Chapter 2 To Read Is to Wander

Hermeneutics

As I wrote in the introductory chapter, my first goal in this book is pedagogical. Even if I can’t predict who my readers will be, I’m imagining the first version of this book as a series of lectures I’ll deliver to students next semester in a course on communication method. I hope others read it, too, but at the time of writing it, I’m addressing it like a letter to my students in the Fall 2020 semester at the University of Ottawa. For that reason, one dimension of the book is performative: I’m doing the things that I’m also describing. In effect, this book is an extended exploration of the ideas of Paul Ricoeur as they become relevant to my students (and, I hope, to the other readers I might one day reach).

This section is about Ricoeur’s hermeneutics, a term I’ve avoided up to this point because—my goals being pedagogical—I worried that its obscurity might prompt my students to stop reading. But I can no longer avoid it. For Ricoeur, hermeneutics is “the theory of the operations of understanding in their relation to the interpretation of texts.”6 It is grounded in the act of careful reading—the act I’m called to undertake here—where the text, having escaped the author’s control and having been made available to anyone who can read, serves as an anchor. As I discuss below, its anchor function is what makes hermeneutics objective, although Ricoeur means something different by objective than the social or natural scientists to whom he is responding.

Kurt Mueller-Vollmer traces the roots of hermeneutics back to Aristotle’s On Interpretation (or, in Greek, Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας or Peri Hermeneias), although, he says, the tradition as we know it did not really begin until the Protestant Reformation.7 It played—and continues to play—an important role in biblical interpretation. Ricoeur is attentive to religion’s role, and his account is performative in much the same way as I want this book to be. He examines the creation story in Genesis, for instance, where he finds two narratives: one of action (“God made . . .”) and one of speech (“God said, and there was . . .”). “The first narrative,” he says,

could be said to play the role of tradition and the second of interpretation. What is interesting here is that the interpretation, before being the act of the exegete [that is, the person performing the interpretation], is the act of the text. The relation between tradition and interpretation is a relation internal to the text; for the exegete, to interpret is to place himself in the meaning indicated by the relation of interpretation which the text itself supports.8

I’m doing work similar to that of the exegete here: I’m placing myself (and my students) in the “relation of interpretation which the text itself supports,” although I’m concerned with Ricoeur’s work rather than the book of Genesis. (It’s worth noting, however, that consideration of religion is part of the DNA of communication studies in the United States, where I was trained. It’s clear in the work of John Durham Peters and James Carey, for instance, not to mention my own work, as in the consideration of the exodus story in this chapter.)9

Ricoeur’s primary concern is the defining question of hermeneutics, namely the opposition “between explanation and understanding.”10 This opposition grows out of questions raised by influential German philosophers in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as Friedrich Schleiermacher and William Dilthey. To understand a text, according to Dilthey, is to enter into the author’s mind, “to know something of [the author’s] mental life through the perceptible signs which manifest it.”11 For Schleiermacher, the point of hermeneutics is to grasp the author’s genius; to understand a text is to use it to “understand an author as well as and even better than he understands himself.”12 To explain a text, on the other hand, is to identify the rules it follows, following a conception of knowledge modelled after forms of inductive reasoning in the natural sciences, in contrast to the humanist mode of interpretation designated by understanding.13

These approaches, however, lead to conceptual problems. The first should be clear in light of the discussion of distanciation in the last chapter: to focus on an author’s inner psyche, where genius and intention both reside, is to neglect the fact that the author’s intention is outside the reader’s ken. The author is not available to rein in the polysemy inherent in their words, and readers have only the text itself to interpret. There’s no need to rehearse the argument here: it’s the point of chapter 1.

The problem with explanation—the approach where we try to arrive inductively at an account of how a text produces meaning—is more subtle. This approach is like solving a jigsaw puzzle. The text is like the cover of the box, and the pieces—the different parts of the text—are inside. The task is to put the pieces together to see how each relates to all the others, until the puzzle looks like the box top, or the pieces fit together to form the text. The problem arises from the fact that explanation in this sense provides an account of how the text functions but not how it relates to the world outside itself.

