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.
There are numerous instances in history where brave individuals or small groups intervened at the last minute to prevent their countries from collapsing. But history is also filled with the remains of peoples, nations, and individuals who vanished into nothingness and obscurity because they could not summon the required will that can only be inspired by faith.
Science took more than three millennia to arrive at the conclusions drawn from Exodus. In 1962, renowned science philosopher Thomas Kuhn changed how people perceived science, offering a fresh perspective on how change occurs in all aspects of life.
The Jewish professor from Cincinnati with degrees in physics from Harvard University-who later would teach at Berkeley, Princeton, and MIT- like most people, grew up believing that progress was inevitable but that it would happen gradually and linearly, propelled little by little by receptive scientists who were willing to challenge conventional wisdom rather than be constrained by it.
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.
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 the disavowing of 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,” “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