Yitro

AllClass of 2026 Senior Sermons

It seems at first glance that God is issuing the same instruction twice. In the first version of his Torah commentary, disparages commentators who differentiate between the two utterances, concluding, “It is as if they had never seen the words of the prophets who speak in doublets (כפל, viz., poetic parallelism) to fix the words in the mind. And it is the way of elegant expression (צחות).” Similarly, Samuel David Luzzatto () states that the doubling is to set “this word, the introduction to the entire Torah,” firmly in the mind. Most modern scholars would agree that the doubling is both emphatic and stylish (poetic).

But that way of interpreting does not comport well with the traditional rabbinic mindset. The rabbinic view is that Scripture is economical, which means that there can be no redundancy or synonymy, certainly not for the sake of mere “elegance.” The burden on the interpreter is to determine the distinctive connotations of the terms that designate Moses’ speech act(s) and audience(s), respectively. Thus the earliest midrashic interpretation, in , chapter 2:

“Thus shall you say”: “thus”—in the holy tongue. “Thus”—in this order. “Thus”—on this matter. “Thus”—that you neither diminish nor augment.

“Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob”—the women; “and tell the children of Israel”—the men.

“Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob”—gently. “Say”—give the women the basic ideas. “And tell the children of Israel”—be specific in speaking to the men.

According to the Midrash, the word “thus” connotes precision in the choice of language (Hebrew), the order of presentation, and the subject matter. “Speaking” is gentle, while “telling” is punctilious. Most provocatively, the women (“house of Jacob”) are addressed gently (בלשון רכה) with generalities, while the specifics are conveyed to the men (“house of Israel”).

adapts and condenses the Mekhilta interpretation, adding (from Shabbat 87a) that the men are to be “told” about “punishments and details, words as tough as sinews [or, as harsh as poison].” The latter comment is based on a word play between the term for telling (תגיד) and the word that means either sinews or poison (גידין).

Why would anyone think that “house of Jacob” refers to women in the first place? The starting point is a rabbinic comment in Berakhot 13a: ישראל עיקר ויעקב טפל לו, “[The name] Israel is primary and Jacob is inferior to it.” This comment is a reflection on the fact that even after God changes Jacob’s name to Israel, the seemingly superseded name continues to appear in the text. Why so? To allow for different connotations of the respective names.

Correlating the Talmudic statement about the two names with the association of the “inferior” name with women leads to blatantly misogynistic interpretations such as this one by Joseph ibn Aqnin, translated from Arabic and quoted by Baḥya ben Asher in his commentary on :[1]

Know that the name Jacob connotes lowliness, derived from “his hand was holding onto the heel of Esau” (Gen. 25:26), for the heel is the lowest part of the body. The name Israel, however, connotes authority and high stature…. That is the sense of “The Lord said to him, your name shall be Israel,” as the sages said, “Israel is primary and Jacob is inferior to it.” And Scripture goes on to state, “Thus shall you say to the house of Jacob and tell the children of Israel,” relating women to Jacob because they are inferior to men, and relating males to Israel because they are primary.

In his commentary on , Baḥya elaborates, stating that God commanded Moses to speak “calmly” (בנחת) to the women first, “to teach them discipline and proper conduct and, moreover, so that they might direct a son towards the study of Torah and observance of the commandments.” Moses is instructed to give the women only the “chapter headings” (generalities) “because their minds are not as settled as men’s.”

Some later commentators retain the midrashic sensibility while diminishing or eliminating the misogyny implicit in the midrash and spelled out in Baḥya’s interpretation. does so explicitly, commenting:

It is necessary to explain the doubling of you shall say // you shall tell. Our rabbis said “house of Jacob” refers to women, to whom Moses would speak soothingly, and “to the house of Israel” he would declare words as tough as sinews. But the difficulty is that we do not find that God’s words conveyed two different messages, but a single expression for men and women alike, whether tough or soothing…. Also, I see no “tough words” in God’s words to the men, but words that revive the soul!

Following that assertion, Ibn Attar launches into a lengthy excursus on the rewards that people receive for observing the commandments, arguing that two verses in Deuteronomy (7:9 and 20:6, respectively) prove that the reward for observance out of love is twice as great as that for observance out of fear. When God reveals the words of Torah, then, there are two possible ways to present them:

One way is to speak loving and tender words, with the positive outcome that [people] will receive the Torah out of love, and double their reward…. The second way is to speak tough words, like a king who decrees to his subjects with threats, with the positive outcome that they will not accidentally disregard a single commandment, although they will be entitled to only half the reward that they would get for doing them out of love.

