The wood-gatherer of Parshat Sh’lach

A belated note (or very early, or just on time, depending when you’re reading it) on the stick-gatherer of Parshat Sh’lach (Numbers 15:32-36).
The basic story: The Israelites find a guy gathering sticks on Shabbat, presumably for firewood, and don’t know what to do with him. Moses asks God, and the answer is to stone him to death, which they do.
It seems extreme, and it is extreme. I mean the death penalty for gathering sticks on Shabbat? What’s so bad about that?
Before I give an answer, let me be clear that I, like most rabbis for the last two thousand years, take a dim view of the death penalty. We definitely shouldn’t actually stone anyone for gathering sticks on Shabbat or for any violation of Shabbat.
Nonetheless, I think there’s something to be learned from asking the question: What’s so bad?
A standard answer, which may in fact be right in a historical sense, is that Shabbat was seen as a core acknowledgement of God’s sovereignty and breaking Shabbat was therefore understood as treason against God. And in lots of societies, treason against the sovereign is a capital offense, all the more so if the sovereign is God!
But I’d like to offer another possibility of what was so bad about what the stick-gatherer did: He was exhibiting utter despair about the future and about community. I mean, wouldn’t there be any sticks that night, after Shabbat? And he’s surrounded by about a million other Israelites (according to the story); Would not one of them give him some sticks if he needed them? This guy was in utter despair (or contempt?) about everyone and everything, but himself.
A society can’t last like that! We can only survive if we have some hope and solidarity, assuming that the future and our community will bring some blessing, some sustenance. In that light, gathering sticks on Shabbat was a socially destructive act. OK, we, now, might say that a therapeutic/spiritual/social intervention would be a better solution to the destructive behavior than the death penalty. But we can learn from how seriously the Torah takes this behavior, if we consider it in the light of the despair it exhibits.