But as is usually the case, it is thus that we bequeath our aspirations, and often our burdens, to our unsuspecting young. And in their failure, they looked to their children to assume the mantle of pursuit, as if, like salvation, others could be enlisted to achieve their hopes. After 40 years of desert wandering, they all died without achieving their original goal of possessing the chimeric paradise. Except Joshua, not one of the entire group would see or enter the promised land. And with the doubts came the finger-pointing, fault-finding, and insatiable capacity to forget their recent history and instead remember the embellished goodness of their Egyptian overlords.Īs it turned out, they had good reason to doubt they would ever arrive safely at their destination. But the sea had hardly collapsed on the pursuing enemy soldiers, entombing them in their watery grave, when doubts began to bubble to the surface. But this would later be revised in their imagination to include the ephemeral concept of liberty, which gradually morphed into the more concrete vision of “a land flowing with milk and honey.”īuoyed by news from Pharaoh’s court describing Moses’s demonstrations of the miraculous powers of their newly found God, this fledgling “nation-on-the-move” would carve a path through the Red Sea in a daze of euphoria. The original proposal called for a brief visit. Rooted only in an idea, the entire community of desperate individuals, whose previous ties to one another were through shared suffering and not ancestry, would uproot everything and commit to a shadowy pilgrimage-one first conceived as visiting a place they did not know, to worship an unfamiliar god. Such was the power of Moses’s presentation. Though the amenities their masters provided were paltry, they still wanted to guard against losing them.īut Moses would bend his people’s minds to believe that freedom-a concept completely alien to their thinking and worldview-had intrinsic value worth pursuing. So for the generationally enslaved, the idea of freedom needed to be approached with trepidation, as it promised to upend their accustomed “comforts.” Though if truth be told, in their experience, those comforts consisted of having only the bare necessities that made living semi-tolerable. After all, what is the worth of freedom if, after attaining it, one is dispossessed of such basic necessities as food, shelter, and clothing? And a threat to normalcy and one’s accustomed station in life. A betrayal for the inherent abandonment of the only benefactors they knew. Because they were in perpetual servitude, slavery had become normative for Jacob’s descendants to the extent that when Moses spoke of “freedom,” it might have sounded like betrayal and threat. Exodus and Deuteronomy tell the story of Israel’s journey from Egypt to the promised land and are instructive of the interplay between religious faith and concomitant doubt.
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