13 Jun SHLACH: THE PSYCHOLOGY OF FEAR VAIN TEARS

Tears

A man and woman
were recently
celebrating their 50th
wedding anniversary.
While cutting the cake,
the wife was moved after
seeing her husband’s eyes fill with tears.
The wife took his arm, and looked at him
affectionately.
“I never knew you were so sentimental.” she
whispered.
“No . . . No . . .” he said, choking back his
tears, “That’s not it at all. Remember when
your father found us in the barn and told me to
either marry you or spend the next 50 years in
jail?”
“Yes,” the wife replied. “I remember it like
yesterday.”
“Well,” said the husband, “Today I would have
been a free man.”
Vain Tears
The Torah—in Bamidbar, parshas Shlach
-relates how when the twelve spies returned
from scouting the Land of Canaan they
frightened the Bnei Yisroel from entering it.
This is what the spies said:
We came to the land that you have sent us, and
indeed, it flows with milk and honey; this is its
fruit. However, the people who dwell in the
land are strong, and the cities are fortified and
very great; we also saw giants there. The
Amalekites dwell in the Negev, the Hittites, the
Jebusites and the Emorites in the hills, and the
Canaanites at the sea and on the banks of the
Jordan… We cannot go up against these people,
for they are mightier than we…
They spread an [evil] report about the land
which they had scouted, telling the children of
Israel, ‘The land we passed through to explore
is a land that consumes its inhabitants, and all
the people we saw in it are men of stature.
There we saw the giants, the sons of Anak,
descended from the giants. In our eyes, we
seemed like grasshoppers, and so we were in
their eyes.’
As a result of this the Torah relates:
The entire community raised their voices and
shouted, and the people wept on that night. All
the children of Israel complained against
Moshe and Aaron, and the entire congregation
said, “If only we had died in the land of Egypt,
or if only we had died in this desert. Why does
G-d bring us to this land to fall by the sword;
our wives and children will be as spoils. Is it
not better for us to return to Egypt?”
Comes the Talmud and teaches us that the
spies, who were sent on the 29th day of Sivan,
returned after forty days on the 8th of Av. The
mass weeping of the entire nation thus occurred
on the night of the 9th of Av. G-d declared to
them, “You wept in vain, I will establish this
day as a time of weeping for all generations.”

Indeed, that day—the 9th of Av—has become
a day of tears and grief, for the terrible
calamites that occurred on this day throughout
our history. Jews have been crying on this day
since.
Yet, G-d’s response seems unfair. Just because
someone cries in vain, is it a reason to penalize
them and make them cry in earnest over real
pain for generations to come? The act is
incommensurate with the punishment. Just
because someone weeps over delusional
misery, is it a reason to “take revenge” and
make them suffer real misery which would
illicit real tears? What is the connection
between the two? How could “vain tears” alone
warrant such a dramatic punishment—that for
all generations this would become a night of
tears and grieving?
The answer of course is that this was not a
punishment. G-d was stating a prediction, and a
natural one. He was attempting to explain to
the people the tragic ramifications of their
behavior. Your crying tonight in vain is what
will cause you to cry for generations. Why?
Helplessness
Why were the Jews weeping that night?
Because they saw a hopeless and doomed
future for themselves and their children. They
have been through so much; they have finally
made it out of Egypt, only to meet their cruel
deaths upon entering Canaan.
Yet there is something strange here. In all of
history, it would be difficult to find a generation
whose lives were more saturated with miracles
than the generation which left Egypt. Egypt,
the most powerful nation on earth at the time,
was forced to free them from slavery when “the
mighty hand” of G-d inflicted ten supernatural
plagues. When Pharaoh’s armies pursued them,
the sea split to let them pass and then drowned
their pursuers. In the desert, miracles were the
stuff of their daily lives: manna from heaven
was their daily bread, “Miriam’s well” (a
miraculous stone which traveled along with the
Israelite camp) provided them with water, and
“clouds of glory” sheltered them from the
desert heat and cold, kept them clothed and
shod, destroyed the snakes and scorpions in
their path, and flattened the terrain before them
to ease their way. Above all of this, this nation
witnessed—the only time in history—the
revelation of G-d Himself at Har. Sinai sharing
with them the ultimate truth of existence.
For these people to doubt G-d’s ability to
conquer the “mighty inhabitants” of Canaan
seems nothing less than ludicrous. Yet this very
people embraced the notion, “We cannot go up
against these people, for they are mightier than
we” and even He!
The Power of Fear
Thus is the disturbing power of fear. It is not
always rational. Sometimes, it proves more
powerful than all of your previous success
stories. The fear may be baseless from a

