Once- A - Year  Day
             By Rabbi Joshua (annually known as The Hoffer) Hoffman


After Moshe pleads with God not to wipe out the natio God tells Moshe, " I have forgven them  in accordance  mean?' Rashi says that this refers to Moshe's argument that if God wipes out the people, there will be a Chillul Hashem, a desecration of His name, in that the nations will say that God killed wiped them out because  He was not able to bring them into the land. Rav Moshe Sterbach, in his Ta'am VaDa'as,  adds that it is for this reason, to avoid a  Chillul HaShem, that we invoke this verse on the evening of Yom Kippur, after Kol Nidrei. The continued state of the Jewish people as a nation denigrated and suffering among the nations is a desecration of God's name, and so we ask Him to remove our suffering for His name's sake.
so that God's punishment of the people for  heeding the words of the spies was to make them stay in the wilderness for forty years, one year for each day that the spies scouted the land. As God told Moshe- '" one day for a year." ( Bamidbar, 14:34) actually, the verse should have said ' a year for a day.'  Why was it written in this way? Rabbi Besser suggested that it serves as an allusion to Yom Kippur, which is a day that comes one time a year. The punishment of a year for a day demonstrated God's kindness to the people, and, in addition, as Rashi points out the mission of the spies, to traverse the entire land, should have taken them much longer,,but since God knew that the spies  would sin, and cause the poeple to reject the land and be punished, in accordane with the number of days he trip would take,   he enabled them to make the trip in a very short time. We thus ask of God, at the beginning of Yom Kippur, to show us, in our annual judgment, the kind of mercy that he should us after the sin of the spies.

I would like to sugeest a further reason for alluding, on Yom Kippur eveningto the sin generated by the spie . Rabbi hershel Reichman, a Rosh Yeshiva in Yeshiva University's RIETS, spoke in the Yeshiva,  this past Shavuos, about the reason for reading  Megillas Rus on Shavuos. Although many other reasons have been  given, Rabbi Reichman felt that one of them is to emphasize the connection between the Torah and Eretz Yisroel. Rus, after becoming a convert to Judaism, went to Eretz Yisroel with her mother-in-law Naomi. This demonstrates, said Rabbi  Reichman, that to lead a true Jewish life, and observe the Torah properly, one must live in eretz Yisroel. This idea is actually stated by the  Ramban in his commentary to parshas Vaeschanan , where he cites and elaborates on the Sifrei brought thereby rashi,  Rrashi, which says that the main place to do themitzvos in in Eretz Yisroel, and we do mitzvos, suchas tefillin and tzitzis, outside the land so that they will not be new to ua when we come back to the land. Rabbi Eliyahu Meir Bloch, among others, explained that as far as God's decree to  observe these mitzvos, there is no difference between Eretz Yiroel andother lands.. The difference, rather, is in the effect that themitzvos have on us, whichis far greater in Eretz Yirsroel than it is outside of it, since Eretz Yisroel is the place where the divine presence ( shechinah)dwells. In order for us to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, fulfilling the charge which we received as a prelude to the giving of the Torah, then, e must live in Eretz Yisroel, wherethe shchinah dwells. 


Yom Kippur is the day that we received the second pair of tablets containing the Decalogue, after receiving atonment for the sin of thegolden calf, which led Moshe to break the first set. Thus, Yom Kippur is a second giving of the Torah, and we need, again,on that day,  to be aware of the intrinsic  connection between Torah and Eretz  Yisroel. Perhaps, then, it is  for that reason that  we allude to the aftermath of the sin of the spies on Yom Kippur, in order to remind us  of the importance of eretz Yisroel in our mission as God's peeople on this earth.