The Eternal said to Moshe, ‘I will rain down bread for you from the sky, and the people shall go out and gather each day that day’s portion—that I may thus test them, to see whether they will follow My instructions or not.
Shemot 16:4
Take care lest you forget the LORD your God. . . . You may say to yourself, ‘My own power and the might of my own hand have won this wealth for me.’ Remember that it is the Eternal your God who gives you the power to get wealth, in fulfillment of the covenant that He made on oath with your fathers, as is still the case.
Devarim 8:11, 17–18
The Deception of Memory
It is memory that is the problem.
If we had no memory, everything would be wonderful!
Memory enables forgetting.
Memory is what allows us to become accustomed to our lives: to regularity, to the laws of nature, to our health, to the air we breathe, to the food we eat, to our parents and children, to the rising and setting of the sun, to the people we meet, to our own face in the mirror—even to our belief in God.
And therefore, we no longer see what is truly happening: that ultimately everything comes from God.
Imagine that we remembered nothing from one moment to the next. We would be like a newborn baby, living in total surprise. Everything would be new. Every moment would be a “knockout” from which we could scarcely recover.
But the experience would be awesome. Everything would remain infinitely novel. There would be no monotony—and therefore, perhaps, only truthful living.
A baby, however, is just beginning to develop memory and therefore cannot grasp what is happening. We can grasp something only by experiencing it against the background of the past. Yet by the time the child can grasp it, the child has already become accustomed to it. The power of recollection has developed, and monotony has set in.
The child begins to “normalize” life. Soon he confuses memory with explanation.
He tells himself that repetition is, by definition, explanation: the more often something happens, the better we understand it. We call this a law of nature.
But there is no necessary relationship between the two. The fact that something has happened before does not explain it. It tells us only that it has happened repeatedly. Frequency is not explanation.
Memory becomes deceptive when we ask it to tell us more than it can. It does not explain an event. It merely tells us that what is happening now has happened before.
The sunrise is no less wondrous on the millionth morning than it was on the first. Repetition does not make it less miraculous; it only makes it familiar. A man who has survived until today cannot therefore conclude that he is immortal.
It would be more honest to say that frequency is the repeated renewal of a miracle.
Science necessarily works with observed regularities and with the expectation that, under the same conditions, they will continue. That is one foundational principle of what we call the laws of nature.[1] Yet those laws do not explain themselves.
Memory becomes deceptive when we ask it to tell us more than it can. It does not explain an event. It merely tells us that what is happening now has happened before.
Science can tell us, with astonishing power, what happens, how it happens, and how one phenomenon is connected with another. But it cannot answer the ultimate question: Why does it happen and why is there such a world at all?
The Manna Test
The manna test described in our parasha is remarkable.
For forty years, while the Israelites wandered through the desert, they ate a “heavenly food” every day. Yet the way it was given violated every ordinary expectation of distribution and inventory.
The food was called manna—from the Israelites’ question, man hu, “What is it?” It fell from heaven, but only enough for each person for one day. On the sixth day, twice as much was gathered; on Shabbat, none fell. It shattered the illusion that yesterday could be stored up and made to guarantee tomorrow.
According to the Talmud, the manna also fell at different distances according to the spiritual condition of its recipient: the righteous found it at the entrances to their homes, ordinary people went out to gather it, and the wicked had to wander farther.[2]
There was no security in storage. The Israelites had to trust that the manna would fall again the next day. They could not rely on leftovers, for—except for the portion kept for Shabbat—what remained overnight became wormy and smelled horrible.
This insecurity must have been an enormous challenge. The question “What if tomorrow there is no manna—no food?” must have haunted them, at least at first.
It turned them into newborn children. Each day stood separately. There was no stockpile connecting one day to the next. Security ended with the passing of the day.
For some Israelites this was too much. In their need for security, and their fear of its absence, they went out on Shabbat morning to search for manna. But they found none. (Shemot 16:27)
Memory had become powerless.
Yesterday’s abundance could not be eaten today. The Israelites had to ask themselves: Is there an inviolable law of nature on which we can always rely? Or would this confidence be merely an illusion in the eye of the observer? Is nature just routine—or a constantly repeating miracle?
