Americans Are Lazy
Our failure to think beyond ourselves is preventing us from fighting injustice.
There’s a 3,000-year-old story in the Hebrew Bible that has always fascinated me.
The Hebrews escaped slavery in Egypt and were on their trek through the desert to soon create a free, new home in Israel.
Moses instructed 12 scouts (often referred to in English as “spies,” but the Hebrew word comes from “leg”) to travel throughout the would-be future homeland and report back to Moses upon their return. Their job was to gather information to help prepare the new nation for their plans to enter what was to be Israel.
But when the scouts arrived, they saw disturbing things.
“The land swallows its inhabitants,” they later told Moses and the anxious Hebrews.
All but two scouts spoke negatively of the land promised to them. They scared the daylights out of most of Moses’s some-million followers.
“Let’s go back to Egypt,” the formerly enslaved Hebrews cried out in response. “We don’t want to be swallowed up.”
Though the Bible doesn’t indicate that the scouts were lazy, an ancient 2,000-year-old Jewish text teaches that their mistake was that they were, in fact, lazy.
