What the Spies Missed

May 31, 2026 / 15 Sivan 5786

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May 31, 2026 2:05pm EDT

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On the morning of October 7th, Lieutenant Colonel Guy Madar, commander of the IDF's Desert Patrol Battalion, was celebrating Simchat Torah at the home of relatives in Kiryat Gat. He was in civilian clothes and had only a pistol. But when terrorists invaded the south, he drove straight toward them.

In the Re'im area, he pulled a wounded Golani Brigade soldier from the field and killed the terrorist who shot at them. He picked up the terrorist's weapon and kept fighting, eliminating several more terrorists before a gunshot wounded his leg. He joined forces with a policeman until they were shot at and their patrol car veered into a ditch. He applied a tourniquet to himself and lay there for two and a half hours, surrounded by dead terrorists, waiting.

When IDF forces finally reached him, they didn't know what to make of what they saw: a wounded man in civilian clothes, armed, lying among the dead. They raised their weapons.

Then one of the soldiers noticed his tzitzit, the ritual fringes worn by observant Jewish men, hanging out from beneath his shirt. Guy Madar was evacuated to a hospital, alive.

The Torah portion of Shelach is best known for the story of the twelve spies sent to scout the land of Canaan. Ten returned with a report designed to terrify: giants in the land, fortified cities, a people before whom Israel would be like grasshoppers. The nation wept that night — and the Talmud tells us that God marked that night, the ninth of Av, as a night of weeping for generations. A single act of collective faithlessness reverberated through history.

But Shelach doesn't end with the spies. After the punishment is decreed, after the mourning and the forty years of wandering are established, God gives Moses more commandments. At the very end of the portion defined by catastrophe, God commands:

"Speak to the Children of Israel and tell them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments... and you shall see it and remember all the commandments of God and do them, and you shall not stray after your heart and after your eyes" (Numbers 15:38-39).

Why here? Why now?

“We Felt the Hand of God”: The Priests Who Waved the Shavuot Offering on the Temple Mount Tell Their Story

The Kohanim planned it like a military operation, training for months, consulting leading rabbinical authorities on every halachic (Jewish legal) detail, preparing backup loaves in case of failure, and assigning each participant a precise role. And then, on Shavuot — a day when the Temple Mount was officially closed to Jews — they ran barefoot across the holy site, dodging Arab worshippers hurling plastic chairs and police officers trying to tackle them, and waved the Shtei HaLechem (the Two Loaves offering) for the second consecutive year.

What the Spies Missed

May 31, 2026 / 15 Sivan 5786

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