What did the spies mean when they said “and so we were in their eyes”?

Rabbi Landau explains that there is something strange in the spies' report. After saying they felt like grasshoppers, they added, v'chein hayinu b'eineihem, “and so we were in their eyes.” His question: “How did they know how the giants saw them?”

They couldn't have known. What happened, he explains, is that “they saw themselves as grasshoppers and assumed everyone else saw them the same way.” The second half of the sentence was not a report about the giants. It was a confession about the spies.

“That's projection,” he says. “You don't see reality, you see the inside of your own head painted on everyone else.” As his caption puts it, they couldn't possibly know how the giants saw them; what they actually revealed was how they saw themselves.

Going deeper: Rabbi Landau's teaching, level by level

Surface claim

The spies' words about the giants described the spies, not the giants.

What may be behind it

In A Soul at Peace, Rabbi Landau writes that the spies never spoke with the giants. Out of their inner feeling of being small, they put onto the giants a view they had never seen or heard.

Deepest human truth

People don't see reality; they see the inside of their own head painted on everyone else.

More questions from this teaching

• Why would someone suddenly suspect me of things I never did?