From a 21st century point of view, every action, and in particular every reaction, has a source and a reason. Modern culture has made it an art to find a label, and perhaps, a diagnosis for just about everything. Indeed, a few months ago there was a radio ad in Quebec in which a woman voiced her frustration that female workers were now suffering from “extreme exasperation syndrom.” But the cold, hard fact of the matter is that every person has free will - every person makes a choice in how they act. Sometimes the influences within or without are difficult to resist, but, nevertheless, there is almost always some measure of culpability for one's actions.
Pages upon pages of commentaries and discussions have been written about Parshas Shelach and the underlying reasons for the actions of both the scouts who gave a negative report about the Promised Land and the reaction of the people to their report. From a modern pop-psychology point of view, one might even say that Hashem’s punishment, which was the forestalling of the nation’s entry into the Promised Land until after the generation died out, was unfair since the generation was burdened with the trauma of slavery and impeded by a lack of confidence in their spiritual acceptability. And yet, at the apex of the narrative, there is an intriguing placement of words that could be read as a potent reminder of free will; "Va’tisa kol ha’aida, ba’yitnu es koolam. Va’yivkoo ha’am ba’layla ha’hoo. And the congregation lifted up, and they gave their voices. And the people wept that night” (Number 14:1).
This is a grammatically interesting verse. There are two sentences, so the speak, in this verse. They separated from each other by the esnachta trop. Also, the first of these two sentences is divided by a zaken katon trop into two separate phrases. With these grammatical nuances in mind, let us look again at the actions of the nation. Va’tisa is based on a verb that means to lift up or carry. It would be completely within the norms of Biblical grammar for it to be written here that the congregation lifted up their voices, for indeed this construct is used elsewhere in the Torah ("and Eisav raised up his voice and cried"). Instead, the Torah states that the congregation lifted themselves up, and then the Torah adds another verb and direct object: Va’yitnu, which is from the verb to give (and they gave). Herein we see that there is a choice of action implied in the the active nature of this verb.
Furthermore, it is interesting to note that the first verb phrase is singular; the congregation was lifted up together as a unit. The whole congregation suffered from a reaction to the words of the scouts, from the incongruity of what they expected from the Promised land, and from the frightening need for conquest being described. The second phrase, however, is in the third person plural (Va’yitnu es koolum, They raised their voices), which infers that now each voice was the voice of an individual within a larger group.
The response to the words of the scouts started out as a national reaction, but that unity was false, for each person gave their own voice. When they cried through the night - again with phraseology set in third person plural - they each cried from their own fear, and anguish, and insecurity. They cried through the night because the night is when we process the information we are given throughout the day. And they cried individually, but collectively, because their bitachon - their trust in God's active guidance - was gone, dashed as a result of truth spoken wrongly by the scouts. The scouts did not lie. After all, they were well-respected leaders of their tribes. However, they told the truth as they wanted it to be understood, and that use of truth without honesty undermined everything that Bnei Yisrael was building (With the exclusion of Yehoshua and Kalev, who understood that their mission was not about themselves and their feelings or their perceptions, but about the path laid out for them by Hashem.) The people cried through the night because their minds were trying to process all of the events of the day: the truths of the scouts, the truth spoken by Kalev, the emotions of the nation as a whole, the plethora of voices that they heard among their fellows, and also their own reactions to which they had given voice.
Perhaps, after having actively joined in the national reaction, the majority of the people felt broken, and this was why they "murmured against Moshe and Aaron" (14:2). Perhaps having seen themselves take one step off the derech (path) provided, they thought there was no alternative but to wish to go back to Mitzrayim, to a place and a time when they had no free will, no choices to make. Additionally, one might note that there is a not uncommon reaction in people when they make a large error or are greatly embarrassed by something they have done: to think or even state, with belief or not, that they wished they were dead. It is a feeling of wishing to avoid the consequences of the mistake, even when those consequences are not, in the end, truely dire. Humans do not like to acknowledge their wrong doing, and, in the face of a large mistake in which they know they were culpable, there is a desire to change reality. Thus the people could utter "if only we had died in the wilderness" (14:2).
There are many ways in which the situation of the People of Israel could have been different. Even in this one situation, there are a thousand different ways we could wish there had been different reactions. They could have listened to the honesty of Kalev’s report. They could have prayed for guidance instead of turning on Yehoshua, Moshe, and Aaron. They could have immediately repented for giving voice to their fears. But even as they expressed a wish to alter history - to go back to Mitzrayim or to have died in the Wilderness, which was really a wish not to be in their current situation - they had opportunities to choose a different path. They did not. They continued to rebel, even to the point of being so stubborn as to mount an attack after they had been punished and thus completely missing the point of bitachon.
We could sit for hours and dissect their motivations, their reactions, their histories, and their psychologies. In the end, however, it does not matter. What matters is the actions. What matters is the choices we make and the way in which we use our free-will.
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