Parashat Shelah – 5786

Remembering as an Act of Imagination

A D’var Torah for Parashat Shelah

By Rabbi Dr. Rachel Posner

This week I met with my psychotherapy client, Melanie (not her real name), who is preparing to give birth for the first time. At her recent baby shower, friends and relatives could not resist sharing their own birth stories. Each woman hoped to help prepare Melanie for what lay ahead. Instead, their stories multiplied her anxiety. “I’m scared,” she told me, “because I’m not really in control. I don’t know what will happen, or what it will really feel like.”

This is, of course, a completely natural response to a completely natural situation. Women give birth every day – but for Melanie, it is not every day. It is the most consequential day of her life so far. I asked her to remember that she has everything she needs to navigate what’s coming, and then to imagine herself coping with whatever lay ahead, even without knowing the specifics. We also talked about how anxiety can cause us to miss out – not on the birth itself, but on all the moments leading up to it: her last days of anticipation, the tender hours before she meets her new baby.

Anxiety takes us out of the present moment, sending us spinning wildly into an imagined future. But when we are truly present, it is practically impossible to be anxious. Anxiety causes us to miss our lives. It blinds us to the power and beauty of what is.

Faith helps us transform anxiety into awe. But how do we build faith? Our parashah teaches that we begin with remembering – and that remembering, rightly understood, is itself an act of imagination, a doorway to a future of possibility.

In this week’s parashah, a grave sin sentences the desert generation to death before they can reach the Promised Land. What is the nature of their transgression? The Israelites believe the lies of their spies. Returning from their mission, the spies instill fear by distorting the dangers ahead: the land devours its settlers, they say; its inhabitants are supernatural in stature, making the spies feel like grasshoppers by comparison (Numbers 13:33). The spies’ failure is, at its core, a failure of self-confidence – they see themselves as small and weak, and their negative self-perception spreads like a contagion. The people are infected with dread.

The people’s failure looks like a lack of courage. But it is really a lack of faith. They cannot tolerate uncertainty. They cannot hold an unknown future with any kind of equanimity. “It would be better for us to return to Egypt!” they cry (Numbers 14:3). They would rather go back to slavery – a known misery – than forward into a freedom they cannot yet picture. This is the nature of anxiety: it makes the familiar cage feel safer than the open road.

The people’s sin, at its deepest, is a failure of imagination. They cannot envision a future where things look different, where they themselves are capable and strong. They have forgotten who they are, and what has already carried them this far.

At the close of the parashah, we receive the commandment of tzitzit, and Rashi connects this mitzvah directly to the sin of the spies. We are instructed to place fringes on the corners of our garments, including a thread of pure blue — tekhelet — the color of the sea and the sky. This blue thread is a visual invitation to awe: a reminder that when we look up or out at the natural world, we can find ourselves returned to a sense of wonder, resting in the faith that the expanse of sea and sky inspires. God constantly renews creation; the world is not fixed and neither are we.

Tzitzit serve as a tool to help us see with honesty — to see through the distortions, embellishments, and catastrophic projections of the anxious mind. They are meant to save us from the sin of the spies, which is to say, from the sin of mistaking our fear for reality.

Tzitzit are both a mitzvah in themselves and a reminder to fulfill all the mitzvot. They are, at their core, a technology of memory. And memory, I want to suggest, is an act of imagination.

When I look at my tzitzit, I look backwards and forwards at the same moment.

Looking backwards: I remember standing next to my father in shul as a child, running the threads of his tzitzit through my fingers. I remember the tallitot I bought for each of my daughters as they became Bat Mitzvah. I remember learning to tie my own tzitzit during ritual skills training at AJR, and the tallit I purchased for my ordination, each knot tied with intention and care.

Looking forward: tzitzit remind me of who I aspire to be, and the path I aspire to walk. They connect me to something larger than the moment’s fear.

This dual movement — backward into memory, forward into aspiration — is what the Torah calls uzkhartem, remembering. It is not passive retrieval. It is an active, creative act.

There are three distinct actions embedded in the Numbers 15:41: first, we look at the tzitzit; then we remember the mitzvot; then we do them. The sequence matters. Looking leads to remembering, remembering leads to action. Memory is not the end — it is the beginning.

Remembering requires imagination. We cannot truly remember without reconstructing, reimagining, re-entering. And imagination fuels faith: when we can envision ourselves as capable, held, and part of a larger story, we are freed to act with courage rather than paralysis. This is the chain that the tzitzit are meant to set in motion: look → remember / imagine → act.

When I think about Melanie, preparing to step into the great unknown of her first birth, I think this is exactly what she needs — not more information, not more stories from other women’s experiences, but a way of returning to herself. She already carries everything she needs. The work is to remember it.

This is the work the tzitzit invite us into, week after week: to remember who we are and where we have been, so that we can imagine, with faith, where we are going. To transform anxiety into awe. To stand at the edge of the unknown — as the Israelites stood at the edge of Canaan, as we all stand, in our own ways, each day — and choose to step forward.