You Can't Always Get What You Want: A Reflection on the Ten Scouts

delivered June 14, 2014

The Rolling Stones said it well:

No, you can't always get what you want

aaaahhwaw

No, you can't always get what you want

aaaahhwaw

No, you can't always get what you want

aaaahhwaw

But if you try sometime, you just might find

You get what you need

The Stones’ song could have been written about our ancestors making their way through the wilderness.   Fits and starts, these people never, quoting Abba Eban “Never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity.”

You see this week Moses sends 12 scouts, which we often think of us spies, to scout out the land that God has promised to the people now moving through the wilderness.

One is appointed from each ancestral tribe.  They go to the land.  They see what is there.  They come back.  And they report not just to Moses and Aaron, but loudly announce before all assembled:  “We are like grasshoppers to the people of this land.”  In other words, even with God’s reassurance time and again that they will survive there, prosper there, it is too much for the scouts to let in.  Instead, they pollute the ears of all the people with inaccurate information, information that dramatically raises the people’s anxieties.

I’ve noticed this quite a bit with how we human communicate.  

And it does not take a large group for this to happen--it can happen in small gatherings--over bridge and golf games, at committee and board meetings, at dinner parties.  

Someone--it doesn’t matter who that someone is--says something in passing that becomes interpreted by the people hearing it as a fact.

Let me share with you two local examples.

At a seder this past spring people were speculating why Interstate 91 at the bridge was closed in Brattleboro.  Did it collapse into the water?  Did the crane collapse?  Was it permanent?  In a little less than three minutes’ time the rumors collided.  On fact checking it became known that it was shut-down temporarily for a safety inspection by Vermont’s Department of Transportation.  All of the rumors, none of them true.

Another:  Do you remember Panda Garden, the Chinese restaurant set far back from the street that closed recently?  

Do you remember what you may have heard?

Some of the things that we repeated to me, erroneously, included:

• they were handing out heroin with the take-out
• their staff was in an overcrowded home
• the Manchester police/federal drug authorities shut them down
• and more.

So much so that our local paper, the Manchester Journal, was forced to run a story that said, “The property on which Panda Garden sits is being sold.  Panda Garden had not paid rent in two years.  The owner of the property evicted the restaurant so that they could sell the property with a clean title and no encumberances.”

That’s it.  No drugs.  No overcrowded home.  No busts.  No special take-out.

Just a business that had not paid its rent for a long period of time.

So what happened in the wilderness was that ten of the 12 scouts spread wild rumors, undermined the confidence in God’s protection, and set off widespread panic and anxiety among all that were presence.

So much so that God decrees that not one of the people alive in this moment, except for Joshua and Caleb, the two scouts who worked to tell the truth and calm the people, would be alive when God fulfilled the promise of bringing them to the Promised Land.

What makes Torah so resonant is it is so easy to see how we, too, can take bad information, spread it, and create unnecessary panic.  The end result may be that we may not be punished as the people in the Torah were, but still, we cause damage by repeating untruths--damage to other people, damages to businesses, damage to community, damage to the fabric of our connections with each other.

Just as the Rolling Stones sang you can’t always get what you want. . . you can try sometime to get what you need. . . and what all of us need is to be cautious with our words, especially in the absence of facts.

We need to slow down that instant connection between mind and mouth, to be reflective about what we are saying before we say it, and to use words and actions to strengthen our relationships with each other and our communities.   In so doing, we avoid spreading erroneous information, increasing the anxiety of others, and becoming known as people whose words destroy communities.