As we have learned the last three months, the wilderness is a hard place to live for an extended period of time. But, so is the Promised Land.
To explain, I refer you to my wife Ashirah’s late grandfather Jack Najman who when he thought about America would often remark sarcastically, “a Brachah on Columbus.” And, by Brachah he meant anything but a blessing. Coming from a man who nearly lost his entire family to the Nazis, and who, with his wife Rose, narrowly escaped the same fate by getting on the final ship out of Europe called the Navemar (see – https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.jta.org/1941/08/18/archive/refugee-ship-navemar-sails-from-lisbon-en-route-to-cuba-and-new-york/amp), it was indeed surprising. But, what he meant by it was that the America he lived in, up in the Bronx, was not always the easiest, and certainly not the ideal he had read about in books.
In this week’s Torah portion, Shelach Lecha, ten out of the twelve spies sent to scout the Promised Land find this out the hard way. For, while the land itself flows with milk and honey, it is filled with mighty armies and fortified cities that make the spies feel like grasshoppers in their presence. If not for the chutzpah of Caleb and Joshua that might have been the end of the story, but their insistence in still moving forward despite the obstacles helps us overcome the other spies’ grim pronouncement.
Today, we understand all to well what wilderness feels like. The uncertainty of the pandemic clouds our view of our future. But, if the Promised Land is our eventual return to normal, that too is confusing and hard. The lesson of the Torah text is not to get discouraged, to remember what Caleb and Joshua tell us, that in the end it is “a very, very good land” (Numbers 14:7). Something that Jack Najman would whole heartedly agree as he, no doubt looks down from heaven upon his ever expanding mishpachah (one that is about to add a first great-great grandchild in September), filled with smiling faces and happy lives, despite all of the hardships he had to endure to make that possible.
The refugee steamer, Navemar, held here for eight days until the American consulate could reissue the expired visas of 250 of the refugees on board, sailed for Cuba and New York today with 1,180 refugees. Eighty of these boarded the Navemar at Lisbon, after its arrival, from Seville, fearing to remain here any longer. Just …(17 kB)
