11 Life and Nation Saving Lessons from the Torah Portion of the Spies: Which spies are deceiving you today? Why are you going along?

Intelligence agencies portray themselves to their host populations as all powerful and advocating for the best interests of their host population. But is that true? Let's learn what the Torah teaches

Parshas Shelach (Bamidbar (Numbers), Chapter 13 ff) presents us with a peculiar situation - despite seven generations of explicit promises from G-d Al-mighty that the Holy Land was for the decendents of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and despite explicitly hearing from G-d Al-mighty that He would take the Jewish People into the Holy Land, some people requested that spies be sent to verify if the Land was in fact conquerable!

Problem #1 has already appeared - not taking what G-d Al-mighty communicates to us literally!

Solution #1 - take literally what G-d Al-mighty says even if it contradicts all what you think are the “realities” and “facts on the ground.”¹

Problem #2 - the people abdicate responsibility for their own lives and delegate it to a select few to become the experts and tell the rest what to do.

Solution #2 - take responsibility for your own life, follow the 6 steps of Making Good Decisions in All Times and Places. Sometimes you will need to check text, sometimes consult with others, sometimes think for yourself.

Moses, Our Teacher, sent 12 spies, the leader of each of the 12 tribes. They were all completely righteous when appointed. Ten quickly fell into a conspiracy to distort the truth and mislead the people, substituting their own impressions and goals for G-d Al-mighty’s Vision.²

Problem #3 - relying on a person’s past behavior and reputation to certify his current statements and actions. The prior track record of the spies was irrelevant - their past righteousness had no value to those that followed them astray.

Solution #3 - constantly check what you are hearing against the 6 steps of Making Good Decisions in All Times and Places no matter how impeccable the track record of the leader, teacher, writer or speaker.

Only two of the spies remained true to G-d Al-mighty and Moses, Our Teacher — Yehoshua Bin Nun (Joshua) and Calev ben Yefune (Caleb). But, they couldn’t do it on their own. They needed Divine Assistance - Moses, Our Teacher, added a letter from G-d Al-mighty’s name to Yehoshua. And, Calev extracted himself from the presence of the conspirators and prayed at the gravesite of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, Our Fathers, that he be saved from falling in with the conspirators.

Problem #4 - relying on yourself and your peers to keep you honest and on track, or relying on some vague sense of the prior glory days of your country, that the future will reflect the past.

Solution #4 - constantly seek Divine Assistance to keep your thinking clear and your speech and action in accordance with the Divine.

Problem #5 - belonging to the group taking precedence over loyalty to G-d Al-mighty and to Moses Our Teacher.

Solution #5 - reinforce to yourself and your family that loyalty to G-d Al-mighty and to Moses, Our Teacher, is the only standard, even if that means having to leave the most prestigious group of peers.

Now that you have made it this far, you may be wondering where is the answer to the questions posed in the title of the article. Who are the spies today? How are we being deceived?

It’s normal to want to rush to the punchline. But in doing so you miss the point. Every warped result is the cumulative effect of a series of warped choices based on warped thoughts. You can only get to the right result if you trace back all the warped thinking and choices and clean them out permanently.

That is what learning Torah does for us. It shows us the root mistaken thinking. And, that’s why here together we must go through each one of the mistakes. Your only hope to free yourself from the false reports of the spies today is to identify each one of the problems listed here and implement each one of the solutions. If you skip even one, the warped result will remain warped. For example, if you realize you are being misled but default to what your peers would find acceptable to think, say and do, nothing will change.

Now to continue the steps to the warped result in Parshas Shelach:

The spies took seriously insecure thoughts about themselves. They related that they were like grasshoppers in their own eyes. (13:23)

Problem #6 - each person is faced at every moment between choosing to dwell on a secure thought or on an insecure thought. Which we choose will affect ourselves and everyone we lead in our family, community and nation.

Solution #6 - make your own choices of what thoughts to dwell on, choosing secure thoughts to focus on, and do not adopt a teacher or leader’s dwelling on an insecure thought, rather let your own thoughts stay on track and pray for them to let go of the insecure thoughts.

The spies used very few words to disinform the Jewish People, claiming that the Holy Land was unconquerable and the opposition of its people insurmountable.

In fact, their entire report was merely 43 words, followed by 9 words of analysis and conclusion and then another 31 words of analysis for extra emphasis. With 83 words, a majority of the Jewish People collapsed into utter despair and chaos, crying terrible cries, rebelling and complaining against G-d Al-mighty and Moses, Our Teacher, saying that they would rather be dead in Egypt or die right there in the desert, or, return to the relative “safety” of enslavement in Egypt, than face the “realities” and “facts on the ground” presented in the spies’ disinformation.

How was it possible for 83 words to cause such despair and retraction, contraction and defeat?

The spies merely had to report true facts with a special strategic choice of words and emphasis to drive to their own people into collapse and surrender.³

In verse 13:29 they reported a fact, that Amalek lived to the South of the Holy Land. This was irrelevant but choice information when effectively and maliciously spun. Amalek was the nation that had viciously attacked the Jewish People on leaving Egypt after the Splitting of the Reed Sea while on the way to receive the Torah on Mount Sinai. That attack had very little actual military effect on the Jewish People. However, the attack did sting and the mention of Amalek was inserted into the spies report to cause the Jewish People to fear and retract in fear and despair.

