In the Middle

Lionel Trilling wrote an excellent novel entitled “The Middle of the Journey.” I wish he had picked a different title, because it suits perfectly a notion which recently struck me with the force of a “revelation.”

I’ve been reading secular treatments of the history of the Jews, and as I made my way through accounts of the Exodus,  I realized that Judaism differs from every other faith in a way that -- I think –  no one else has ever noticed. Judaism is the only religion that experiences its central revelation “in the middle of the journey” rather than at the beginning! All the others follow Weber’s scenario of “beginning at the beginning,” with a charismatic prophet alone in the desert undergoing a transformative experience, attracting a few followers, and starting from there.

Ours has its preliminary revelations, to be sure, and a thousand years of history in which to narrate them, but not its crucial formative experience – the Sinaitic – until this “prehistory” has exhausted its possibilities. At that point we are given the Torah. We see God. We proceed to nationhood. The “we” is of course a collective of thousands of families. And that is key. Those thousands witnessed Providence with their own eyes. The experience was a shared one, not the solipsistic mystical trance of a virtuoso. It had to be, for a mob to be transformed into tribes, and eventually into a nation.

That is why the Sinaitic revelation, our fundamental formative experience, had to come in the middle of the journey, rather than in the beginning. It had to be the property of a people rather than of a mystic and his few followers, so it would be an eyewitness reality rather than a mere faith, thus generating a historical narrative rather than a myth.

Am I right that no one else has noticed this “middleness” of Judaism’s story? Food for thought on Passover.