EXOD337 To be sure, in the Torah itself we see the Israelites as a recalcitrant, obstinate people complaining and rebelling against God. Yet the prophets in retrospect saw things differently. The wilderness was a kind of yihud, an alone-togetherness, in which the people and God bonded in love. Most instructive in this context is the work of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who focused attention on the importance of rItes of passage. [The Rites of Passage (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1960)]. Societies develop rituals to mark the transition from one state to the next-from childhood to adulthood, for example, or from being single to being married-and they involve three stages. The first is separation, a symbolic break with the past. The last is incorporation, re-entering society with a new identity. Between the two comes the crucial stage of transition when, having cast off one identity but not yet donned another, you are remade, reborn, refashioned. Van Gennep used the term liminal, from the Latin word for "threshold," to describe this transitional state when you are in a kind of no-mans-land between the old and the new. That is what the wilderness signifies for Israel: liminal space between slavery and freedom, past and future, exile and return, Egypt and the Promised Land. The desert was the space that made transition and transformation possible. There, in no-mans-land, the Israelites, alone with God and with one another, could cast off one identity and assume another. There they could be reborn, no longer slaves to Pharaoh, instead servants of God, summoned to become "a kingdom of priests and a holy nation" [this verse].