One: Each year, thousands of Jewish 11-year-olds study the book of Leviticus and are repulsed by the idea that we are permitted to eat grasshoppers. On the other hand, several hundred of them love to study this fact.
For some reason, ancient Israel was permitted to consume grasshoppers. In fact, the book of Leviticus (11:22) specifically allows us to consume three varieties of locusts. If we don’t like one kind, we can always try another.
Two: The portion of Shelach Lecha, Numbers 13-15, contains the report of the spies sent forth to reconnoiter the land of Canaan.
In their report, they said, “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers. All the people that we saw in it were men of great size…and as we seemed like grasshoppers to ourselves, so were we in their eyes.” (Numbers 13:32-33)
New reality: The lowly grasshoppers now represents the self-concept of the Israelites. They are pests that the Anekites would want to eradicate.
So now in July, we come to the end of Numbers, and the Israelites, 40 years after leaving Egypt, are about to begin their conquest of the land of promise.
Are they grasshoppers anymore? How do the Israelites perceive themselves now? What have they learned about themselves?
Enormity of the possible
Thirty-nine years earlier and based on their lowly self-perception, the Israelites rejected the command to conquer the land. Their fears overpowered their hope and the slave generation died in the desert as a consequence of their lack of faith and courage.
So we can presume that 39 years in the desert toughened them. And later Jewish textual authors also sought to reverse that unprivileged self-perception.
Leviticus instructs, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (19:18). From these words we normally understand that what is good for us should be good for another person.
But the passage might be read more deeply: Before assuming we know what is good for another, we should know ourselves well enough to understand why something is good and how it elevates us, and then how it will raise the self-image of others.
In Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Sages), we are instructed to accept that the honor of our students should be as precious as our own (4:15). Here, too, we are required to understand what motivates and compels us through life — that is, what would honor us and why — before we transfer that sense of honor to another person.
We have a rather long history of low self-concept. We may desire to be a butterfly, but as philosopher Emile Cioran once remarked, we might be “afraid of the enormity of the possible.”
We retreat from the expanding potential in our lives, and rather maintain our lowly state and never transform ourselves into our real human potential.
In 1946, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross visited the Majdanek concentration camp. She was especially overcome by the condition of the children’s barracks.
Toys, shoes and other remnants of the innocents’ lives were strewn on the floor in every direction. She could only imagine the pain suffered by these children.
Her attention was then drawn to the walls of the barracks. She looked up from the rubble of the floor, and on the walls she found hundreds of images of butterflies, apparently etched into the walls by rocks, sticks and tiny fingernails.
In later years and throughout her work on death and dying, she slowly came to understand that those butterfly images represented a message of hope: The children may have known that their bodies were doomed, but their spirits were going to soar as butterflies.
Each of us has the capacity to see ourselves as those beautiful creatures that fly unrestricted in every way imaginable. We also have the potential to view ourselves as grasshoppers. What will we choose?
Regardless of our experience, and irrespective of our age or level of ability, we can lift ourselves and our self-perceptions away from the status of a grasshopper, and be able to soar and succeed. There is no need to fear the “enormity of the possible.”
May we always see ourselves as creatures of beauty and grace, capable of flights of elegance and freedom.
Rabbi Jonathan Biatch serves Temple Beth El in Madison.
Loading ...