A dramatic and shocking, but tiny, act of terrorism was amplified by the intelligence service (the spies) to make war on the minds and hearts of its own people, to dissuade them from taking the right action. This plays out in real time in our lives where acts of terrorism in the Holy Land and around the world, are both intended to shock and terrifying, even while having no military effect, and provide “facts” for fodder of amplification by the ostensibly “homeland” intelligence service for use in their analysis to feed the politicians, media and common man with the disinformation designed to reshape thinking and bringing about actions of surrender flowing from despair.

Problem #7 - intelligence services seed dramatic words and imagery to create reactions in the people and to give people and governments the excuse to take action detrimental to the nation and its people, at the behest of the terrified and despairing people.⁴

Solution #7 - realize that intelligence reports and the delivery of messaging from intelligence services through politicians, academics and media, are based on a shady sequence of fact gathering, which you have no way to know what facts they included, excluded, ignored or failed to understand the significance of. Even with the most well-meaning intelligence officer, they are gathering information, including information intentionally manufactured and planted by enemy services, which disinformation then gets incorporated in the ultimate reports and analysis. So in such a wilderness of mirrors, stay away from the experts of intelligence, their reports and all their derivative journal and news articles and media reports and from news sources that claim to have “inside sources” or “former intelligence operatives” as sources, because they are just a fountain of disinformation with you as the intended consumer.⁵

The ears of the Jewish People became impermeable to the pleas of Yehoshua and Calev to not listen to the disinformation and to instead stay focused on the reality that the Holy Land would be easily conquered because G-d Al-mighty was with them, that it was a very very good Land, that G-d Al-mighty desired the Jewish People to enter it and would bring the Jewish People there and give them the Land of Milk and Honey. Just, they pleaded, don’t rebel against G-d Al-mighty and don’t fear.

The response of the desperate people — to move to murder Yehoshua and Calev for telling them good news and that victory was possible! (14:10) Yeshoshua and Calev were only saved by the appearance of the Glory of G-d Al-mighty at the Tent of Meeting!

Problem #8 - the minority report was ignored in the emotional turmoil intentionally fomented by the majority report to the extent that people could no longer even hear the truth and sought to kill the minority.

Solution #8 - don’t listen to the majority, rather listen for the reassuring voice of Divine Truth within you and coming from those who have the courage to speak it out loud, learnt the eternal Divine Guidance of the Torah that applies to all human beings, and ignore the hysterical cries of despair and fear from those who have outsourced their thinking to the destructive spies.

Problem #9 - in the face of the raging mob, among those who know the truth, many are afraid to speak up and out, accelerating the disaster

Solution #9 - your life comes from G-d Al-mighty Who loving and intentionally recreates you at every instant. Be like Yehoshua and Calev who spoke the truth and stuck to the truth even though all they saw was the raging mob and had no way to predict whether they would be saved.

The spies went so far as to deliver their analysis that the then residents of the Holy Land were more powerful than even G-d Al-mighty Himself! (verse 13:31, see Rashi’s articulation of the simple meaning of the verse for a five year old to comprehend) And, the people fell into despair.

Problem #10 - even while sounding like they want your well-being, the spies are openly waring against G-d Al-mighty, arrogantly concluding that they have “figured it out” and claim that the very enemy that they are supposed to be helping defeat is actually stronger than not only the people but stronger than G-d and it’s pointless to even try to resist or defeat that enemy.

Solution #10 - don’t look to others for their analysis. It’s remarkable to watch how people will watch a talk show of analysts and the viewers will each choose one analyst to align with and then repeat that analyst’s analysis as if it is true. But what they don’t realize is that generally all the analysts are offering different sides of a phony dialectic and all the analysis, even contradictory analysis, is false. So stay away and go back to basics - what is G-d Al-mighty’s Vision for Creation and for human beings - that they should know Him and live in Liberty and all actions should be towards exponentially expanding that in every place and time.

People fell into such despair, that they turned to idolatry proclaiming that they need a new king and a new god! (14:4) They abandoned the G-d Al-mighty of their fathers and of themselves (remember they had just been taken out of Egypt by G-d Al-mighty and received the Torah on Mount Sinai) and looked to invent in their minds outside forces that they would imagine would save them (a new king and a new god).

Problem #11 - in the midst of the despair from false intelligence reports, people will act in desperation and imagine that some politician or military leader or secret group will come to save them and their country. They will even appoint false gods, gods that are imagined to come to save them from their despair, or make their leaders into gods or themselves into gods, thinking that they can prepare and overcome all by themselves.

Solution #11 - keep coming back to grounding that there is nothing but G-d Al-mighty, as we are reminded multiple times each day, “Hear Israel, the L-rd G-d Al-mighty, our G-d, the L-rd G-d Al-mighty is One.” (Devarim 6:4) If that is your focus, you can’t go off track, no matter what is going on around you and no matter how many people you know are running after their imagination of false leaders and gods to save them.