Here’s a concrete example, that of structuralism, from the early- to mid-twentieth century. In the founding work of structural linguistics, the Cours de linguistique générale (published in English as the Course in General Linguistics), Ferdinand de Saussure divides the phenomena of language into two categories: langue, or the structure that produces meaning in language, and parole, or the actual instances where people create messages using the tools that this structure provides. (The French words langue and parole do not have tidy equivalents in English. Langue means “language,” in the sense of a system of verbal and written signs that can be described by a dictionary and a grammar book, the first providing words and the second the rules to combine them. In that sense, it describes the structural capacity to speak. At the same time, national languages such as English or French are also langues. As for parole, it means “speech” or acts of communication.)

For Saussure, the proper object of linguistics is langue, or the system that makes communication possible, even if it is knowable only through acts of parole. Within the system of langue, words come to have meaning as a result of their relationship to other words. It’s a negative relationship, in that words are defined by what they are not. For instance, at the level of the signifier (or the sounds that speakers say or communicate in a written form), an English speaker recognizes cat because it’s not bat or mat or sat, or cut or cot, or cap or can. At the level of the signified (or that to which a signifier refers—essentially, the idea that a word denotes), that same English speaker recognizes a domestic four-legged feline (a cat) because it’s not a four-legged feline at the zoo (a lion), nor a domestic four-legged canine (a dog). Different languages—different langues—organize signifiers and signifieds in different ways, but following the same negative logic. Un chat n’est pas un rat ni un chut ni un char.14

Saussure’s ideas resonated with a range of thinkers such as literary scholar Roland Barthes, anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, and political theorist Louis Althusser, who applied his ideas to popular culture, social systems, and politics, respectively.15 In that respect, their work was hermeneutic: they were interpreting wrestling matches and advertisements for spaghetti (Barthes), cultural groups in South America (Lévi-Strauss), and apparatuses of the state (Althusser). The problem, according to Ricoeur, was that the systems they investigated were closed: if words had meaning only in relation to other words, they never left the abstract realm of langue for the concrete world inhabited by actual people. The same was true, paradoxically perhaps, for the signifying systems that structuralist thinkers used to explain other objects of study, even when those objects appeared to belong to the concrete world, as in the case of Lévi-Strauss or Althusser. The systems were closed in on themselves.

Guess and Validation

Ricoeur reaches outside of these systems by borrowing from the speech act theory of philosophers of language such as J. L. Austin and John Searle, according to whom

the act of discourse is constituted by a hierarchy of subordinate acts distributed on three levels: (1) the level of the locutionary or propositional act, the act of saying; (2) the level of the illocutionary act (or force), what we do in saying; (3) the level of the perlocutionary act, what we do by the fact that we speak.16

For example, I say, “It’s cold” (my locutionary act), but I’m really making a request, “Please close the window” (my statement’s illocutionary force), and you understand it as such and close the window (its perlocutionary force). This move allows Ricoeur to reframe the understanding/explanation dichotomy as a dialectic—a relationship of mutual influence between the subjective and objective dimensions of a text. This new frame provides tools to begin to engage in the process of guessing and validation that we will follow as we interpret a text (see figure 5).

For Ricoeur, the objective dimension (reflecting concerns addressed by previous thinkers under the rubric of explanation) is that of the obdurate, stubborn text, whose fixed content will not admit of fanciful invention. Consider what is surely the most succinct argument about hermeneutics in the history of English-language children’s literature, which appears in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass. The plucky hero Alice, having passed through a mirror in the drawing room of her house, encounters Humpty Dumpty, sitting on a wall. Like everyone else she meets, he’s impertinent and speaks in riddles. After making what he thinks is an especially clever point about the merits of “unbirthdays,” he proclaims, “There’s a glory for you!” Alice says she doesn’t understand, and he explains that a glory is a “a nice knock-down argument.” Alice objects that a person can’t make a word mean whatever they want, to which Humpty Dumpty responds:

“When I use a word . . . it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”17

Ricoeur would side with Alice here. Words might be polysemic, but their meaning is not entirely free-floating. The same is true of texts: they are open to multiple interpretations, but not ones made from whole cloth. If texts did not act as an anchor for interpretation, they could neither make claims nor build worlds.

The subjective dimension (reflecting concerns addressed under the rubric of understanding) is that of meaning itself. We make meaning of a text (using strategies I describe below), but that meaning is held in check by the text. By drawing attention to this relationship between meaning and text, Ricoeur overcomes the opposition between understanding and explanation advanced by his predecessors, who treated them as irreconcilable. He shows that they are in fact linked, each exerting influence over the other.

