I asked you earlier to count during the asseret ha-dibrot, the so-called Ten Commandments, and to pay attention to how many commandments there are in the ten commandments. Does anyone have an answer?
The answer is subject to a lot of debate. Is “I am the Lord your God” a commandment? According to Maimonides it is. According to R. Hasdai Crescas it is not; there can be no commandments for someone who doesn’t believe in God.
How many separate mitzvot are included in the prohibition against having other gods? Is having the god, making the image, and worshipping it just one prohibition or three prohibitions? Lo Tahmod is written twice. How many prohibitions is that?
The phrase “ten commandments’ developed, I suspect, among Christians who came to believe that there are *only* ten commandments in the Torah. Aside from those ten commandments, the rest of the Torah to them is just stories. The Jewish perspective sees the Torah as comprising six hundred thirteen commandments, all of them are eternal, and all of them together can guide every moment of our lives.
I want to pivot now to the beginning of the parasha when Yitro returns to Moshe after having looked after Moshe’s family during the hardships of the exodus.
וַיִשְמַ֞ע יִתְר֨ו כֹהֵ֤ן מִדיָן֙ חֹתֵ֣ן מֹשֶ֔ה אֵת֩ כָל־אֲשֶ֨ר עָשָ֤ה א-ֱלהִים֙ לְמֹשֶ֔ה ולְיִשְראֵ֖ל עַמ֑ו כִֽי־הוצִ֧יא ה׳ אֶת־יִשְראֵ֖ל מִמִצְרֽיִם׃
“Jethro priest of Midian, Moses’ father-in-law, heard all that God had done for Moses and for Israel His people, how the LORD had brought Israel out from Egypt. Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, brought Moses’ sons and wife to him in the wilderness, where he was encamped at the mountain of God.
Moshe then recounted to his father-in-law everything that the LORD had done to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians for Israel’s sake, all the hardships that had befallen them on the way, and how the LORD had delivered them.”
The Torah then tells about how Yitro saw how Moshe was suffering from his need to provide guidance and decisions from morning until evening for people seeking his council. Yitro suggests a system of delegation which Moshe implements in which local scale judges provide guidance in the moment to those questions that did not require Moshe’s personal intervention.
But this morning, I’d like to ponder, not what Yitro said, but when did he say it.
Ramban, Nachmanides, as he typically does, says that whenever it is possible to read the Torah this way, we should assume that the Torah lists events in the order in which they occurred. Therefore, Yitro’s intervention occurred right when it was written in the Torah, the exodus was first, then Yitro came, and then the revelation at Sinai occurred. But, according to Rashbam and Ibn Ezra, there is sufficient evidence to assume that Yitro came to Moshe after we received the Torah at Sinai. First was the exodus, then the revelation, and Yitro only came afterwards. Who is right?
In addition to the chronology of the Torah itself, Ramban also has support for his opinion from the fact that the revelation of the Torah at Sinai is not explicitly mentioned in any of Moshe’s exchanges with Yitro. They discuss God’s miraculous rescue of the Israelites. They do not discuss revelation at Sinai.
וַיִשְמַ֞ע יִתְר֨ו כֹהֵ֤ן מִדיָן֙ חֹתֵ֣ן מֹשֶ֔ה אֵת֩ כָל־אֲשֶ֨ר עָשָ֤ה א-ֱלהִים֙ לְמֹשֶ֔ה ולְיִשְראֵ֖ל עַמ֑ו כִֽי־הוצִ֧יא ה׳ אֶת־יִשְראֵ֖ל מִמִצְרֽיִם׃
“And Yitro heard all that God had done for Moshe and his people Israel…for the Lord had taken Israel out of Egypt.” There is no mention of any act of revelation!
On the other hand, if the Torah had not been given, why were so many people seeking Moshe’s guidance? How can he offer judgement with no laws?!
Rashbam and Ibn Ezra, teach that the Torah is not written in chronological order in this instance. Yitro came to the Israelite camp after revelation at Sinai. The Torah is explicit that Yitro came to Moshe on the Mountain of God, :הַ֥ר הָאֱ-לִֽהים, a place that the Israelites only reach in the following chapter. And Moshe only needed the guidance and advice of Yitro after he had already started his 40 year career teaching Torah.
So, if Rashbam and Ibn Ezra are correct, why did the Torah tell this story in the wrong order?
According to Rashbam: the Torah takes the story of Yitro and moves it back on chapter so that the Asseret HaDibrot, the so -called Ten Commandments, are now juxtaposed and proximate to the mitzvot of Parashat Mishpatim and the rest of the Torah. According to Ibn Ezra, the story of Yitro is moved back one chapter so that it is juxtaposed and proximate to the story of Amalek attacking us. In this way the account of a wicked gentile tribe attacking our ancestors is right next to a story of a kind and wise gentile offering his advice and support.
The Torah, as it is written, is not a chronological account of events as those events actually happened, but does give us a cleaner dividing point between narrative and law. Up through the story of Yitro giving advice, the Torah is a book of stories, one after another. After the revelation at Sinai, the Torah is primarily a book of law. In Parashat Yitro the Torah changes, fundamentally, the sort of book that it is. (It is now harder to teach children about the weekly Torah portion). The first half of the Torah is a book of narrative, the second half is a book of Law. Right in the middle, is the story of Yitro which is a story-about-law.
