Backing Up

And all the people were watching and hearing the thunder and the lightning flashes, and the sound of the trumpet, and the mountain smoking; and when the people saw it all, they trembled and stood at a distance.  Exodus 20:18  NASB

At a distance – It’s a nice translation but it doesn’t really tell us what happened.  In order to understand mērāḥōq, we need to picture the event sequence.  The people have gathered around the base of Mount Sinai waiting for a sign from God.  Suddenly the mountain is shrouded in darkness.  Thunder and lightning begin.  The mountain smokes.  A trumpet blares—a trumpet that does not cease.  The ground shakes.  Panic ensues.  Fear floods the audience.  What do they do?  The text says that they “stood at a distance,” but what it really means is that they retreated.  They fled.  They ran away.  And when they felt that they were at a safe distance, they stood.  In other words, we should probably translate this idiomatically as “they backed away.”

Why?  Zornberg has a very interesting explanation.  “Trauma does not refer to the damage to the nervous system but to ‘the effects produced on the organ of the mind.’  Here, fright plays a role, and the sense of having missed the experience.  Belatedness is inherent to traumatic experience—followed by repetitions of the event in the form of nightmare and fantasy, attempts to master what was never fully grasped in the first place.”[1]

The people backed away from God because they could not process what they were seeing.  They missed God’s direct encounter.  Following this action, they will recall the event through the centuries, but they weren’t present to it when it occurred.  From this point on, it will be a half-hidden traumatic memory rather than a glorious spiritual experience.  The people were still in Egypt.  Their context, disposition, attitudes and expectations were still governed by the slave mentality of their past.  They weren’t ready for God to show up.  Oh, they thought they were.  They proclaimed faithfulness.  But when the divine exploded on the scene, they backed away.  It was simply too much for them to handle.

Just like us!

“For the Israelites, God holds that pain in storage.  To appropriate their own pain would allow them, in the full sense, to leave Egypt.  Clearly that will not happen overnight; it will require a process for which the wilderness wandering will provide space and time.”[2]

Wandering in the wilderness is simply a measure of our inherent resistance to the divine.  That doesn’t mean it’s our fault.  We were born into Egypt.  We didn’t ask to carry the baggage of Mitzrayim.  “Mitzrayim—Hebrew for Egypt—with its harmonics of tzara (constriction, trouble), meitzar (narrow straits), tzirim (birth contractions).  On all levels, from the metaphysical to the brutally physical, the Israelites must be redeemed from a death grip that chokes their expressive life.  Yetziat Mitzrayim—the exodus from Egypt—comes to mean an impossible but essential birth from anguish.”[3]

We complain about our wilderness journey, perhaps justifiably so, but the truth is rather blunt.  We weren’t prepared for God’s arrival.  We still had all that baggage packed into our hearts and minds.  The wilderness was necessary; a place of stripping away what prevented us from real freedom with God.  When we should have stood and felt His presence, we stepped back into the “comfort” of our slavery.  That left only two solutions: die or disassemble.  The wilderness is for breaking us apart, excising the trauma demons in order that we might be present to His appearing.

Topical Index:  Mitzrayim, Egypt, slavery, constriction, mērāḥōq, at a distance, Exodus 20:18

[1] Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg,  Moses: A Human Life, p. 14.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid., p. 6.