The story of the spies abruptly interrupted the march of Jewish history from Egypt to Eretz Yisrael. Eretz Yisrael is the land that Avraham recognized on his own as the land of spiritual opportunity with its rarefied atmosphere, avira d’Eretz Yisrael. It is the land that is the object of Hashem’s particular focus and involvement. It is where we come from, where we belong, where we can thrive, and where we find our connection to God. It is the land of our destiny, and the journey there from Egypt was to be direct and speedy, pausing only to receive the Torah at Sinai.

But we lost our way. We questioned whether the destination—our destiny—was right for us. We questioned whether we could thrive there and whether we could succeed in getting there. It seems so absurd that we as a people could become so disconnected from both our past and our future, but we did. And it led to the most fitting consequence: We were doomed to spend a generation wandering in the desert, biding our time with no clear direction at all.

The anniversary of this occasion is commemorated every Tisha B’Av. On Tisha B’av, we mourn this event along with the destruction of both Temples, as well as every other tragedy of Jewish history. Evidently, they are all one story that repeats itself. At each of those times we disconnected from our past and from our future, we lost sight of our purpose and our destiny, and ultimately, we became aimless wanderers.

This should not be one of those times. We in our time have been blessed to witness the transformation from destruction to rebirth, from the horrific devastation of the Holocaust to the restoration of Eretz Yisrael as the home of the Jewish people and the wellspring of the regeneration of Torah worldwide. To us, the irrevocable destiny of the Jewish people—chosen by God to be given His Torah and settled in the Holy Land—is patently clear. And while the world denies it, and while far too many of our brothers and sisters fail to recognize it, we will never again lose sight of it. We must not lose our way and be left again to wander aimlessly off the path of our destiny.

We are thankful for the privilege of this awareness which will give each of us the clarity to withstand the challenges that surround us from all sides and to move forward with clarity to our shared destiny as Klal Yisrael.

Rabbi Moshe Hauer is executive vice president of the Orthodox Union (OU), the nation’s largest Orthodox Jewish umbrella organization