In this way, hermeneutics becomes an argumentative discipline: a text has no “true” or fixed meaning because its objective dimension—its unchanging content—is inextricably linked to the act of meaning-making. Instead, readers must demonstrate that their interpretation suits the text-as-anchor better than others. In effect, Ricoeur establishes a different warrant (the “standard the researcher applies to assess the merits of the data supporting a claim”)18 for hermeneutics than for the social sciences from which the idea of explanation borrowed. It follows a logic of probability rather than verifiability. In this respect, he hearkens back to Aristotle, who saw the persuasion at the heart of rhetoric in a similar way. For Aristotle, a speaker could convince listeners in one of two ways. The first was through irrefutable evidence: the fact that a person had a fever was a sign that they were sick.19 The second was through an appeal to what was likely. This approach was more common, for instance in a court case where there were no witnesses, a situation that gave Greek jurists room to argue that “the judges must decide from what is probable; that this is meant by ‘giving a verdict in accordance with one’s honest opinion’; that probabilities cannot be bribed to mislead the court; and that probabilities are never convicted of perjury.”20 It was only in the second case that persuasion was necessary, as irrefutable facts, according to Aristotle, presented no other possible interpretation.

How do we go about engaging in this process? In order to argue that one interpretation is better than another, we must first propose an interpretation, and for that, we must make a guess, as prosaic as that sounds. Lost and disoriented, we take a stab at it: Might the author mean _____? It might feel precarious to take that risk: other people might be smarter, and we might be wrong. (I constantly felt this way when I was a student. My classmates often said things that seemed so brilliant that I couldn’t even guess what they meant, let alone what the text we were discussing meant. Later I learned that this feeling is called “imposter syndrome,” and everyone experiences it.) But here Ricoeur is reassuring: “there are no rules for making good guesses, but there are methods for validating our guesses.”21 When you’re dangling in the void, you reach out for whatever will hold you, and if you grab something solid enough, you start to pull yourself up.

I’m not entirely convinced, however, that there are no rules for making good guesses. Over time, we develop tools for validating guesses, as Ricoeur suggests, and when we start to recognize familiar situations (authors making similar arguments, for instance), we can anticipate the process of validation in order to formulate stronger guesses in the first place. In fact, Ricoeur himself provides two basic strategies for guessing (table 3). We can find clues, and we can relate the parts of a text to the whole (and vice versa). Clues—statements or claims that X is Y or A does B—make certain interpretations likely and others unlikely. Our task is to determine which unsuitable interpretations they exclude or which suitable ones they encourage. The most probable interpretation will prove consistent with the greatest number of facets of the text. This is the logic of probability. Our first goal, despite the mouthful of words in this paragraph, is accuracy, or what Ricoeur describes as congruence. Does our interpretation reflect the content of the text? Does the content of the text support our interpretation?22

Source: Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, chapters 6 and 8.

We can also ask how different parts of the text work together. Ricoeur compares texts to three dimensional objects that can be observed from different angles. To describe the entire object—or the entire text—is to see how its parts combine to form a whole: “It is always possible to relate the same sentence in different ways to this or that sentence considered as the cornerstone of the text. A specific kind of onesidedness is implicit in the act of reading. This onesidedness confirms the guess character of interpretation.”23 In accomplishing this task, we achieve a second goal, which Ricoeur describes as plenitude. As we move from congruence to plenitude, we move from technical explanation to interpretation and understanding.

This is the approach I have taken here. Consider my notes (reproduced in figure 6) for table 2, included in the previous chapter. My goal was to take Ricoeur’s disparate comments on metaphor, text, and meaningful action, spread across a series of lectures and a collection of essays,24 and to trace the links between them, asking how his treatment of one made it possible to see the others in new ways. If you compare my notes to the figure in its final form, you’ll see the working-through process, where I validate and revise my guesses. For instance, my draft version has only four rows (instead of five, as in table 2), and they’re in a different order than the one I finally settled upon. In addition, some of my attempts to draw connections are less sure than others. For example, my notes about metaphor’s fixed form are especially tentative. To be honest, I made extrapolations that I think are open to critique. My claims are not as persuasive as they’d be if Ricoeur addressed metaphor’s fixed form explicitly. (Maybe he did, and I just haven’t found that book yet. If you sense my nervousness, think about your own. I’m arguing that my reading is plausible, or that someone reading the same things would probably arrive at a similar conclusion. That’s your task, too: stake out a claim, even if doing so makes you uneasy.)

