The spies, sent by Moses to explore the land, came back with a wholly misleading report.

They said we're not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.

The land through which we have gone as spies is an Eretz O'Hale-Joshvah, a land that devours its inhabitants,

and all the people we saw in it are men of great stature.

In fact, as we later discover in the book of Joshua, the inhabitants of the land were terrified

of the Israelites. It was exactly the reverse. When Joshua sent spies to Jericho,

Rehab told them, A great fear of you has fallen on us so that all who live in this country are melting

in fear because of you.

When the people of the land heard what God had done for the Israelites, our hearts melted

in fear and everyone's courage failed because of you.

The spies should have known this.

They themselves had sung at the Red Sea. The people of Canaan melted away. Terror and dread fell upon them.

The spies were guilty of an attribution error, assuming that others felt as they did.

They said, we were like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and so we were in their eyes.

But as the Kotska-reber noted, they were entitled to make the first claim about what we felt,

but not the second about what the others felt. They had no idea how the other people felt about them.

They were terrified of the Keneonites, and they completely failed to see that the Kene. They were terrified of the Canaanites and they completely failed to see

that the Canaanites were terrified of them. But the real obvious questions about the spies

are these. Number one, how come 10 of the 12 made this mistake? And number two, how come

two of them? Yoshuaua and Kalev didn't.

Stanford University psychologist Carol Dweck has written a fascinating book called Mindset

on why some people fulfill their potential and others don't. Her interest was aroused. When she was watching,

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