The consequences were enormous - after Moses, Our Teacher’s intervention, the consequence was ‘down-graded’ to the slow elimination of the generation over 40 years of wandering in the desert, rather than in one moment, as the spies themselves perished, thus delaying the entry into the Holy Land by 40 precious years.

There are three groups: which are you in and which do you want to be in?

Group 1 is the false spies. Let’s hope you are not in that group, but surely some reading this will be.

Group 2 is the targeted victims of the disinformation. That’s both Jews and non-Jews. The whole world suffered from the delay. The people who heard the report did not see anything for themselves, and with a few words were moved in the intended direction - the direction of despair, contraction, retraction and despair.⁶

Group 3 - The minority who stayed true to G-d Al-mighty. The individuals in this group had the humility to know they needed Divine Assistance and had to have the willingness to receive Divine Guidance as shown by their prayer.

The goal of this publication is to help you make the move from Group 1 or 2 into Group 3. And, if you are already in Group 3, stay solidly there.

But for the mind games we would be invincible. (Click to watch a YouTube Short.)

This will springboard us into a series of articles…

Bookmark this page to come back for the lessons - in coming articles we will apply the Torah lessons to the Holy Land in Modern times, Iran, Taiwan, South Korea, the United States governance, Ukraine and other charades of the spies.

We will also learn how these agencies infiltrate into religious teachings to subtly tweak a word, an emphasis, to immobilize an entire group of people and to disenfranchise individuals from the Divine within them. Stay tuned.

We will navigate clearly to G-d Al-mighty’s amazingly positive destination for all of us, the true and complete Redemption with our Righteous Redeemer (Moshiach Tzidkainu.)

The spending of your tax dollars on US Intelligence Agencies is around $100 Billion dollars. All that could be replaced with this article and learning the original Torah portion. In discarding the false analysis and disinformation, and instead being guided in how to look at the world by how G-d Al-mighty tells us to view the world, better decisions would be made by individuals and by the nation with better results. You can give yourself and others better intelligence tools by taking out a paid subscription to this publication now.

In the following videos, I address the topics discussed here:

1. d“Realities” is a Marxist term used to get good people to refrain from doing the right thing thereby actually creating the “reality.” So for 100 plus years, Americans have been convinced to accede to the expansion of Communism in the world, country by country, told that “realities” require the “reality” to be the way it is.

2. The astute student of the teachings of the Lubavitcher Rebbe will be ready to quote a talk from the Rebbe where he points out that the behind all the mistakes of the spies was a certain spiritual desire to keep the Jewish People in the desert so they would not have to descend into the mundane matters of everyday life in stewarding the Holy Land. The Rebbe, however, does not intend to distract us from the simple meaning of the verses, that what they did was not G-d Al-mighty’s Will and the result was a disaster for the Jewish People and the continued desecration of the Holy Land for another 40 years, and the delay in the advancement of the entire humanity for 40 years. Furthermore, the Rebbe is showing us that a person can think he is motivated by the holiest and purest of intentions but if they are not grounded in G-d Al-mighty’s Ruach (Spirit) and Ratzon (Will) it will lead to disaster and he thereby challenges each one of us to check and double check if our own personal calculations, motivations and excuses, which we think holy, are truly in line with G-d Al-mighty or rather, G-d forbid, like the misguided thinking of the spies, fearing to fulfill G-d Al-mighty’s explicit mission for us in His world.

3. Intelligence analysts’ reports and the reports of committees and commissions are many thousands of times longer and are similarly designed to confuse and paralyze. Those extra long writings are designed to obfuscate and confuse, while leading the reader to a conclusion that the reader can’t even explain how the conclusion was arrived at but certain that, given the credentials of the authors, it must be the ‘agreed upon’ and ‘safe’ position to hold.

4. An example of this is the US government publication, “Soviet Military Power” created in 1981 ostensibly to portray the grave dangers of Soviet Military power, but actually used to scare the American population into surrendering strategic objectives and nuclear weapons in “peace” agreements, and that ultimately led Americans to believe that the Soviet Military was no longer a threat when it proclaimed its own demise and the “Soviet Military Power” ceased publication.

5. For example, World Net Daily had a Jerusalem bureau chief named Aaron Klein, who claimed to be receiving information from top level insiders of the Marxist terror network operating in the guise of championing the cause of Arab residents of the Holy Land, known as the Palestine Liberation Organization and its myriad false fronts and good cop/bad cop ‘splinter’ organizations including the Palestinian Authority. The Marxists offer such “sources” to unwitting and witting Western journalists who then feed the disinformation and report it to their readers as if it is some special insight into the thinking of the Marxist terrorist leaders. Instead, it is designed to spread more confusion, hide the reality and spread despair while advancing the Marxist terrorist cause. So an “anti-Marxist” publication is delivering Marxist disinformation directly into the trusting minds of its readers.

6. This is how agents of the Soviet Union persuaded Americans to lose the Cold War - by presenting nuclear war and war in general against an ‘undefeatable’ Soviet Military as too scary, it was better to practice such defeatist moves as deterrence and containment (ie. America should contain its own influence on the world), all the while Marxist control and influence expanded.