Actors and Spectators
Belief in the absolute regularity of experience is partly a condition of the mind, unlike knowledge that we attain independently.
Twentieth-century physics—especially quantum mechanics—unsettled the classical picture of an entirely predictable universe. It did not abolish objective reality, as is sometimes claimed; interpretations differ sharply. Yet it did force physicists to ask whether the observer can always be treated as a wholly detached spectator.
The American theoretical physicist John Archibald Wheeler (1911–2008) spoke of a “participatory universe,” a world in which observation is not merely an irrelevant afterthought in our description of reality. “There is no verifiable reality outside us independent of our perception. The percipient and the perceived are one and indivisible.”[3]
Niels Bohr put the matter more cautiously: “In the drama of existence we are ourselves both actors and spectators.”[4]
Neither Wheeler nor Bohr thereby proved that human consciousness creates reality, although they wondered what was actually true. Their point is more unsettling: we never understand the world from outside it. We are always participants.
Memory tempts us to imagine that things simply are the way they are, entirely independent of the observer and utterly reliable. But all our empirical knowledge is gained from within the world, never from a place beyond it. This has far-reaching consequences for our understanding of normality and the laws of nature. The question is not whether reality is unreal, but whether our idea of normality is as verifiable as we assume.
Gold with a Soul
But there is more.
What is gold? According to physics and chemistry, gold is an element. In its solid state, its atoms are all alike and arranged in a regular crystal structure—rather like ping-pong balls packed as closely together as possible.
A scientific analysis of an object such as one of the golden death masks from the royal tombs at Mycenae can describe the composition, density, and structure of the gold. But for the crowds who pass the glass cases in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the mask is something entirely different.
It is gold with a soul.
They all see the same object, but each sees it with a unique understanding of what they see.
The great Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez (1927–2014), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, once observed that “the rationalism of European readers prevents them from seeing that reality does not end with the price of tomatoes or eggs.”[5]
On another occasion, he said, “Europeans are ultimately Cartesians. They reject everything that does not fit rational thought”[6] Indeed, while wearing these Cartesian blinders, we call ourselves enlightened, which in this context is a deliciously ironic word. The truth may be that we are living in unseen darkness.
We expect normality on the basis of memory. But memory gives familiarity the appearance of necessity. That is the manna illusion.
A Land of Manna
Israel is a land sustained by manna. Normality has never been its natural condition; nor has it been the condition of the Jewish people.
It is not a vast fertile plain watered by a dependable river like Egypt. Instead, it is a land of hills and valleys, dependent on rain from heaven (Devarim 11:10–12)—rain that, as everyone in Israel knows, is never entirely predictable.
Life in this country rarely feels stable, permanent, or secure. Those who live here are vulnerable. They live with insecurity as a permanent companion.
Israel is manna-bound. Again and again, it is attacked and forced to fight for its existence. Between wars come terrorist attacks, and there is constant condemnation from abroad. Never is there a dull moment.
Nobody knows from where the next portion of manna will come, whether it will come at all, or in what measure. There is no historical pattern on which Israel can safely rely.
In this sense, Israel stands at the center of the world. Its insecurity reminds the other nations that their own security, wealth, abundance, and welfare are also as vulnerable as a single portion of manna.
There is no memory on which Israel can safely rely. Neither can the world.
Only one memory remains constant: “Remember that it is the Eternal your God who gives you the power to get wealth” (Devarim 8:18).
The rest is manna.
Notes
[1] See David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding, sec. 4, pt. 2, on the problem of extending past experience to the future.
[2] Babylonian Talmud, Yoma 75a.
[3] John Archibald Wheeler, “Information, Physics, Quantum: The Search for Links,” in Complexity, Entropy, and the Physics of Information, ed. Wojciech H. Zurek, Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity, vol. 8 (Redwood City, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1990), 3–28, esp. 5.
[4] Niels Bohr, “Discussion with Einstein on Epistemological Problems in Atomic Physics,” in Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (Evanston, IL: Library of Living Philosophers, 1949), 236.
[5] “Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Gabriel García Márquez, The Fragrance of Guava: Conversations with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza.” (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1982). Original in Spanish.
[6] Nauwgezet en Wanhopig, interview with Marquez, Dutch, VPRO, 1989
