The Lubavitcher Rebbe’s suggestion that we add the letter yud, equaling ten, to the word “shaliach,” which we mentioned in the previous segment, makes a great deal of sense in the context of Shelach. Moses chose twelve spies, one from each tribe to spy out the land. 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 and in their own abilities to conquer the land. From the fact that the Torah refers to the ten spies as an “evil assembly,” 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 (Megillah 23b). In essence every minyan rectifies the power of ten’s ability to do evil by forming an assembly to do good.
As Moses sends the spies on their appointed way he adds a letter yud to the name of Joshua, who was known as Hoshea till then (Numbers 13:16). Every name change in the Torah signifies a change of status – the attainment of a new level of consciousness or the burden of a new mission. On the peshat level, Rashi explains that Moses changed Joshua’s name to indicate his own prayer that God save Joshua from participating in the conspiracy woven by the ten spies. The addition of the yud, which has the numerical value of ten, alludes to Moses’ intuition that Joshua would need this letter’s extraordinary power to ward off the power of ten implicit in the “assembly” of spies. As we mentioned in the previous section, 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. By adding a yud to Joshua’s name, Moses was preparing and grooming him for his eventual mission of leading the Jewish people into the Promised Land.
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….”(Numbers 14:17). In a traditional Torah scroll, the Hebrew word for “magnified” (yigdal) begins with an enlarged letter yud at the beginning of the word. Paradoxically, the incredibly powerful yud in its usual form is the smallest of the letters; as the Midrash states, it is “the little that contains much” (Bereishit Rabbah 9:7). 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.
God answered Moses’ prayer in the affirmative – “I have forgiven because of your words” – 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” (Numbers 14:22). Once again the number ten appears in this portion, 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.
Yud is the first letter of God’s four-letter name and signifies His Presence in every point of reality. Graphically this is symbolized by the yud’s form being a stylized point. In Psalm 145, often referred to by its first word “asherei,” King David prays to God: “Open up Your hand and satisfy the desire of all living things.” The Hebrew word for “hand” (yad) has the same root as the letter yud. The Sages teach that the verse’s deeper meaning is revealed when instead of reading it as “open up Your hand,” it is read as “open up Your [aspect of] yud.” God’s greatness is revealed in that He not only provides for all but also “satisfies the desire of all living things” – even those who defy Him.
According to tradition, God tested Abraham ten times. Abraham’s final test was the Akeidah, the Divine command to sacrifice his son Isaac. The Midrash states that after the ordeal was over, Abraham – who had not protested even once during the test – turned to God and requested that He show his descendants mercy as his reward. Perhaps Abraham’s merit in passing his ten tests gave God, as it were, the strength, patience, and compassion to endure his descendants’ ten tests. (See “The Ten Tests of Abraham – The Ten Tests of God” above.)
God did not allow the men between the ages of twenty and sixty to enter the Holy Land because of the sin of the spies. The Slonimer Rebbe explains that we should not view this decree as a punishment, but rather as the inevitable result of their actions. Because they lacked the faith to enter the Promised Land, they changed their own destinies with regard to the Land. The Land itself could not allow them to enter. In fact, many of the ostensible punishments in the Torah have been explained by the commentators as being the inevitable consequences of peoples’ actions. This principle of Divine justice is similar to the notion of “measure for measure” that we have discussed many times before.
As the multiple connections 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.