The strategy of relating the parts to the whole provides another tool for evaluating claims. One way to see these relationships is as chains of associations (a point I alluded to briefly in chapter 1). As we observe a text from different angles, putting our observations together to see the whole, we’re describing chains of associations contained within the text. Consider, for instance, how Ricoeur speaks of probability (figure 7). He refers to Aristotle and to the human sciences. He also refers to the natural sciences and to concepts such as falsifiability, concepts that draw together his entire interpretive schema: “To the procedures of validation also belong procedures of invalidation similar to the criteria of falsifiability emphasised by Karl Popper in his Logic of Scientific Discovery. The role of falsification is played here by the conflict between competing interpretations. An interpretation must not only be probable, but more probable than others.”25

Those ideas in turn relate to others: Aristotle applies ideas of probability to logic and reasoning. The human sciences, as they strive for a mode of objectivity modelled after that of the natural sciences, develop paradigms such as structuralism, and, along with the natural sciences, raise questions of epistemology. The discussion of verification and falsifiability raises similar questions. These ideas, in turn, point to still others: signs and probabilities (in Aristotle’s technical sense), content, discursive logic, even statistics and the positivism in which they are grounded. And those ideas point to still others.

My sketch here is incomplete. There is no way, in fact, to circumscribe the chain of associations within Ricoeur’s texts, if we also investigate the ideas in the texts to which he refers, and in those to which they refer in turn, and so on. But the challenge doesn’t stop there. We must deal not just with congruence, but with plenitude, too: “All of the connotations which are suitable,” Ricoeur says, “must be attributed.”26 As soon as we reach beyond the limits of the text, the potential connotations are unlimited. Consider my structuralism example: Ricoeur refers to Saussure, and Saussure refers to others (whom Ricoeur doesn’t necessarily address), who refer to still others, and so on.

Viewed in this way, the task of interpretation is one of situating a text within the networks of association constituted by those chains. This is an inexhaustible task. In conceptual terms, that’s because there are always more texts. In practical terms, that’s because there are always more readers. My network likely overlaps with yours to a large degree (a fact that makes communication possible) but not entirely, as we’ve led different lives. Two people might read the same words in the same order, but because they’re reading against different conceptual horizons formed by their respective experiences with the texts in question, they will not arrive at the same interpretation.

For this reason, plenitude is not merely about relating the parts of a text to the whole, and the whole to the parts. It’s also about relating the parts to the other texts to which the author is responding. This network is the source of the text’s plurivocity (or textual polysemy—its multiple, competing meanings). It is also the reason that interpretation follows a logic of probability rather than certainty. One reader can contest another’s claim about what a text means by resituating it within a different network of associations.

All of this leads me back to Ricoeur’s assertion that “there are no rules for making good guesses.” One the one hand, I said I’m not convinced. On the other, the complexity of these networks makes hazarding a guess tricky. To read in a radical sense—to read like you mean it—is to approach a text with no preconceptions, in which case the first guess is in fact a stab in the dark. (If you apply what you think you know about a text, you run the risk of reaching conclusions about it even before you read it.) We will never have all the information we need in order to act, and yet we need to act. And in acting—we guess, we validate, we revise our guess—we come to discover the things we did not know when we started out.

In the sections that follow, I look at examples of people who wandered and how they made their first guesses as they tried to orient themselves. In the next chapters, especially chapter 4, I focus on the process of validation, or how, through guessing, we find the perspective that leads us out of the wilderness.

Floundering in the Time of Pandemic

I opened this chapter by talking about the COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps you know how this pandemic ends. I do not. That gut-level feeling of uncertainty is what I’m trying to evoke as a way to illustrate the disorientation we feel when we’re negated by a text. I’m floundering—and so too, it seems, is the whole world. The world we knew no longer exists: the life we knew has been negated.

The best illustration of this disorientation comes from the months right after different regions went into lockdown. It was the moment where we all felt like the hapless pilot whose flying contraption has just collapsed (the image I discussed in chapter 1). We were all grasping for whatever solid object we could find to support our weight, anything to orient ourselves in a world where our trusted reference points were gone.

To make sense of the pandemic, people made guesses, in Ricoeur’s sense, by asking, Does the pandemic mean _____? Over time, they were able to evaluate their guesses, but at first, they had to take a stab in the dark. This section focuses on people who made a professional habit of interpreting events, such as teachers, artists, and religious leaders, who had all cultivated their hermeneutic skills but, as we’ll see, still felt ill-equipped to deal with the transformations the world was undergoing. It goes without saying that my sample is not representative. Instead, the value of these people’s interventions came from their public nature and from the fact that the authors were people to whom others turned for guidance.

