Torah Posting: יתרו
This week we revisit Mosheh’s family by marriage, most importantly Yitro, the priest of Midyan, whose land-based wisdom was instrumental to Mosheh in the first parashah of Shemot and encompassed the whole burning bush episode.
Yitro hears about the big exodus Mosheh just led, and he goes out to the מדבר — the wilderness, the word for which is identical to the verb “speak” but pronounced with different vowels — to see him. He brings his daughter — Tziporah (Bird), Mosheh’s wife, and their sons Gershom (Stranger There) and Eli’ezer (My God Helps). The text expounds upon the sons’ names to make clear they refer specifically to Mitzrayim (Egypt) and the liberation from there.
Mosheh and the people are camped at הר האלהים — the Mountain of God — the place where Mosheh foretold they were to go to worship. When he said “Let my people go,” he was asking Pharaoh to let them go here to observe a festival for God just three days’ march from Egypt. Mosheh had every intention of taking them farther later, of course, but there is major religious work to do out here first, in the wilderness/speaking place.
Mosheh receives his family, brings them into the tent, and recounts the wild and miraculous adventures that have just concluded. Yitro — who is a priest of יהוה, remember — rejoices, offers blessings, affirms יהוה’s supremacy over foreign gods, and makes burnt offerings and sacrifices, which Mosheh’s brother, Aharon, and the elders of Yisra’el partake in as well.
The next day, Mosheh has to do his new job as basically mayor and sole judge for the entire people. No big deal. From morning until evening, he is swarmed by people bringing every single kind of problem an entire portable city-state might have.
Yitro, an experienced chieftain, is beside himself. “What are you doing, man?” he asks his son-in-law rhetorically. “Why are you trying to solve every problem in your entire people one at a time while literally everyone else waits in line all day?”
Mosheh responds, dumbly and matter-of-factly, that since it is his job to interpret the will and law of God, he has to do it.
Yitro responds, “לא-טוב” — “It’s not right!” Mosheh will burn out form this, and so will the people.
Mosheh, remember, is coming from the court of the world’s most powerful autocrat. While Pharaoh is always described as being constantly attended to by mincing bureaucrats to execute his commands — not a luxury Mosheh has out here — it is certainly the case that audience before one man is the only way to get anything done in the society from which Mosheh just liberated everyone. Perhaps the sole exception in the Torah’s version of history was during the time of Yosef, but no one alive in Mosheh’s time was there.
Yitro, meanwhile, is the chieftain of a community with a close relationship to Source. The most obvious indication of this is the way Mosheh’s respite in the land of Midyan from the lofty edifices of Mitzrayim led not only to his starting a family but to his direct encounter with God through the living land. Yitro was the one who held space for all of that. And now Yitro is providing Mosheh with more communal wisdom from people indigenous to the wild places.
Yitro recommends to Mosheh that he find talented, God-fearing community members who are not greedy for power and delegate the arbitration of minor issues to them. Yitro frames this as a divine commandment, and Mosheh accepts it as such and does as his father-in-law teaches him to do.
With this sustainable system in place, Yitro bids Mosheh farewell and returns to Midyan.
Here the narrative backs up a little bit to the day of the New Moon of the third month, when the people enter the Sinai, the region where the Mountain of God is. As soon as the people are camped at the foot of the mountain, Mosheh goes up for the first time. God gives Mosheh words to speak to the people: In light of the miracles God has performed for them — “I bore you on eagles’ wings,” God says — the people should now have all the evidence they need to faithfully keep God’s covenant. And if they do so, God will make them “a kingdom of priests.”
These are words to which I referred very early on in my sense that there is not only a way but a reason for a Jewish person like me to explicate my people’s sacred text for all people to read.
The concept of the “chosenness” of my people by our God is very badly understood by other people, many of whom have taken our sacred text as their own without the ability to understand it. It’s not that this text isn’t about them, it’s that they think the part that’s about us is about them. I wonder who it is they think the parts of the Torah are about that refer to the other people and nations. In any case, these pesukim do a pretty succinct job of describing how it actually works in the Torah. “לי כל-הארץ,” God says — “All the Earth is mine.” All earthlings are descended from the same primordial earthling created in the image of God. But this people, the one to whom God is speaking now through Mosheh, shall — if they uphold God’s covenant — be a “ממלכת כהנים וגוי קדוש” — “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
I’ve encountered a fair number of non-Jews who take offense to the word “goy” as though it is a slur. And yeah, I’ve encountered a fair number of Jewish people who use it as a slur. I would say discrimination against other people is a fairly commonplace character flaw in human beings, wouldn’t you? But here is God, giving us the chance to become a “goy,” because the word means “nation,” and God is saying that my nation will be קדוש (holy) by upholding our covenant. By keeping this covenant — which is between God and us — we are demonstrating God’s will by virtue of our distinctiveness. So what I ask of other nations is this: What is God’s covenant with you? How can your people be a גוי קדוש?
