Moshe Rabbeinu sent spies into the land of Israel (Canaan). Their mission was to search the land, to gather information, and to report the facts about the land back to Moshe Rabbeinu and the Jewish people.
We can learn many important lessons from this story about processing information in a manner where we are likely to find out what is true and real in our lives.
The mission of the spies ended up with a disaster. Most of the generation was banned from entering the promised land of Israel and they died a terrible death in the desert. All of the future generations of the Jewish people have been suffering due to the events that took place as a result of this fact-finding mission. What went wrong and what can we learn from it?
Discovering the truth can be a difficult thing to do. The first step to finding the truth about any matter is to access the information that is relevant to that matter. The biggest challenge of the mission of the spies would seem to have been to access the information. To do so they needed to go into enemy territory to discover what was going on there. The rest of their job would seem to be easy. Their job was “report what you see”. Once they saw what they saw it should be simple to take that information and share it with Moshe Rabbeinu and the Jewish people.
One of the things that they saw was that there were a lot of people dying. That was what they actually saw. However, their interpretation of what they saw was that the people were dying because of the climate. They thought that the only logical interpretation of why people were dying was for that reason. The reality was that there was a different reason why they were dying. It was a kindness from Hashem to distract the people so that they wouldn’t pay attention to the spies.
However, why didn’t they report that a)what we saw was people dying, and b)we assume that it was because of the bad climate? Their report was that it is a bad climate. They didn’t see that. They just assumed that?
It seems that they made two mistakes. 1)Their assumption was incorrect. 2)They presented their assumption to be fact.
It turns out that even though they thought that they were reporting the facts when they said that Israel has an unhealthy climate, they really weren’t.
Throughout our lives, we are bombarded with information, and we are constantly processing the information to discover what the facts are. The information that we receive and the way that we process it determines what all of our decisions will be. Therefore, we need to make sure that we are accurately assessing what the true facts are and we need to make sure that we are not making inaccurate assumptions.
Once we make the wrong assessment about what the facts are, we will often create a story around those facts. We often assign motives and we fill in information based on our assumptions.
After the spies came to the mistaken conclusion that the land of Israel was an uninhabitable place (due to the climate), they now asked themselves why Hashem would tell them that it was a great place to live. That led them to another false conclusion that it must be that Hashem was not being honest with them. Hashem was promising them prosperity and success when the reality was that Israel would not be able to offer them that opportunity.
As a result of their conclusion that Hashem was not being honest about how amazing the land of Israel is, they now questioned Hashem’s overall motive for taking them out of Mitzraim. They now suspected that Hashem may have been preparing them all along to be slaughtered by the powerful Amorite nations. This caused them to reinterpret all of the experiences that they had over their entire journey through their leaving the desert and their journey through the desert.
This caused them to panic, complain, and to question the whole direction of their lives. They started to plan a revolution and a break away from Moshe and the Jewish people. They were even considering going back to Mitzraim.
This whole chain of events began with the spies misinterpreting the facts, and then they built an entire story around their mistaken view.
The same thing happens within our relationships. We often misinterpret, misrepresent, or exaggerate the facts. That leads us to begin to create a whole narrative around the actual facts and our picture of the situation is not in sync with the actual reality. The fact that we create a negative narrative is usually one of the biggest challenges to our relationships. Had we processed the situation based on the true facts our relationships would be much better.
This gives us an insight into one of the key ingredients in improving our relationships. We need to see the true and real story.
The meforshim explain that the spies had a personal agenda. They didn’t want the Jewish people to enter the land of Israel. That would have caused them to lose their role as the leaders of their tribes. Due to their agenda, they were motivated to interpret the facts in a manner that supported their agenda.
Our personal agendas often play a big role in our view of the world. The way that we understand each of the individual situations in life is often based on our agendas. In truth the way that we process everything around us is affected by what our agendas are. We believe what we want to believe!
The same is true for our relationships. We build our reality based on our agendas, and therefore our egos (our agenda) causes us to manipulate the truth to ourselves and to others. Our biases then build a whole narrative to magnify the problems and to make it difficult to see things differently.
The Torah teaches us to judge others favorably. This concept is not just about giving people the benefit of the doubt. The responsibility to judge others favorably is part of a bigger job that we have in life-to see the truth. Not to judge others in a manner that is not based on the truth. We need to process everything in life based on the truth. We should avoid understanding others in an untrue manner, we shouldn’t judge Hashem in an untrue manner, and we can’t judge anyone in the world in an untrue manner.
When we focus on the truth and we don’t build our own narrative around whatever the true story is, we are going to find that we have the real truth and we will be able to make the proper decisions in life.