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June 5, 2026 // 20 Sivan, 5786
CORRECTION: A previous version of this post had the wrong opening line. This version has been amended.
For this week’s parsha, Rabbi Shira writes about the leaders of the twelve tribes seeing the Promised Land for the first time:
All lies begin with the truth.
The best lies — the ones that really stick — start with a kernel of truth, because if they didn’t, we’d see right through them. The Talmud agrees:
“Any slander that does not begin with a truthful statement ultimately does not stand.” (Sotah 35a)
The Talmud’s example of this principle is in our parsha, Shelach. The twelve scouts sent by Moses latur et haaretz — to tour through the land — are information- gatherers, reporters in the best sense of the word. And not just any twelve guys — they are the leaders of the twelve tribes.
A traumatized people, fresh out of slavery, wandering in the desert, are about to hear a report about their promised land from the twelve people they have been taught, more than anyone else, to trust.
And what do the scouts report?
They start with the facts. “We came to the land you sent us to; it does indeed flow with milk and honey, and this is its fruit.” And then — almost in the same breath — “however.” That word. “However, the people who inhabit the country are powerful, and the cities are fortified and very large; moreover, we saw the Anakites there.” And “we were in their eyes like grasshoppers.”
Notice what’s happening. They’ve moved from observation to feeling. The people are powerful — okay, that’s something you can see. But grasshoppers? That’s not a description of the Anakites. That’s a description of how the scouts felt standing next to them that they’re presenting it as fact.
And then — here’s where it fully goes wrong — they make the leap. “We cannot attack that people,” they say. “The land devours those who settle there.”
“We cannot” — that’s a judgment, not an observation. “The land devours” — that’s an emotional interpretation, not a description. They are taking real information, filtering it through their own terror, and presenting that terror as reality to the entire community without identifying it as such.
That’s the lie inside the truth.
The philosopher Miranda Fricker has a term for what happens to people on the receiving end of this: hermeneutical injustice. Being wronged not through a direct attack, but through being denied the freedom to make sense of your own situation. When the information you’re given is pre-chewed, pre-interpreted, when someone else has already decided what it means — you’ve been robbed of your agency. Your ability to make sense of your own life.
I don’t think the scouts intended to mislead anyone. I think they were scared, trying to protect the people they loved. But the most damaging misinformation usually isn’t malicious — it comes from people who genuinely can’t see the difference between what they observed and how they feel about it.
Real leadership requires that you try to see that difference.
In our current world, our media is built — literally, by engineers and designers, for profit — to route us toward content that confirms the fears we already have, that makes us feel righteous and scared at the same time.
We are the Israelites in this story.
To be honest, this is not a problem we can individually bootstrap our way out of. The Torah holds the scouts primarily responsible, not the Israelites. The people who have access to real information and choose to present it in ways that manipulate rather than illuminate — they bear the greater moral burden.
And yet. We still have to do something. Because when the punishment came, it wasn’t only for the scouts. Yes, they were struck down immediately. But the people — the ones who let the fear of their leaders become their own fear, without stopping to ask wait, how do you know? — they were punished too. Forty years of wandering. An entire generation that would never see the land. Not because they were evil. But because they outsourced their perception. They let someone else’s terror become their truth.
Our work — each of us — is to at least try to see. To seek out sources trying to tell us what happened, not just how to feel about it. To notice when we are being told we cannot and ask: why? By whom? What did they actually observe, and what did they conclude, and should those be the same thing?
The scouts came back with a cluster of grapes and a story of doom. The grapes were real. The doom was a feeling.
May we learn to hold both — the grapes and the giants — without letting anyone else decide for us what they mean.
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