In Parshat Shelach, Moses sends 12 scouts to survey the land of Israel in preparation for their entry. It seems as if God commanded them to go, so why should they be punished for reporting what they saw?
The problem was that their perception was skewed based on their slave mentality. They imagined the natives were stronger than them and “the land was out to eat them”! Although they admitted that “the land is flowing with milk and honey,” it was irrelevant to them. As Robertson Davies says, “The eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend.” This appears to be the root cause of the sin of the spies, for when it came to describing what they saw, they said,
There we saw the giants, the sons of Anak, descended from the giants. In our eyes, we seemed like grasshoppers, and so we were in their eyes.
They felt unworthy and incapable and projected their insecurities and fears onto the natives and the land. The biggest sin of it all was that they caused their own suffering due to their lack of faith in their G-d-given abilities to successfully conquer, inhabit, and enjoy a blessed land. The huge luscious fruit which should have been seen as a blessing turned into a self-made curse.