The Torah explains how my people can be a holy nation, but also — perhaps even more clearly — it explains how we can fail to be one. My hope is that my little exegesis project here can help all peoples understand what is entailed in building — and continually rebuilding — a living, holy nation.
In any event, Mosheh comes down the mountain, summons the elders, and tells everybody this. The people answer as one: “Everything God has said, we will do!” And Mosheh goes back up to tell God that the people consent.
God says, “Okay, if yall are ready for this, then I shall prepare my vehicle of thick cloud for becoming physically manifest, so that all the people can hear me themselves and know that you’re speaking with the real God from now on. Go back down and tell the people to purify themselves, wash their clothes, and be ready for the third day. On that day, יהוה will appear to the entire people from Mount Sinai.”
God makes very clear to Mosheh that this is no laughing matter. The people may not even touch the mountain. Anyone who does must be executed by a means that does not even involve touching them. They will be free to go up the mountain once the shofar sounds a long blast. (This is the signal of the end of the holiest times of the Jewish year to this very day.)
Mosheh comes back down and delivers the news: Stay pure. Wash your clothes. No sex. Be ready for the third day.
The dawn of the third day arrives with thunder and lightning and a dense cloud upon the mountain. A shofar blast — like an ethereal one without a clear physical source — rocks the camp. The people tremble with fear.
Mosheh leads the people out of the encampment to the foot of the mountain. The mountain trembles and smokes. The shofar just keeps getting louder. Mosheh speaks in words; God speaks back in thunder. Mosheh has to go up a little ways to hear God better. God tells him to go back down and warn the people again not to break through the smoke and clouds to behold God directly; they’ll die. Even the priests (what priests?) must be careful.
Mosheh says, “Don’t worry, they can’t because you told us they couldn’t even touch the mountain.” This careful observance of the meticulous ritual instructions is the final test; God sends Mosheh down one more time to get his brother, Aharon, and no one else. Mosheh must have his brother as a witness to the direct transmission of the essential kernel of the covenant with God.
God then utters 10 pronouncements:
I am יהוה, the God who brought you out of slavery in Mitzrayim.
You will not have any other gods before Me. You will not make any sculpted image or likeness of any particular being to bow down to and serve. I am a temperamental God, and those who reject Me will be punished for four generations, but those who love me and keep my commandments will receive compassion for a thousand generations.
You will not swear falsely by the name of יהוה your God; one who does that will never be forgiven.
Remember and sanctify Shabbat. No one, even slaves and foreigners in your land, will work on Shabbat. יהוה made the entire universe in six days and rested on the seventh, so you can handle taking a little break.
Give glory to your father and mother in order to lengthen your days on the land that God has given you.
You will not murder.
You will not violate your sexual commitments.
You will not steal.
You will not testify falsely against your neighbor.
You will not covet your neighbor’s house, or spouse, or slave, or ox, or ass, or anything else of theirs.
The people are overloaded by the intensity of this transmission. It’s all thunder and lightning and smoking and ethereal horns blasting. They tell Mosheh, “You speak to us, and we’ll do as you say, but don’t let God speak to us directly. We’ll die!”
Mosheh tells them, “Do not fear. God is doing this to test you, and to make sure your minds are properly blown, so you won’t go astray.” So the people remain at a distance but agree not to run away screaming. Mosheh goes back into the thick cloud.
Having given the main download, God gets particular with the structure of giving offerings. Make no gods of silver, make no gods of gold; we’ve covered this. Make for God an altar of earth to burn your animal offerings on. In every place where God causes the Holy Name to be mentioned, God will come with blessings.
If you make the altar out of stones, do not hew them with tools; it makes them profane. I find this a beautiful instruction. Work with the Earth when making offerings, don’t force yourself upon it.
And lastly — sorry, I can’t help but find this one funny, but remember that, at the time, it was not — you must not ascend God’s altar by steps, because that will expose your undercarriage to it.
Okay, we’re in it now. The main event has begun. We are learning God’s fundamental truths and inner workings. But even aside from the particulars, something incredible is happening: God has deigned not to simply give the download to God’s elect, lonely prophet, but communally, to the entire people, with the prophet and his priestly brother using their talents to facilitate the overwhelming energy of this process. The reason this moment is the constitutional convention of the Jewish People is not simply because the words are written down. It’s because everybody, intersubjectively, verifiably, together, experiences revelation.
The sages say that the souls of all the generations of my people were present at Sinai. So you can trust me. I was there.
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