These two verses should always be read together as a unit: “It is eleven days from Horeb … but it was in the fortieth year …” And this juxtaposition cries out for us to consider all the ways of interpreting this fact: the irony, the waste, the necessity, the experience, the growth, the suffering, the need for a new generation who had not known slavery, the inability of humans to outgrow a trauma of mammoth proportions to an entire nation (I write this in the generation after the holocaust, in which the psychological effects of what happened still afflict us).
