“The real subject of this Book of the Wilderness, I suggest, is the longing of the people of Israel to learn directly from God, by learning something new about the Torah, about the world and themselves. What they are developing in their skeptical discourse is a language of imaginative truth, in which the fantasies of return to Egypt will be brought into connection with the miracles of Exodus. In them, traumatic suffering and traumatic revelation seek some subjective expression.”
