Change Your Garments and Change Who You Are

Art Vladimir Kush

Text by Yitzi Hurwitz - from the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe

[This is the second part of the article, to read the entire essay click here]

What is the eternal message for us in the stories of the spies? 

To answer this question, let me take you to a deeper place. 

We each have a neshamah (a G‑dly soul) that comes into our bodies and into our animal souls, similar to the spies coming into the land of Canaan. The ultimate goal is to conquer the land and make it holy—to turn Eretz Canaan into Eretz Yisrael. Similarly, we are meant to affect the body and the animal soul, which naturally crave the pleasures of the world, and make them holy to do G‑d’s will. 

There are two ways to do this, symbolized by the two sets of spies. 

In Moses’s time, the Jewish people were at a very high level; they were tzadikim. Their job was to inspect the entire land and the seven nations that lived there. The seven nations symbolize the seven emotional attributes that we each have. 

The idea here is to inspect your emotional makeup, and if need be, change your attributes to align with G‑d’s will. The problem is that the average person doesn’t have control over their emotions and certainly doesn’t have the ability to change them, and it takes incredible power to make that kind of change. A tzaddik has that power, but most of us are not at that level, how can we make our bodies holy? That is where Joshua’s spies come in. 

In Joshua’s time, they weren’t at the level of tzadikim. They only went to Jericho, the entryway to the land of Israel. But change the Jericho, and you will eventually conquer the entire land. Jericho (Yericho) is like the Hebrew word rayach, an “aroma.” In Kabbalistic teaching, aroma refers to the “garments” of the soul, which surround it. You may not be able to change your emotional makeup of your animal soul, but you have the power to change its garments. 

Just as a garment is an expression of who you are, the garments of the soul are how it expresses itself.

What are the garments of the soul? Thought, speech and action. Speech and action are easier to control than your thoughts since you cannot stop thinking, but you can always choose to think about something else, effectively controlling your thoughts. Change the garments, and eventually, with G‑d’s help, you will be able to change your emotional makeup as well.