Chasidut sur Les Nombres 13:3

Numbers 13,3. “Moses dispatched them from the ‎desert of Parana at the command of Hashem;” [note ‎that the Torah writes about this both in verse 3 and again in ‎verse 17, so that exegesis for this repetition is forced upon us. ‎Ed.]
Moses and his generation, predominantly part of ‎the generation of the desert, are viewed as comparable to the ‎written Torah, whereas Joshua and the people entering the Holy ‎Land with him, are viewed as comparable to the oral Torah. This ‎is also what the Talmud in Baba batra 75 referred to when ‎the sages said that the face of Moses was comparable to the sun ‎whereas the face of Joshua was comparable to the moon. The oral ‎Torah is viewed as being the vessel which received input from the ‎written Torah, just as the moon receives its light which it then ‎reflects from the sun.‎
When the Torah writes here that Moses dispatched the 12 ‎men to “tour” the land of Canaan, this is an allusion to the ‎generation of the Israelites that were supposed to make their ‎home in the Holy Land, i.e. it was appropriate for these men to ‎reflect the oral Torah. Actually, seeing that, as we explained ‎repeatedly in connection with the ability of the righteous in each ‎generation being able to change G’d’s decrees, the “oral Torah” is ‎not quite the same in each generation, as the sages in each ‎generation have the power to add or change protective decrees ‎knows as ‎סיג לתורה‎ “a protective fence around Biblical decrees.” ‎This is also the reason why the Israelites who are perceived as ‎symbolic of the oral Torah count their months according to the ‎lunar calendar, the moon being symbolic of the oral Torah. ‎‎[I believe that the author wished to explain why the name ‎of Moses had to be mentioned again in this verse, seeing that he ‎had been addressed by G’d in the verse before and the subject had ‎not changed. Ed.]‎

In the Book of Numbers, it is hinted that no living being will be exculpated before Him, that even precious souls, "there is no righteous in the land who does good and does not sin" (Ecclesiastes 7:20), as in this portion it is written "consuming at the edge [katze] of the camp"(Numbers 11:1)—the elite [ketzinim] of the camp (see Sifri Numbers 85), and in parashat Shelah is written the sin of the scouts "all of the men being heads of the Children of Israel,"(Numbers 13:3) who were "mistaken hearted... and not knowing the ways [of God]" (Psalms 95:10), and so, in the section of the gatherer [of sticks of Shabbat], and in parashat Korach, "who was clever... and his eyes misled him” (Bamidbar Rabba 18:8, Midrash Tanhuma Korach 5, Rashi on Numbers 16:7), and in prashat Hukat is written “the waters of conflict” (Numbers 20:13) about Moses and Aaron, and in parashat Balak about Zimri ben Salu [who was killed for improper relations with a Midianite woman] that he was a chieftain (see Numbers 25:14). This hints to what was said “Remember, do not forget how you angered God your God in the wilderness”(Deuteronomy 9:7) because ‘wilderness’ indicates the destruction and the desolation that is in every individual, as how there were worlds that were destroyed before the world of building (see Kohellet Rabba 3:11:1, Zohar 3 292b:2). And this hints to the strength of humans over the demonic and wild forces within them that want to mislead them in youthful sins, and thus also in all lofty matters, are found deriving from the force of the wilderness, as the wilderness indicates the whole world, because before the creation of the form of humanity the whole world was a wilderness, because settlement [the alternative to wilderness] is only from people, and anything before the complete finishing of the formation of humanity is called wilderness.