[This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on my Livejournal on 28/6/2006]
The obvious question to ask about this sedra is why ten of the spies Moshe sent to Israel did not seem to think that they would be able to conquer the land and why most of the nation agreed with them. These people had seen the miracles of the exodus from Egypt, so why didn't they think God would help them conquer the land? One explanation I have heard from several rabbis is that the spies misunderstood the point of Judaism. In the desert, the Israelites had an intimate relationship with God. God provided all their physical needs (manna for food, clothes that miraculously did not wear out), leaving them free to spend all of their time studying Torah and gaining an understanding of God, a process heightened by the miraculous nature of their lives. However, on entering Israel, they would have work the land, grow their own crops, make their own clothes, in short have an ordinary physical existence and yet at the same time bring God into that existence by following the mitzvot. They saw staying in the desert as preferable to this, misunderstanding that the desert existence was not an ideal, but only a temporary measure to allow them time to prepare to enter the land. It is bringing a spiritual dimension into physical life that is the Jewish ideal.
It occured to me that maybe there is something else going on here too. Maybe, regardless of whether they thought it was the ideal or not, the Israelites simply didn't think they would be able to live a physical life and bring spirituality into it. Some evidence that lack of confidence may have been a part of the problem can be found in Bamidbar/Numbers 13:33, where the ten spies, describing the Canaanites say "and we were in our eyes like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes." I have seen it noted that they describe how they saw themselves first ("in our eyes") and assumed that the Canaanites saw them the same way, stemming from a lack of confidence. Perhaps this lack of confidence did not just concern the conquest of the land, but ordinary existence in it afterwards.
Incidentally, the commentary in the Artscroll chumash states, based on the Maharal, the Chiddushei HaRim and the Be'er Moshe, that the sin of the spies was based on a misinterpretation of what the conquest of the land involved. They assumed that they had to conquer the land without overt Divine aid and did not think that they were strong enough to do so. Their mistake, according to this interpretation, was that they did not believe that God could help them to succeed above such practical, physical considerations. I think this interpretation can be seen as complementary, rather than contradictory. Conquering the land, with overt Divine aid or otherwise, can be seen as another physical activity they had to make spiritual (by following the halachot for waging war).
This attitude contrasts with that of Moshe in the parsha immediately before Shlach Lecha, Beha'alotacha. We are told (Bamidbar 12:3) "And the man Moshe was very humble, more than any person on the face of the Earth." However, his attitude to a challenge is fundamentally different to that of the spies, showing that humility (a lack of pride in one's abilities and achievements) is not the same as a lack of self-confidence (believing that one has no abilities and can not achieve anything). In Bamidbar 11:14, he had told God 'I am not able to bear this people alone, because it is too heavy for me.' The difference between Moshe and the spies, I think, is two-fold. One, the spies assumed that they would not be able to conquer the land, but Moshe tried to lead the Israelites before saying he could not (actually, he did appear to resist being given the task of leading them in Shmot/Exodus 3-4; the commentators differ as to what exactly he meant, he did eventually go and there is at least one opinion that he was punished for protesting). Two, while the spies tried to avoid their task completely Moshe did not withdraw entirely from the task of leadership. Rather, he asked for help, which shows some self-belief co-existing with a humble awareness of one's limitations.
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