As I wrote in the introduction, the pandemic constituted a meaningful action in Ricoeur’s sense of the term. Consider the five qualities that characterize metaphors, texts, and meaningful actions (table 2 in chapter 1): their propositional claims, their fixed content, the unknowable intent of their authors, their potentially limitless audience, and their non-ostensive worlds. Of those, four are easy to identify with respect to the pandemic:

• The content is fixed: The pandemic has “left its mark,” so to speak, as it has changed how we interact with the world.
• The author’s intention is distant: The many actors in the pandemic—public health professionals, governmental leaders, other members of the public, the virus itself—are not present to explain their actions to us.
• The audience is potentially limitless: The pandemic affects everyone, and everyone interprets it.
• The world referred to is not that of the immediate environment: When people interpret the pandemic, they do so in different contexts.

The remaining quality—the idea that people attribute meaning to an action—is simultaneously the most difficult and the most important for understanding how they approached the pandemic.

It was clear, on the one hand, that people felt driven to interpret what was happening. “We are not well designed, it seems, to live in uncertainty,” according to humanities professor Mark Lilla.27 The problem, on the other hand, was that there was little if any meaning to be found. Doctors and nurses treating COVID patients found themselves at a loss even to express their own grief.28 Writer Leslie Jamison compared the social loss of the pandemic to the personal loss she experienced at the same time—a divorce, first, but also the loss of the senses of taste and smell, a symptom that doctors would link to COVID soon after she contracted the disease. For her, the pandemic was marked by “a certain cognitive dissonance” in the encounter of “something as surreal and unfamiliar as a global pandemic from inside the deadening familiarity and cloistered banality of our apartment—an extraordinary event experienced from inside a parade of days textured by unceasing ordinariness, the daily loop of domesticity.”29

Jamison made sense of the loss through a metaphor, the social experience of the pandemic is like the personal experience of loss, but the incommensurable tension between the objects she was comparing, the social and personal dimensions of experience, complicated rather than simplified her understanding of what was happening around her:

Sometimes loss just feels like loss, and absence is just absence: the solipsism of pain; the ache of losing touch; the empty streets and bankruptcies, the missing ventilators, the bodies stored in the temporary morgues of moving vans. The trick is how to hold both truths at once—absence-as-presence and absence-as-absence—rather than letting one obscure the other; how to let fragile, unexpected, imperfect consolations exist alongside everything they can’t console.30

Rodrigo García went a step further in a letter to his father, the late Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez. For him, the pandemic represented not just loss without meaning, but loss without even the chance to redeem it as meaningful: “It’s not just death that frightens us, but the circumstances. A final exit without goodbyes, attended by strangers dressed as extraterrestrials, machines beeping heartlessly, surrounded by others in similar situations, but far from our people.”31

Faced with this void, what do people do? Some reject the demand that we find meaning that does not exist: “A dose of humility,” Lilla suggests, “would do us good in the present moment. It might also help reconcile us to the radical uncertainty in which we are always living.”32 Others make guesses, asking, Does the pandemic teach us the same thing as _____? (figure 8). Like Jamison, they use metaphor, a form of meaningful discourse on a smaller scale, to identify the propositional claims (concerned, for example, with the new relationships we are forming with others) that they might attribute to the pandemic. What can we learn from people with similar experiences (the loss of one’s house, or cancer, or a midlife career change)?

After the first few months, as new routines began to set in, journalists began compiling “rule book”-type lists of what to do in the face of uncertainty: “First, reflect on how you’re feeling and on what’s still good. . . . [Second,] try to set aside other people’s expectations.”33 Or, more practically,

1. 1. Check the health of your state and community
2. 2. Limit the number of your close contacts
3. 3. Manage your exposure budget
4. 4. Keep higher risk activities as short as possible
5. 5. Keep taking pandemic precautions34

But these lists were as much about the day-to-day challenges of manoeuvring through difficult times as they were about what those difficulties meant. Venturing further afield, what insight might literature provide? The turn to literature shouldn’t be surprising. As Jonathan Culler explains, “experience is always mediated by signs and the ‘original’” and the experience we have that we think is somehow new “is produced as an effect of signs, of supplements.”35 In other words, we interpret our experience through stories we’ve read or heard or seen about others. (If you’ve ever taken an online quiz to know which character from your favourite show you “are,” you’ve experienced this mediation. One appeal of stories is the way that we come to understand ourselves better through the actions of others.) García notes in his letter to his father, “Not a day goes by that I don’t come across a reference to your novel ‘Love in the Time of Cholera,’ or a riff on its title or to the insomnia pandemic in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’”36

