I always found it ironic that the logo for the Israeli ministry of tourism was the meraglim returning to the dessert with the enormous grapes of Eretz Yisrael. Baruch Hashem we have been privileged to return to our Holy Land in an openly miraculous way but it was specifically the sin of the meraglim that kept us from going into Eretz Yisrael for so many years. One would not think that this would be an appropriate representation of a ministry that seeks to bring people to Israel to visit. Perhaps I'm reading into it too much. In any event this is not the most difficult part of the story of the meraglim to understand. The Meraglim were some of the most righteous people of their generation. These were the leaders of Klal Yisrael. How could they have made such a tragic mistake? What were they thinking? Sometimes there are hints to a deeper message in the Torah in seemingly trivial details of the story. One of the "small and insignificant" details of the cheit hameraglim is that they spied on the land for forty days. It doesn't seem to radically change the narrative of the story and yet apparently it is important for us to know. What is the inner message that we are being taught? Forty is an important number in the Torah. We find it in many stories but I'd like to highlight two other places where we see the number forty. The first is when it comes to receiving the Torah. Moshe Rabbeinu went up on Har Sinai for forty days and nights and only then came down the mountain to transmit
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