As the story goes many years ago two salesmen were sent by a British shoe manufacturer to Africa to investigate and report back on market potential. The first salesman reported back, “There is no potential here – nobody wears shoes.” The second salesman reported back, “There is massive potential here – nobody wears shoes.”

I was thinking about this story in the context of reading Shelach, this week’s Torah portion. Here we read that the Israelites are waiting to enter the Promised Land. Before entering, God instructs them to send a representative from each of the twelve tribes to check it out. Two spies came back with glowing reports, but the other ten spies told stories of gloom and doom. What would cause the spies to experience the Promised Land so differently? They were given the same information before leaving, and they reported on the same land and people. We read:

‘The land, through which we have passed to spy it out, is a land that eats up its inhabitants; and all the people that we saw in it are men of great stature. 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.’

Numbers 13:31-33

How we experience life is so often a result of how we see ourselves. It seems that the only difference between our spies was their self-image. Do we see a market not interested in shoes or a massive potential?

Not so long earlier Moshe crushed Egypt with a series of plagues designed to help “inspire” Pharaoh to let the the Israelites go. Relevant to our situation here, the 8th plague was locusts. But what is the difference between a group of grasshoppers and locusts?

The answer is the swarm. In grasshoppers swarming there is a collective behavior exhibited in which they aggregate together. They pool their impact and can destroy a civilization. As individuals or even as a a small group grasshoppers are trivial. But in a swarm the same grasshoppers can topple a civilization.

The spies were each leaders of their tribes, but it was clear from their report they did not see themselves as part of a collective before their opponents, only their constituents. Their unified report almost destroyed the nation. If they saw how unified they could be as a swarm they would not have been worried by what they saw in the Promised Land. They surely saw and persevered through a worse situation in Egypt.

How do we come together in common cause to make huge impact? We can decide to see massive potential or not. Will we have a group think or will we swarm? What is our fate and what is our destiny?