The unpredictable, inexplicable help that we encounter
With the exodus from Egypt, something radically new happened: history took an unexpected turn, and the world suddenly changed.
Exodus, the book that recounts this event, tells us that when human activity follows a self-destructive path, the only way out is by radically changing course.
History is full of examples where, at the eleventh hour, heroic small groups or even single human beings appeared on the scene to save their nations from falling into an abyss. History, however, is also awash with the debris of peoples, nations, and individuals that, unable to muster the necessary will that only faith can inspire, fell into nothingness and oblivion.
It took science over three thousand years to reach Exodus’ conclusions. In 1962, Thomas Kuhn, an influential philosopher of science, provided a new way to look at change in all of life by modifying how people looked at science.
The Jewish professor from Cincinnati with degrees in physics from Harvard University later would teach at Berkeley, Princeton, and MIT- grew up, like most people, with the idea that there was an unavoidable progress which was gradual and linear, moved little-by-little by open-minded scientists, that rather than being bound by preconception were ready to question inherited ideas.
He eventually found out that, in reality, these advances weren’t the consequence of gradual, linear progress, nor that the leaders in the discipline were free from preconceptions and were open-minded. Kuhn succeeded in showing that science, like history, develops through wholly revolutionary moments that he called “paradigm shifts.”
We are in the presence of a paradigm shift when, for example, the earth is no longer seen as the center of the universe, old notions of truth are discarded, and new ones take their place. A single human being has reached that conclusion and felt the brunt of those unwilling to see it.
The reality of life, as science attests it, as well as the ever-presence of political revolutions in history, share with Exodus the understanding that complacency with forms of life that are far from perfect is not acceptable and that progress is not a straight march forward; that radical corrections are many times necessary and require strongly inspired human beings to lead the way.
Changes in value systems and disavowing everything one has grown up with require more than psychological will; it requires faith. This is the kind of faith that says: “It can be done,” “There is a better way,” and “Life can be redeemed and become what it was meant to be.”
How do we know that? Because all through Jewish history, from the Exodus to the Maccabean Revolt to the rising from the ashes of the Nazi Holocaust to the creation of the modern State of Israel, the end result was not the to-be-expected consequences. It was something that surprised even the most optimistic speculations about human capacity.
The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber had said that sometimes
“When deeply troubled, we can feel utterly lost, beyond anyone’s help, especially beyond anything we could still do for ourselves. And yet, it sometimes happens that we emerge from the depths- perhaps more accurately, something pulled us up from there. It was not our initiative or basic reflex; we were beyond that. As it were, a hand reached out to us and helped us with a power not our own.”
This unpredictable, inexplicable help that we encounter says Buber, has taught us that God redeems. And our folk experience of the Exodus and its echoes in Jewish history testify that God liberates peoples and persons.”