These approaches are all guesses, and they call for validation. Do they represent our experience accurately (congruence, as in table 3 above)? Do they help us see new dimensions of our experience (plenitude)? If they reveal new dimensions, do those new insights in turn lead us to make new guesses? And how, then, do those guesses represent our experience in all its dimensions? To see this process in greater detail, I want to turn to one metaphor that was frequently evoked in the first few months of the pandemic. It is the metaphor of the Israelites wandering for forty years in the desert, in the books of Exodus and Numbers, versions of which are found in all Abrahamic religions, primary among them Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Although people evoked other stories, such as that of Job or of disciples setting out on the road,37 the story of the Israelites in the desert resonated more widely and provides a valuable example of the iterative cycle of guess and validation.38

Wandering in the Desert

Exodus and Numbers are the second and fourth books of Moses.39 Exodus tells the story of how Moses was born and how God called him to free the Israelites, who were slaves in Egypt. Numbers tells the story of the forty years the Israelites spent wandering in the desert, waiting to arrive in the land of Canaan, which God had promised them when they left Egypt. These are the stories that make Moses a central figure in the Abrahamic religions. They are also the stories that hold especial meaning for oppressed people and others who feel they are wandering: “many racial-ethnic and women’s groups, believing that God has promised a better future, have constructively appropriated the biblical theme of a wilderness journey.”40 Hence their appeal in the COVID era, too.

That these books are imbued with meaning should come as no surprise. The word sign appears thirty times in Exodus—the book is swimming in signs.41 God convinces Moses to be his messenger (along with his brother Aaron; they are later joined by their sister Miriam) with a sign, turning his rod into a snake and then back into a rod. God tells the Israelites to put the blood of a lamb on their doorposts as a sign not to kill their firstborn sons, an event still marked each year in the observation of Passover.

Numbers, as its name implies, is a book about counting, full of censuses and measurements, as the Israelites count how many people there are in each of the twelve tribes (descended from the twelve sons of Jacob) and follow God’s instructions about how to conduct their rituals of worship and purification. Where Exodus is full of forward movement, as Moses leads the Israelites out of Egypt, Numbers is full of waiting, with many Israelites coming to doubt that leaving Egypt was the right idea at all.

The life the Israelites led in Egypt was difficult. When Moses first approaches Pharaoh, he conveys a message from God: “Thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, ‘Let my people go, that they may hold a feast to me in the wilderness.’”42 Not only does Pharaoh refuse, saying that he does not recognize this god, but he decides that the request is a sign that the Israelites do not have enough work. He instructs his taskmasters to stop supplying them with the straw they need to make bricks, forcing them to find their own. The taskmasters beat them when they cannot make as many bricks as before. When Moses demands again that Pharaoh release the Israelites, Pharaoh refuses again, and Moses tells the Pharaoh that God will visit plagues upon the Egyptians “that [they] may know that there is no one like the LORD our God.”43 God sends frogs, locusts, and pestilence, until finally, for the tenth and final plague, God kills all of the Egyptians’ firstborn sons and firstborn cattle. Even when Pharaoh releases the Israelites, his army pursues them toward the Red Sea. When the Israelites reach its shore, Moses lifts his rod, and the sea parts. The Israelites pass through it, but when the Egyptians enter it, “The waters returned and covered the chariots and the horsemen and all the host of Pharaoh that had followed them into the sea; not so much as one of them remained.”44 Then the Israelites enter the wilderness.

Two aspects of their lives in the wilderness are especially useful for understanding how their story helped people understand their lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. On the one hand, the Israelites start to establish a new routine. Six days a week, God sends them manna, which “was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey,”45 with instructions that they gather enough for the day or for two days, if the following day is a one of rest. They also establish new laws, most famously the Ten Commandments, but also rules about how to offer sacrifices, conduct rituals, and keep themselves ritually clean. They even begin to organize what looks to contemporary eyes like a bureaucratic structure for administering justice, when Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, advises Moses to appoint capable individuals “as rulers of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens.”46 These are tools they need for their large community, which includes more than 600,000 men who are able to fight, according to the census taken at the beginning of Numbers.47

