They were not nobodies. Every one of the twelve men Moses sent to scout the Land of Canaan was a prince, the leading figure of his tribe. These were the best men Israel had. Moses chose them personally.
How did twelve of the greatest leaders in Israel’s history look at a land flowing with milk and honey, with God’s miraculous hand still fresh in their memory, and come back with a report that shattered the nation’s will to move forward?
They saw giants. They saw fortified cities. Fine — those were real. But that’s not what broke them.
Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, the twelfth-century Spanish commentator, argues that men who spent their entire lives as slaves could not shed the slave’s psychology. It was too deeply conditioned. The generation that left Egypt was not capable of conquering the land — not because of military weakness, but because of who they understood themselves to be. They had to die in the desert. Only their children, born free, could become conquerors.
Read that against the spies’ report, and one sentence jumps out:
Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk — the nineteenth-century Hasidic master — noticed what everyone else skips over. The spies didn’t say the Canaanites saw them as grasshoppers. They said they themselves felt like grasshoppers, and then assumed the enemy must see them the same way. They had no idea what the giants actually thought of them. They were projecting their own self-image onto the enemy, and then citing that projection as intelligence.
Ibn Ezra explains why they thought this way; the Kotzker shows you exactly what it looked like.
That self-image didn’t stay internal. It came out in how they reported what they saw. A people who see themselves as grasshoppers will produce a grasshopper’s report.
Rashi explains that God had sent a plague through Canaan, keeping the inhabitants busy mourning their dead so they wouldn’t notice the Israelite scouts moving through their land. The spies, however, watched a miracle unfold and read it as a curse. “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its settlers” (Numbers 13:32).
The Torah calls their report a dibah — typically translated as “slander” or “evil report.” This is a strange word to use, since the spies were telling the truth. The cities were fortified. The giants were real. Nachmanides explains that what made it slander was not fabrication but framing: taking accurate facts and arranging them to produce despair. The spies saw funerals and concluded the land consumed its inhabitants. They saw obstacles and concluded God’s promise was undeliverable. Everything they reported was true. The slander was how they presented it.
This is not just an ancient problem.
The nations are not lying when they say that Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria create tension. Tension exists. They are not fabricating when they say Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem complicates diplomacy. It does complicate diplomacy — for people who think Jewish sovereignty is a complication. The slander is the framing: the assertion that Jews in Hebron are the problem, that Israeli presence on those hills is the obstacle, that the path to peace runs through Jewish retreat. Every UN resolution, every EU statement, every State Department briefing that treats Israeli sovereignty as an aggression rather than a right — these are slander.
Against this, God held up two men, Joshua and Caleb. The Torah describes Caleb as follows:
What was this “different spirit”? It was not that Caleb was braver or more physically capable than the other princes. It was that he refused to outsource his perception of reality to the consensus. When ten respected leaders looked at the land and decided the mission was impossible, Caleb held his own vision steady. He did not argue that the giants were smaller than reported. His argument was: “The land is very, very good.” (Numbers 14:7) He understood that the holiness of the land outweighs whatever is standing between the Jewish people and possessing it. That is not optimism. That is a different framework, one that starts from what God has promised rather than what men have deployed against it.
Before Moses sent the spies, he gave them a word of instruction that tells you everything about what the mission was supposed to accomplish. He told them: go, see the land, v’hitchazaktem — be strengthened (Numbers 13:20). The Hebrew root chazak means strength, fortification, resolve. The whole point of seeing the land was to return with more resolve than they left with. The spies inverted the assignment. They went to gather chizuk and came back carrying despair.
Jerusalem Day — which we mark this week — commemorates the moment in June 1967 when Israeli paratroopers stood at the Western Wall for the first time in nineteen years. Those soldiers wept. And within hours of the city’s liberation, the international pressure to give it back had already begun. That pressure has not stopped in nearly six decades. It takes different forms in different administrations, different forums, different vocabularies — but the underlying message is the same message the ten spies delivered to Israel in the desert: the obstacles are too great, the price is too high, the wisest move is retreat.
Israel365 Action exists to be the ruach acheret in that conversation — in the halls of Washington, and on the ground in Judea and Samaria. The young Christian leader who walks through Hebron and comes home to his congregation or his hundred thousand followers saying: I was there. The land is real. The history is real. That is Caleb’s spirit in the twenty-first century.
The spies toured the land and came home grasshoppers. We bring people to the land so they come home lions.
Jerusalem is not won once. It must be held every day, in every arena where the slander is being told — and we intend to be in every one of those arenas, telling the truth.
