Two kinds of fear.

One of the most powerful addresses I ever heard was given by the Lubavichur-Roube Rabbi Menach and Mendel Schneerson on this week's Parasha, the story of the spies.

For me, it was nothing less than life-changing.

He asked the obvious questions.

How could ten of the spies have come back with a demoralizing defeatist report?

How could they say we can't win? The people are stronger than us.

Their cities are well fortified. They are giants and we are grasshoppers.

They had seen with their own eyes how God had sent a series of blagues

that brought Egypt the strongest and longest lived of all the empires in the ancient world, to its knees.

They had seen the Egyptian army with its cutting-edge military technology, the horse-drawn

chariot, drown in the reed sea while the Israelites passed through it on dry land.

Egypt was far stronger than the Canaanites, Peresites, Jebusites, and the other minor kingdoms

that they'd had to confront in conquering the land. Nor was this an ancient memory. It happened

not much more than a year before. What is more, they already knew that far from being giants,

confronting grasshoppers, the people of the land were terrified of the Israelites.

They said so themselves.

In the course of singing the song at the sea, Shammu Amir Ghazun, the people have heard, they tremble, pangs of seas, the inhabitants of Philistia.

Now the chiefs of Edom dismayed, trembling ceases the leaders of Moab.

All the inhabitants of Canaan have melted away,

terror and dread fall upon them, because of the greatness of your arm, they are as still a stone.

The people of the land were afraid of the Israelites. Why then were the spies afraid of them?

What's more continued the rabbi, the spies were not people plucked at random from among

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