The report that kept a generation out of the land, and the one clause in it that describes the spies rather than the giants.
For children, teens and adults
Here is the part that makes this passage uncomfortable. The ten did not make anything up about the land. They walked it for forty days, they came back with the fruit and Kalev never disputes a single thing they describe. Then they added a sentence that was not a description at all: we are not able. And two verses later they said something even stranger, we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and that is also how we looked to them. Nobody sent them to find that out. So the question worth sitting with is not how twelve people could see different lands. They saw the same land. The question is where an accurate report stops being a report, and whether you could tell you had crossed that line while you were still talking.
The third paragraph of the Shema: a garment law that turns, mid-sentence, into a law about where you let your eyes take you.
For children, teens and adults
You have probably heard this passage hundreds of times and never once studied it. It is the third paragraph of the Shema, said morning and night, and saying it that often is exactly what makes it invisible. It starts as a clothing law and turns into something far less comfortable: velo taturu acharei levavchem ve’acharei eineichem, do not go scouting after your heart and after your eyes. The obvious objection is that nobody chooses what they notice. So what is actually being commanded here, and can a string tied to a hem do anything about it?
The verses are from Miqra according to the Masorah (Wikisource, CC BY-SA 4.0), via Sefaria, without the cantillation marks. On this site the four-letter Name is written ה׳.