Lightning flashes that illuminate the way

DAVID SAKS

One correspondent asserted that the Biblical narrative lacked veracity, since there was no way such a large number of people could have survived in the desert (while also denying that the departing Israelites could have been so numerous).

Those responding have pointed that, as the Torah itself frequently emphasises, there was nothing natural about either the redemption from slavery or the subsequent period of wandering. Rather, the natural order underwent various crucial changes at the behest of the A-mighty Himself, to which the entire Jewish people were direct witnesses (and beneficiaries).

There nevertheless exists strong resistance to the idea that this formative period in Jewish (and world) history did not come about by natural means. Frequently, one finds attempts to find more prosaic, everyday explanations for the miracles that purportedly occurred, such as that Krias Yam Suf might have been simply a matter of incoming and outgoing tides which our primitive ancestors took to be a Divine phenomenon, or that what really occurred was a timeous tsunami (possibly caused by the volcanic eruption that destroyed the Mediterranean island of Santorini, estimated to have taken place around that time).

None of these alternative explanations are really plausible. For one thing, the details of the Red Sea parting as recorded in our tradition, make it clear that what happened was of a supernatural nature. Moreover, it was something the entire Jewish nation experienced at first hand.

It was not as if Moses came along and said: “Follow me, o my brothers, for behold, the L-rd caused the waters to split before me…” The event is claimed to have been experienced at first hand by an entire nation. Could such a thing have been fabricated long after the fact? While not an outright impossibility, it is highly improbable.

It would entail, for a start, convincing every Jew that such events had actually happened to their forebears, even though none would have heard of any such thing from their own parents and grandparents. Once they had compared notes with one another, and learned that in no family did such a tradition exist, they would surely have concluded that those telling them about it were speaking nonsense.

Remember, too, that the whole Exodus narrative has never been approached as a vague tradition assigned to an undesignated time in the distant past. Rather, its central events – the date of departure, the splitting of the sea and the Revelation at Sinai six weeks after that – are pinpointed to the day (even the approximate time of day).

Would the purported inventors of such a tradition really have gone so far as to locate their whole imagined scenario so exactly in historical time? On the contrary, it would have been far more logical for them to have kept the details vague, so as to forestall uncomfortable questions.

Moreover, the Torah account makes it clear that the Jewish people began commemorating the events of the Exodus from the very first year after it happened, and were indeed instructed to do so in the years to come.

This means that those making up the whole account not only sought to convince the masses that their ancestors had experienced a series of miracles (which none of their own forebears had told them about) and that these each occurred on a specific day of a specific month of a specific year, but that these had been commemorated on those very dates in each subsequent year before the practice was inexplicably discontinued at some unidentified point in time.

What seems to me to be the clincher is that if, despite all these objections, it was in practice possible to fabricate a tradition of mass revelation long after the fact and persuade everyone else that it actually happened, then not only the Jews would have done it. Rather, one would find similar accounts of supernatural events with multiple witnesses in other religions.

It is, after all, obviously much more convincing to allege that many people (and how much more so an entire nation) were privy to acts of Divine revelation rather than just a single individual.

In fact, in no other religious system does one find even an attempt to make such a claim. Miracles and Divine visitations are invariably said to have been experienced by a single individual or, at most, a handful of people who never in turn passed on their experiences to their children. All this demonstrates that at the very least, something extraordinary must indeed have happened to our ancestors all those years ago.

Interestingly, Judaism nevertheless advises us not to place too much emphasis on miracles. As I see it, they are like occasionally lightning flashes that momentarily illuminate the way forward during a long, hard journey in the dark.

They show, unmistakably, where one has to go, but actually walking that path when all one has is the fading memory of that brief revelation is when the hard work begins.

This is what Judaism is really all about. It is not about blind faith, but of remaining faithful to the mission that was revealed to our forebears and of which we are the heirs.