I returned on Monday from an eight day Orthodox rabbinic delegation to Israel that was sponsored by the S. Danny Abraham Foundation for Middle East Peace. I will look for a chance to share my experiences in greater detail at some other occasion with those who are interested. Our mornings began with Shacharit at 6 or 7 AM and we had sessions and meetings until 10 or 11 at night. If I described everything we did, we would be here for a very long time. However, I had a very significant experience and, in broad strokes, I want to share a bit about what I experienced.
Our delegations itinerary, in broad strokes, can be divided into three components. One set of meetings was with government officials, diplomats, and defense establishment personnel from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Prime Minister’s Office, strategic think tanks, the American Embassy, and the PA.
A second set of meetings was with representatives of Israeli and Palestinian NGO’s that are working on nonviolent approaches to ending the conflict. And a third set of meetings focused on the shockingly effective work that is being done by Rabbi Michael Melchior and others to develop a distinctly religious basis for peace and then taking that message to the most influential religious scholars across the Islamic world and beyond.
I repeatedly had my expectations and assumptions challenged. A retired IDF general shared what he believed to be the “greatest challenge to the Zionist enterprise in 70 years” and it was something I had never heard of before. Diplomats, were on average less diplomatic and hopeful about the prospects for peace than religious figures from the most intense and even extreme backgrounds with whom we met. When the terrorist group Hamas was founded, one of the men in the room when they picked its name, spoke to our group with more hope for peace than diplomats whose job it is to bring peace.
I feel educated and enriched by this encounter with complexity and depth and subtly of contemporary Israel and I also was repeatedly inspired by meeting men and women doing truly sacred work on behalf of the Jewish People. Many Americans have a story that we tell about Israel. There are heroes and there are villains and everyone knows who the heroes are and who the villains are. Heroes are good and must be supported and villains are bad and must be defeated. There are left wing and right wing and even centrist versions of this story but what they share in common is that they are each too superficial and too short to convey enough information or flexible enough to survive once they encounter some new piece of information or a new fact.
Stories alone are not sufficient. The Torah stops being a book of stories in this week’s Torah portion when the Torah transitions to being a series of stories to being the basis for a list of laws, mitzvot, that can shape our lives in all of our complexity. There are not just ten commandments. There are six hundred thirteen commandments and the web of mitzvot they create can shape our lives in a way that stories alone cannot.
All of us who love Israel should make that transition from telling one another simple stories, to the harder, but more rewarding work, of digging into the meaty details about a fully range of what is really happening, not just on the headlines, but behind the scenes, and on the sides.
Of course the Torah does not switch from narrative to law completely and forever. The Torah all five books together, are an amalgam of law and narrative in which it is sometimes hard to determine which element is primary. The Torah contains a story about one of our ancestors who married two sisters and then favored the child of his more beloved wife rather than his first born. And the Torah contains mitzvot which explicitly forbid that behavior. The Torah continues to tell stories, right up until the very final chapters, and even the most dry legal section of the Torah contains a “VaYiddaber Hashem el Moshe…and God said to Moshe” which envelopes the law in a narrative context of a personal relationship between Moshe and God.
That should be the goal of our American attachment to Israel. I do not believe any of the simple stories are sustainable. When we teach our children stories that are too simple they crumble when they reach college and find out that their teachers have withheld inconvenient information from them. One of my children recently shared that the pro-Israel message he gets from school is so positive it makes him suspicious about what they aren’t saying. The school could use this as a marketing tool, “our school is so pro-Israel that it makes our students suspicious.”
But if a simple story is not sustainable, it should not be possible for us to relate to Israel as just a collection of facts that we analyze with cold objectivity The future of the Jewish people is largely being written in contemporary Israel and the lives and welfare of our brothers and sisters must be of existential importance to us. I think the need that exists is to weave a new narrative that moves beyond the first naiveté of a child’s story through incorporating the details and depth and breadth that law can provide. Our love for Israel can be enduring and can be sustainable from generation to generation, only if it’s a love that is based on a knowledge that is as comprehensive and detailed and as subtle as can be.
I will conclude with an example of the dynamic that I suggest, moving from a simple myth to set of facts that undermine that myths, and then pushing to to construct a new and more inclusion story: Some time ago this was a large dinner in Madrid to commemorate the twenty fifth anniversary of the Oslo Peace accords and the Madrid Peace Conference which set the stage for modern diplomacy surrounding the Arab Israeli conflict. Israeli and Palestinian diplomats who had been active in those negotiations who are still alive gathered together in Madrid. The main course was ham. The Jewish and Muslim guests all ate.
There is a myth that religion is an enemy of peace. There is a reality that secular Jews and Muslims have failed for twenty five years to bring peace and that deeply religious individuals in the Jewish and Muslim community are now in regular contact with one another and speaking about ways to build a more peaceful future. If Jews and Muslims in the Holy land are able to use religion to create peace, the kiddush hashem, the sanctification of God’s name, this would represent would transform the world.
Shabbat Shalom.
Rabbi David Wolkenfeld 