On the other hand, the Israelites are restless. They have been uprooted from everything they knew, to which they harbour a strange desire to return. Without their old points of reference, they complain repeatedly to Moses, saying: “Would that we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”48 In their drive to understand what has become of their lives, they turn toward the familiar, even if what was familiar was slavery. Eventually, their complaints will prove so frustrating that God will threaten to “strike them with pestilence and disinherit them.”49 Moses intercedes on their behalf, and God relents, but not without punishing them, saying, “Your children shall be shepherds in the wilderness forty years, and shall suffer for your faithlessness, until the last of your dead bodies lies in the wilderness . . . you shall bear your iniquity, forty years, and you shall know my displeasure.”50

Thus there are two generations of Israelites in these stories, the first that leaves Egypt with Moses, the second that is born in the wilderness. The difference between the two, according to Katharine Sakenfeld, is that the second generation is more obedient.51 Another way to interpret the difference is to recognize that the second generation does not have first-hand experience of life in Egypt: all they know is the wilderness, which provides the points of reference the first generation lacked. The routine that began to develop in the early years of wandering has continued to settle in, so that the wilderness no longer feels so disorienting. Thus there are fewer “murmurings against the LORD,” which is to say, fewer complaints.52 When the sons of two families ask permission to build a settlement just outside the land of Canaan for their families, where they can graze their sheep, Moses warns them that God will be angry if they settle down and do not take up arms as the other men must do. They respond, “As the LORD has said to your servants, so we will do,” an answer God finds more pleasing than the complaints from the prior generation.53

Here we return to Ricoeur as a way to see how the stories of Exodus and Numbers serve as interpretive lenses for people during the COVID-19 pandemic. As with the pandemic, we can see how wandering in the wilderness was a meaningful action for the Israelites. Its content was fixed, in that wandering “left its mark,” changing how the Israelites interacted with the world. The author’s intention was distant: the Israelites could not know God’s mind. The audience was limitless: the Israelites interpreted wandering as they experienced it (not to mention the fact that members of the Abrahamic religions have continued to interpret it in new ways). And those varied audiences have interpreted the wandering in a variety of contexts. That of the first generation was not that of the second, just as the context in which people interpret the events now is not that of the Israelites’ lived experience.

What remains is the question of meaning itself. Here again we see the process of guessing and validation. The complaints from members of the first generation who said they had been led out of Egypt only to meet a new type of hardship suggest that they thought that wandering meant that God had forsaken them. But the view of the second generation is perhaps more interesting, as it shows how meaning evolves as people’s situation evolves. As Sakenfeld points out, the book of Numbers describes a second census, which yields a very similar count.54 The purpose of this count is to give each family a parcel of land proportionate to its size, but the fact that the count remains the same is a sign suggesting “divine faithfulness despite the pattern of persistent rebellion.”55 Hence a second interpretation of the action of wandering: rather than meaning that God has forsaken the Israelites, it appears to mean that God has protected them.

Conclusion: From the “Literal Is Not” to the “Metaphorical Is”

My analysis here is nested. People seeking to explain the COVID-19 pandemic evoked the story of the Israelites in the desert, which is also about seeking to explain experiences of disorientation. What lessons can contemporary commentators draw from the Israelites? Perhaps the most salient is that routine develops even in new situations, and it provides the context for people to reorient themselves. That has certainly been the case for me. A funny thing happened after I started this chapter: time passed, and the world began to open up again. As I write, the province where I live now allows people to move around a bit more: restaurants are open, as are parks and public areas, but everyone must wear a mask. We haven’t returned to the way things were, but I’ve seen more of the world outside of my basement than I had when I wrote this chapter’s introduction. My family has found a new routine and new points of reference. There is still uncertainty, such as how schools will operate when my children return to them in a month, but I feel oriented again, better equipped to make choices (such as about instructional modalities for my kids) that require me to interpret the world in which we now live.

In effect, what I am experiencing is a passage from the “literal is not” to the “metaphorical is,” to return to a distinction from the introductory chapter—from the negation of chapter 1 and consequent wandering of chapter 2 to an exploration of the new space opened up by metaphors, texts, and meaningful actions, which are the focus of chapters 3 and 4. As with my other examples, we can see this transition by looking at people’s lived experience of the pandemic. As different regions have come out of confinement, people have acted on their pent-up energy. Many experienced relief; others something closer to euphoria. That euphoria is the subject of the next chapter.