[Avodah] Shelach

[Micha Berger via Avodah]

On Sat, Jun 10, 2017 at 10:11:31PM -0400, Cantor Wolberg via Avodah wrote:
: The following is a Midrash in which God rebukes the spies:
: "I take no objection to your saying: 'we looked like grasshoppers to
: ourselves,' but I take offense when you say 'so we must have looked to
: them.' How do you know how I made you to look to them?
: Perhaps you appeared to them as angels!" (based on Numbers Rabbah 16:11).
...
: Judaism's preference of the optimist over the pessimist is made clear
: not only by what the Torah has to say on the subject of the spies
: but even more so by the first remark attributed to the Creator upon
: His completion of the work of creation. "And God saw all the He made,
: and behold it was very good..." (Gen. 1:31).

Good -- is the yeitzer hatov,
*very* good -- is the yeitzer hara.

But in any case, the spies are an imperfect example, because they had
G-d's promise that this specific mission would succeed.

We don't have such reason to be optimistic.

Related: I wonder if the difference between Chassidic or the Alter of
Novhardok's view of bitchon is related to history. The AoN said that
sufficient bitachon generates success, to the extent that he felt that
being a "baal bitachon is an objective reality provable by experience and
he signed his name with a B"B without fear of it being bragging. The CI's
view is that bitachon is not prognostic, but the attitude that everything
is happening according to Hashem's plan. I may fail and suffer, ch"v,
but knowing it is all for a purpose makes it easier to cope. The history
that I think divides them -- the CI's Emunah uBitachon was written in
the shadow of the Holocaust. (It was published in 1954, a year after
the CI's passing.)

Similarly, if someone wants to argue that the Torah wants us to be
optimistic, don't we have to address what the Torah would tell a Jew
living in Lodz in 1939?

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy,
micha at aishdas.org        if only because it offers us the opportunity of
http://www.aishdas.org   self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                              - Arthur C. Clarke