What type of spy would you have been?

When reading this week's parsha, I couldn't help but say to myself, "Were you to have been one of the twelve spies sent to size up the land of Israel, you definitely wouldn't have passed the test."

I tried reading the story twice, one that clearly involved human psychology, a divine imperative, a test of leadership for Moshe Rabbeinu, and a battle of wills between two competing factions, those who felt Israel impregnable and unconquerable, and those who thought the land was equally daunting but could be conquered because of a divine promise. 

From my limited reading of the Torah, and I must say, it is very limited, the ten spies who spoke ill of the land, really didn't believe the land could be conquered, and genuinely felt it unwise at the present time to go up against such formidable enemies, towering giants who put chills down their spine. 

The refrain of Calev, though, the spy who initially used trickery and cunning to hoodwink his counterparts into believing that he was really on their side, was. "We shall surely go up." Upon hearing the slander of the ten spies, he countered them by saying that God had promised us the land, and nothing can stand in our way. 

It's uncanny that this episode, known in Hebrew as חטא המרגלים, the sin of the spies, should have had such a formative role in the history of our people. Chazal teach that in every successive generation, every tragedy that befell our people, was some way rooted in the "sin of the spies." Which makes us ask, "Why was it so bad?" And, "How would we have acted differently?"

The same way that belief is visceral - some believe more and some believe less - and Hashem himself states that he's disappointed by the lack of belief of the Jewish people after they had witnessed such great miracles from the Exodus and onwards, yet, that notwithstanding, it would seem that the great travesty perpetrated by the 10 spies was that they tried to incite the Jewish people against Moshe Rabbeinu. In the words of my chevruta, R' Michael Weisberg, "they tried to carry out a coup d'état." When they saw that they failed to convince the top echelons of government, they went the people, and tried to foil the democratic process. Now, we do live in Israel - where a candidate can form a government with less than 6% of the popular vote - but, imagine a situation where a top cabinet official, who is outvoted by his peers, launches a mudslinging campaign against the other ministers to try to sway the electorate that his views are right, and there's are wrong. Is that really tenable? 

Can the Jewish people, the light onto the nations, be founded on a democratic process like that? Where Moshe Rabbeinu, who took the Jewish people out of Egypt, has no more stature than anyone else? Where, failing to convince Moshe, the spies, the leaders of their respective tribes, launch a smear campaign deploring Moshe, and the God he represents, so as to achieve strategic goals, however right they felt they may have been?