I wanted to post today a follow-up post to my dad’s two guest posts the past few days on how culture and environment impacts and influences identity formation – for leaders and for all people for that matter. This post is a summary of some of the comment interaction on the second post, but since most people aren’t tracking comment dialogue I’m presenting some of the thoughts here for continued discussion.
I was reading Thomas Cahill’s “The Gift of the Jews” and read the following quote which I thought related amazingly well to this train of thought.
“One of the most remarkable features of the Torah narrative–and a feature evidenced in no other ancient literature–is a hypersensitivity to the decisive influence of environment and its ability to shape both conscience and consciousness.” pg. 160
It’s interesting to think about environment from this lens (early Jews). Cahill makes the observation that to change the influence of the environmental factors that had influenced Jewish identity (i.e. Egypt, pagan, slavery), it was necessary for Israel to be led into the desert for a generation so that their corporate identity could be re-made or reworked. It’s an angle on the Exodus and Wilderness that I haven’t really thought through before, but when you think about the wilderness experience along with what happened at Sinai with the ten commandments, and the daily provision by God you can’t help but begin to think that this was a huge part of the Jewish story and what God was doing in establishing them as His chosen people.
I often have only looked at these events and the Old Testament narratives through the lens of God’s promises and His deliverance of his people, but the more I think about it the more I see identity formation or re-formation as being a critical part of this part of Jewish history. There is much to learn from here as it relates to the role of identity and environmental factors and what types of things seek to undermine identity and what types of things preserve it.
It’s interesting to see the Exodus and Wilderness journey as a transformation of identity. It’s even more interesting to see the complaint “It was better to live as slaves in Egypt than to die in the wilderness” in light of this discussion. Many grow attached to a corrupted and dehumanizing identity and the promise of a new freedom or new identity is more scary and threatening that the slow destruction of one’s sense of self and conscience.
Here’s the question I raised yesterday, “What do you see as being key for people learning to make the courageous choices to live out their identity and own conscience when they are in environments in which those things are slowly (or quickly) eroding?