rational and empirical point of view; yet this
does not prevent fear from paralyzing you,
and freezing you in your tracks. Roosevelt
was quite correct in his quip that “we have
nothing to fear but fear itself.”
This is what happened to our people on that
fateful night of the ninth of Av. Despite all
rational and compelling evidence that they can
do it; despite the fact that G-d—the singular
master of the world—has instructed them to do
it, they were overtaken by titanic fear. They
concluded that their future was bleak and cruel.
They were powerless. They could do nothing
but weep.
Their weeping in vain on that night was not the
reason for the punishment; it was the factor that
revealed what might come in the future. They
wept in vain because they did not appreciate
that G-d was with them and He has given them
the power to confront their challenges and
overcome their obstacles. When you lose sight
of your inner spiritual power, you indeed
become a victim to forces and people beyond
your control. And then you cry for real.
The Experiment
Psychology Today published some time ago an
experiment conducted by a Harvard
psychologist named Dr. Robert Rosenthal on a
group of students and teachers living in
Jerusalem. The experiment went as follows: a
group of physical education teachers and
students were randomly chosen and randomly
divided into three groups.
In the first group, the teachers were told that
previous testing indicated that all the students
had an average ability in athletics and an
average potential. The teachers were told: “Go
and train them!”
The second group of teachers were told that
students in their group, based on previous
testing, exhibited an unusually high potential
for excellence in athletic… “Go and train
them!”
And the third group of teachers were told that
their group of students had exhibited, based on
previous testing, an extremely low potential for
athletic training. “Now go and train them!”
The teachers were given several weeks to work
with and interact with their student athletes. At
the end of the training period the results were
the same for male and female students, and for
male and female teachers. All of those students
who had been randomly identified as being
rather average in ability performed about
average on the tests. All of those students who
were randomly identified as being above
average, performed above average. All those
students who were randomly identified as
below the average, performed below the
average by a considerable margin. The results
of the test indicated that what the teachers
thought their students’ ability was, and what
the students themselves thought their ability
was, went a long way toward deciding just how

well they performed as athletes.
“Psychology Today” took special note of this
experiment because it confirmed in the physical
arena what psychologists had long claimed to
be true in the educational and emotional arena:
The concept of the self-fulfilling prophecy.
Students in classrooms, workers in shops,
patients in therapy, all do better when the
person in charge expects them to do well, when
they themselves expect to do well. One’s own
self-esteem, one’s own self-image, what
someone thinks of themselves and thinks
himself capable of, is an extremely crucial
factor in deciding what can be, of what one is to
make of himself or herself, and the way we see
ourselves plays an important role in the way
others see us as well.
The Circus
Did you ever go to the circus? Remember
those huge elephants that weighed several tons
who were held in place by a small chain
wrapped around one of their huge legs, and
held to the ground by a small wooden stake? If
those huge elephants wanted to, they could
walk right through those small chains and that
small wooden stake like a hot knife going
through butter. But they don’t. Why is that?
When they were little baby elephants, they
were chained down by those same small chains
and the small wooden stakes. But to them, as
babies, they couldn’t move. They tried and
tried and tried again and could not release
themselves from those chains and stakes. And
then, an interesting thing happens. They stop
trying. They gave up. They developed a belief
system.
Now, as adult elephants, they don’t try because
they are programmed to believe that there
efforts would be useless – in vain. As huge,
adult elephants, they don’t even try. They’re
held in prison by their beliefs.
The same is true with so many of us. The spies
declared: “We were like grasshoppers in our
own eyes, and so were we in their eyes.” As a
result, the nation wept in vain. The spies caused
the Jews to perceive themselves as hopeless,
small and futile “grasshoppers.” Thus they also
came to believe that everyone looks at them as
mere grasshoppers. When you think you are
weak, you indeed become weak, and you
believe that everyone considers you the same.
Part of leaving exile and being worthy of
redemption is that we must stand firm, united,
filled with resolve. We must never capitulate.
As individuals and as a community, we must
dismiss the sense of powerlessness. We ought
to remember that in every situation we are
empowered by G-d to create light out of
darkness and to continue our march to bring
healing and redemption to our world.