Parshas Shelach: The Grasshopper Tax
This week, I finally had a hard conversation that I had been avoiding for a very long time.
It wasn't that the facts of the situation had suddenly changed.
What changed was that I finally reached a point where I got more tired of hiding a struggle than I was afraid of being honest about it. I realized it’s healthier to just live in reality than to keep staying on autopilot out of fear of how I'll be seen.
And something surprising happened: reality turned out to be much softer than the script fear had written in my head.
It didn’t magically solve everything or wipe away the work left to do, but it was human. It was met with warmth and straightforwardness.
And it made me think of this week’s parsha, Shelach.
When the spies return from the land, they deliver a report that breaks the nation's spirit. But there is one specific line that maps out exactly how fear operates:
וַנְּהִי בְעֵינֵינוּ כַּחֲגָבִים וְכֵן הָיִינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶם
“We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we were in their eyes.”
Notice the order of operations.
They didn't become grasshoppers because the giants looked down on them. They became grasshoppers in their own eyes first.
And once they shrunk inside their own minds, that internal smallness instantly bled into how they perceived the world around them: "...and so we were in their eyes."
When we hide a piece of our reality out of fear of judgment, we do the exact same thing. We script the other person's reaction before they even open their mouth. We decide they will be disappointed. We decide they will judge us. We build an entire prison out of a conversation that hasn't even happened yet, carrying the shame of a reaction that only exists in our own anticipation.
But none of it may even be true. There’s always the very real possibility that it’s all just in our heads. The people we are so terrified of confronting may have changed, or they might simply not be the way we remembered or imagined them to be. We freeze ourselves in front of an old script, completely blind to the fact that the person across from us might be entirely ready to meet us with grace.
The tragedy of the spies wasn’t that giants existed. Life is always going to have giants: massive challenges, setbacks, and chapters where we feel completely underwater.
The tragedy was that they looked at the obstacle and immediately disappeared inside themselves.
Because once you become a grasshopper in your own eyes, everything else starts looking impossible, too. You start believing your worth as a person is tied to maintaining a flawless record or a perfect facade.
But maybe Geulah begins the opposite way. It doesn't start by pretending the giants aren’t there, and it certainly doesn't start by trying to pump yourself up to look huge. It starts just by refusing to disappear in front of them.
That’s what truth does. It doesn’t always clean up the mess immediately, but it ends the hiding. And the moment the hiding ends, something incredible happens: the weight drops, the air clears, and you realize you are finally free to grow.
You stop wasting your energy maintaining an illusion and start using it to build something real. The giants don't vanish, but they lose their power to shrink you. You get your stride back. You remember that your worth as a human being is entirely intact, right in the middle of the climb, and that you are held by a warmth that was there all along.
Shelach invites us all to step out of the shadows of our own self-doubt and look reality straight in the eye. This Shabbos, whatever unsaid truth or heavy script you’ve been carrying around, give it some room to breathe. Step out of the grass, drop the armor of the old stories, and remember how tall you were actually made to stand.
Good Shabbos,
Berke
It wasn't that the facts of the situation had suddenly changed.
What changed was that I finally reached a point where I got more tired of hiding a struggle than I was afraid of being honest about it. I realized it’s healthier to just live in reality than to keep staying on autopilot out of fear of how I'll be seen.
And something surprising happened: reality turned out to be much softer than the script fear had written in my head.
It didn’t magically solve everything or wipe away the work left to do, but it was human. It was met with warmth and straightforwardness.
And it made me think of this week’s parsha, Shelach.
When the spies return from the land, they deliver a report that breaks the nation's spirit. But there is one specific line that maps out exactly how fear operates:
וַנְּהִי בְעֵינֵינוּ כַּחֲגָבִים וְכֵן הָיִינוּ בְּעֵינֵיהֶם
“We were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we were in their eyes.”
Notice the order of operations.
They didn't become grasshoppers because the giants looked down on them. They became grasshoppers in their own eyes first.
And once they shrunk inside their own minds, that internal smallness instantly bled into how they perceived the world around them: "...and so we were in their eyes."
When we hide a piece of our reality out of fear of judgment, we do the exact same thing. We script the other person's reaction before they even open their mouth. We decide they will be disappointed. We decide they will judge us. We build an entire prison out of a conversation that hasn't even happened yet, carrying the shame of a reaction that only exists in our own anticipation.
But none of it may even be true. There’s always the very real possibility that it’s all just in our heads. The people we are so terrified of confronting may have changed, or they might simply not be the way we remembered or imagined them to be. We freeze ourselves in front of an old script, completely blind to the fact that the person across from us might be entirely ready to meet us with grace.
The tragedy of the spies wasn’t that giants existed. Life is always going to have giants: massive challenges, setbacks, and chapters where we feel completely underwater.
The tragedy was that they looked at the obstacle and immediately disappeared inside themselves.
Because once you become a grasshopper in your own eyes, everything else starts looking impossible, too. You start believing your worth as a person is tied to maintaining a flawless record or a perfect facade.
But maybe Geulah begins the opposite way. It doesn't start by pretending the giants aren’t there, and it certainly doesn't start by trying to pump yourself up to look huge. It starts just by refusing to disappear in front of them.
That’s what truth does. It doesn’t always clean up the mess immediately, but it ends the hiding. And the moment the hiding ends, something incredible happens: the weight drops, the air clears, and you realize you are finally free to grow.
You stop wasting your energy maintaining an illusion and start using it to build something real. The giants don't vanish, but they lose their power to shrink you. You get your stride back. You remember that your worth as a human being is entirely intact, right in the middle of the climb, and that you are held by a warmth that was there all along.
Shelach invites us all to step out of the shadows of our own self-doubt and look reality straight in the eye. This Shabbos, whatever unsaid truth or heavy script you’ve been carrying around, give it some room to breathe. Step out of the grass, drop the armor of the old stories, and remember how tall you were actually made to stand.
Good Shabbos,
Berke