yisroel into Eretz Yisroel when it is desolate and has nothing in it, so the land is producing fruit for our sake. “Their protection has departed from them”; He is providing it all for us. So, “We will surely go up and conquer it.” May we hear good news.

05:05 Speaker 2 Amen. Amen. Thank you.