In the Hebrew Bible, Humans Never Learn. But Neither Does God.

Before Leon Kass in the “People-Forming Passover,” there was Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781).

It was Lessing who proposed, in his 1780 The Education of the Human Race, that the best way to conceive of the God of the Bible was not so much as a Creator, World-Ruler, or Lawgiver than as an Educator. “That which education is to the individual, Revelation is to the Race,” he wrote in observing that the transition from the book of Genesis, in which God cultivates each of the patriarchs one by one, to the book of Exodus, in which he makes a covenant with an entire nation, reflects a “new impulse” in the biblical narrative. For when God “neither could, nor would, reveal Himself any more to each individual man, He chose an individual People for His special education.” Nor was the education of the Israelites an end in itself. Rather, in selecting them to be his pupils, God was “bringing up in them the future Teachers of the human race.”

Lessing’s formulation was an Enlightenment restatement of the traditional Christian view that, up to the advent of Christianity, the Jews were a crucial part of God’s plan for the world. In taking from Christianity its positive assessment of their role in human history rather than its condemnation of them for their subsequent behavior, which shaped the attitude of many other Enlightenment thinkers, he deserves praise.