Rashi: “And the spirit of the nation was short from the path - from the toil of the journey, which was difficult for them. They said, now we were close to entering the Land, and we are turning back, just as our fathers turned back and were delayed thirty-eight years until this day. Therefore, their spirit was short from the discomfort of the journey… And anything which is difficult for a person can be described as a shortness of spirit, like a person who is confronted with toil and his mind is not broad enough to accept it, and he does not have place in his heart where that pain can reside…”

    One of the basic challenges of life is to be able to carry on even in painful or stressful situations. To a great degree, we have been trained to narrow our focus as much as possible, until we do not see the pain.

     But Rashi here writes that pain and distress is to be dealt with not by limiting our focus, but rather with “דעתו רחבה”—broadmindedness. Now, דעתו רחבה does not mean that the person finds different ways to escape his pain; that would be clever, not broad. דעתו רחבה implies that the person is able to live with his pain. He has “place in his heart where that pain can reside”. He trusts in the Borei Olam: not that it won't hurt, but that he can continue to live even now, and he is able to identify the possibility for Avodah in each and every situation. דעתו רחבה is the opposite of “shortness of spirit”, where the person cannot accept the difficulty of his situation.

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     There is, however, one source of pain that even the hearts of the “broadminded” cannot hold: the distress we bring upon ourselves through “דמיונות”, when we invent in our imaginations current or future calamities.

     Klal Yisroel had traveled for quite some time—why were they overwhelmed by the difficulties of their journey specifically at this point, as they were circling around the land of Edom? Rashi writes that once they had been so close to Eretz Yisroel, and were now turning back, they feared that they would share the fate of the previous generation, to wander in the desert for another forty years. It was this worry, completely imagined, that brought them to a state of “shortness of spirit”. A person receives a special “siyata deshmaya”—heavenly assistance—to deal with whatever life brings upon him. Whatever the difficulty is, he can always find “place in his heart”. But there is no special siyata deshmaya for imagined misfortunes. Why should there be a siyata deshmaya, if he brought these worries upon himself? And thus, even though we are in truth able to withstand a great deal, we often crumble in the face of worries about the future which more often than not, never even come to fruition.

   At any given moment, a herd of zebras may be attacked by a lion pride, and required to flee. Why is it, then, that zebras do not suffer from high blood pressure, from all that stress? One neurologist suggested as a reason that a zebra does not worry about the future. If there is a lion, he runs. If there is no lion, he eats grass. I am not advocating “mindfulness”, that we should live only in the present, like a zebra. Far from it. But we should recognize that very often it is not the actual difficulties of life that overwhelm us, but rather our own imaginations.