From the Chassidic Masters

Why do we talk so much? Witness the endless self-explaining we engage in, the perpetual conversation we feel obliged to “make,” the quadrillions of words unleashed each day in every imaginable medium. Why this insatiable need to put everything into words, as if nothing truly exists until it is trimmed and stretched to fit a set of humanly emitted sounds? Perhaps the Torah reading of Devarim (“Words”) holds a clue.

On whose initiative were the spies sent? The way the story is told in Numbers 13, it was by divine command. But when Moses recounts these events 40 years later, he tells the people of Israel that it was their idea. The contradiction describes a watershed in the history of freedom of choice.