Parashat Shelah: On Faith and Large Carrots

Is the glass half empty or half full? It all depends on your perspective.

That’s the difference between the 10 scouts and the 2 scouts in this week’s parsha. They all saw the same reality: A land so fertile that both its fruit and its inhabitants were extraordinarily large. Is this “information” a cause for celebration – God has given us a great land—or a cause for despair – we will never be able to conquer these giants? It is all a matter of perspective.

Everything can be skewed. The over-sized grapes which should have been a source of gratitude and excitement, instead illicit a kind of fear – it is as if the land is too bountiful for their tastes, bountiful in a kind of creepy, unnatural way. That’s the way it is in life. Even when things seem not just good, but over-the-top great, we can find a way to view them negatively.

The problem is a lack of trust. The 10 negative scouts say that the land is a “land that devours its inhabitants.” Rashi explains that they came to this conclusion because everywhere they went in the land, people were occupied with burials. God caused this to happen, says Rashi, so that the inhabitants of the land would be so preoccupied with their dead that the Israelite scouts would go undetected and unharmed. But these scouts had no trust; they could not see that both the over-sized grapes and the dead inhabitants were signs of God’s care for them; they assumed the worst.

Such perspectives – both good and bad – do not just frame the reality of the present; they shape the reality of the future. The 10 scouts who said concerning the conquest of the land – “It can’t be done” – in fact did not do it, but died in the desert. The 2 scouts – Joshua and Caleb – who said “We can surely do it” – led a successful conquest of the land. Faith makes things happen, creates the positive outcome it foresees.

In the classic children’s story The Carrot Seed, the father and the mother, the sister and the brother, all say of the carrot: “It won’t come up.” But the little boy has faith, and because of his faith, he tends the garden; he waters it and weeds it, and out of his faith comes not just any carrot, but the largest carrot ever seen, carried away in a wheelbarrow. Faith creates large carrots. It tends their seeds, makes them grow and blossom.

The scouts were given a vision of their future – over-sized grapes, like the little boy’s large carrot. But most of them could not see, could not really believe that this was their future. And so they could not do the work needed to be done to get there.

We are all scouts, travelling through life, taking in the sights and evaluating them: Good or bad? Will it/we succeed or fail? The trick is to be like Joshua and Caleb, to maintain a can-do, positive attitude, to have faith that things will work out for the best, because it is through such faith that we ensure that things do work out for the best; it is through such faith that we are capable of growing giant carrots and conquering giant giants.