Why didn't Hashem keep the Jewish people in the desert, learning Torah with everything provided?

Rabbi Landau explains that the desert years really were an ideal learning life: “free food, free protection, and all the time in the world to learn Torah. And that was holy.” Hashem wanted the people to absorb Torah the way a young man learns before his wedding, “learning without any distraction.”

“But that was never the end game.” Hashem said: “Now it's time for Eretz Yisrael. Work the land, build homes, bring my Torah into the materialistic world.” The point of entering the Land was to carry Torah into ordinary, physical life through the work of your own hands.

Rabbi Landau teaches that the spies (the meraglim) resisted exactly this. Their cry was, in effect, “We don't want to leave the free food. We don't want responsibility.” He says that cry became the first Tisha B'Av. His lesson is that Hashem “doesn't want us to stay children forever. He gives us a stage to learn, and then a stage to live out our mission.” At some point, “you got to grow up.”

Also answered in this teaching

Is leaving full-time learning for work a step down?

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes to the man stepping from full-time study into earning a living: “it is not a step down. This is the second stage of your mission.”

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

The desert was a holy stage of learning, but Hashem's goal was to bring Torah into the physical world in Eretz Yisrael.

Fear, vulnerability, or tension

The meraglim cried because they did not want to leave the free food or take on responsibility. In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that they were afraid of the change from a young man in study to a family man with a job.

Underlying need or longing

The wish to stay protected and comfortable, in what A Soul at Peace calls “a greenhouse made by heaven.”

Deepest human truth

Hashem gives a stage to learn and then a stage to live out the mission. At some point a person has to grow up and bring holiness into the work of his own hands.