42 | JUNE 23 • 2022 

Malbim explains the difference 
simply. Latur means to seek out the 
good. That is what tourists do. They 
go to the beautiful, the majestic, the 
inspiring. They don’t spend their time 
trying to find out what is bad. Lachpor 
and leragel are the opposite. They are 
about searching out a place’s weaknesses 
and vulnerabilities. That is what spying 
is about. The exclusive use of the verb 
latur in our parshah — repeated 12 
times — is there to tell us that the 12 
men were not sent to spy. But only two of 
them understood this.
Almost 40 years later, when Moses 
retells the episode in Devarim 1:22-24, 
he does use the verbs lachpor and leragel. 
In Genesis 42, when the brothers come 
before Joseph in Egypt to buy food, he 
accuses them of being meraglim, “spies,” 
a word that appears seven times in that 
one chapter. He also defines what it is 
to be a spy: “You have come to see the 
nakedness of the land” (i.e., where it is 
undefended).
The reason 10 of the 12 men 
came back with a negative report is 
not because they lacked courage or 
confidence or faith. It was because they 
completely misunderstood their mission. 
They thought they had been sent to be 
spies. But the Torah never uses the word 
“spy” in our chapter. The 10 simply did 
not understand what was going on.
They believed it was their role to find 
out the “nakedness” of the land, where it 
was vulnerable, where its defenses could 
be overcome. They looked and could 
not find. The people were strong, and 
the cities impregnable. The bad news 
about the land was that there was not 
enough bad news to make it weak and 
thus conquerable. They thought their 
task was to be spies and they did their 
job. They were honest and open. They 
reported what they had seen. Based on 
the intelligence they had gathered, they 
advised the people not to attack — not 
now and not from here.
Their mistake was that they were not 
meant to be spies. They were told latur, 
not lachpor or leragel. Their job was to 

tour, explore, travel, see what the land 
was like and report back. They were 
to see what was good about the land, 
not what was bad. So, if they were not 
meant to be spies, what was the purpose 
of this mission?
I suggest that the answer is to be 
found in a passage in the Talmud that 
states: It is forbidden for a man to 
marry a woman without seeing her first. 
The reason? Were he to marry without 
having seen her first, he might, when 
he does see her, find he is not attracted 
to her. Tensions will inevitably arise. 
Hence the idea: first see, then love.
The same applies to a marriage 
between a people and its land. The 
Israelites were traveling to the country 
promised to their ancestors. But none 
of them had ever seen it. How then 
could they be expected to muster the 
energies necessary to fight the battles 
involved in conquering the land? They 
were about to marry a land they had 
not seen. They had no idea what they 
were fighting for.
The 12 were sent to latur: to explore 
and report on the good things of the 
land so that the people would know it 
was worth fighting for. Their task was 
to tour and explore, not spy and decry. 
But only two of them, Joshua and Caleb, 
listened carefully and understood what 
their mission was: to be the eyes of 
the congregation, letting them know 
the beauty and goodness of what lay 
ahead, the land that had been their 
destiny since the days of their ancestor 
Abraham.
The Israelites at that stage did not need 
spies. As Moses said many years later: 
“You did not trust in the Lord your 
God, who went ahead of you on your 
journey, in fire by night and in a cloud 
by day, to search out places for you to 
camp and to show you the way you 
should go” (Deut. 1:32-33). God was 
going to show them where to go and 
where to attack.
The people needed something else 
entirely. Moses had told them that the 
land was good. It was “flowing with 

milk and honey.” But Moses had never 
seen the land. Why should they believe 
him? They needed the independent 
testimony of eyewitnesses. That was 
the mission of the 12 And, in fact, 
all 12 fulfilled that mission. When 
they returned, the first thing they 
said was: “We went into the land to 
which you sent us, and it does flow 
with milk and honey! Here is its fruit” 
(Num. 13:27). But because 10 of them 
thought their task was to be spies, they 
went on to say that the conquest was 
impossible, and from then on, tragedy 
was inevitable.
The difference between the 10 and 
Joshua and Caleb is not that the latter 
had the faith, courage and confidence 
the former did not. It is that they 
understood the story; the 10 did not.
I find it fascinating that a leading 
economist and a former governor of the 
Bank of England should argue for the 
importance of narrative when it comes 
to decision-making under conditions 
of radical uncertainty. Yet, that is the 
profound truth in our parshah.
Ten of the 12 men thought they were 
part of a story of espionage. The result 
was that they looked for the wrong 
things, came to the wrong conclusion, 
demoralized the people, destroyed the 
hope of an entire generation, and will 
eternally be remembered as responsible 
for one of the worst failures in Jewish 
history.
Read Amy Chua’s Political Tribes, 
mentioned earlier, and you will discover 
a very similar analysis of America’s 
devastating failures in Vietnam, 
Afghanistan and Iraq. 
I believe that the story we tell 
affects the decisions we make. Get the 
story wrong and we can rob an entire 
generation of their future. Get it right, 
as did Joshua and Caleb, and we can 
achieve greatness. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks served as the 

chief rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of 

the Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings have 

been made available to all at rabbisacks.org. This 

essay was written in 2020.

SPIRIT

A WORD OF TORAH

continued from page 41