In Ibn Attar’s interpretation, God wisely commanded in both ways, by way of love and by inducing fear. “Saying” connotes love and tenderness while “telling” induces fear and reverence. Both are good and necessary for the fulfillment of the Torah: “Every Jew must acquire both love and reverence, and God’s words entail both. As for the words of our rabbis, who said these are the women and those are the men, they are by way of homily.” Overt (albeit polite) rejection of the rabbinic gender distinction yields a more palatable midrashic-style interpretation for the modern reader.

, who also is neo-rabbinic in his avoidance of textual redundancy or superfluity, is another commentator who sets gender aside. First, he asserts the difference between “saying” and “telling”: “Telling entails something novel and difficult that is made known by the teller; it is a matter outside the hearer’s knowledge. Saying includes any oral utterance.” Then, he renders the rabbinic notion of Jacob as inferior to Israel as a class distinction: ordinary descendants of Jacob “are called by the name ‘Jacob,’ and the elite of the nation or the people, those of high stature, are called by the name ‘Israel.’” The common people are to be instructed with “simple and easy words,” in contrast to “the elite and the elders,” who are to be addressed with “new and great words.”

In the minds of our commentators, God’s double charge to Moses carries diverse messages about how Moses should prepare the Jews for revelation at Sinai: (1) by conveying God’s instructions precisely for memorability; (2) by addressing the women in one way, and the men in another; (3) by commanding both lovingly and threateningly; (4) by speaking to the masses in one way and to the elite in another. In every case, the interpretive decisions reveal as much or more about the interpreters as they do about the biblical text—about their prejudices and preoccupations, and about the circumstances of their lives. They provide endless fascination—and possibilities of meaning—for students of Torah.

[1] See Abraham Lipshitz, Studies on R. Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa’s Commentary on the Torah (Jerusalem: Mosad Harav Kook, 2000), pp. 78-80.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).������

Yitro

Because of that very significance it is a curious fact that the narrative that describes the revelation is anything but clear. Try, for example, to tell a child the story of what happened at Sinai and then compare your version to what we read in this week’s parashah. Yes, Moses went up the mountain and came down with, well, what exactly did he come down with? And when does that actually happen in the narrative? In fact the Tablets, “written by the finger of God,” are given to Moses a good deal later, in Parashat Ki Tissa (at the end of ). In the meantime Moses has gone up and down the mountain a number of times, eventually staying there for the famous “forty days and forty nights” (found in , at the end of next week’s parashah, Mishpatim).

It is in our parashah that we read of the thunder and lightning, and the loud blast of the shofar, the last being a particularly confusing detail. We can understand that in the biblical imagination thunder and lightning are in the provenance of the Deity. But isn’t the shofar a human “musical” instrument? Who is blowing that shofar? That very question may have been part of what made it a frightening experience for the Israelites—blasts from a mysterious horn, coupled with the smoke and the fire, while the whole mountain trembled violently (). This describes a full-on volcanic eruption. Meanwhile, adding to the confusion, “the voice of the shofar grew louder and louder” (19:19). I have chosen to translate kol hashofar in this verse as “voice” rather than the conventional translation “sound of the shofar” because voice fits nicely with the second half of this same verse, which would read as a whole: “The voice of the shofar grew louder and louder; Moses would speak and God answered him with voice.”

From both a literary and theological point of view this parashah is deeply concerned with “voice.” Who speaks and what is spoken? How much is heard by the people? Early in the parashah God says to Moses, “I will come to you in a thick cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and trust you ever after” (19:9).

Here it appears that the people will be overhearing the conversation between God and Moses in order to validate Moses’s leadership. Almost immediately following this interchange, Moses leads the people out to the foot of the mountain to hear the Ten Commandments. Although “Ten Commandments” is a common phrase in English, it is not a term used in the Bible; the closest thing we get is the “aseret hadevarim” in , meaning “The Ten Words” or “The Ten Utterances.” (Scholars often use the term “Decalogue,” based on the Greek formulation deka logoi—“ten words”—found in the ancient Jewish translation of the Bible into Greek.)

The Decalogue begins with a prefatory verse, “And God spoke all these words, saying” (20:1). And yet once again the structure of the narrative works against a linear retelling. After the Ten Utterances are completed, in the next verse we seem to switch back to a moment before the revelation—in verse 15 we read that the people were so frightened by the thunder, the lightning, and the shofar that they say to Moses, “You speak to us and we will obey and don’t let God speak to us, lest we die.” So did God speak “all these words” to the people or only some of them? Or did God speak “these words” to Moses who passed them on to the people?

Moses enters (or approaches) “the thick cloud where God was” (20:18). At which point God begins to give a set of instructions to Moses and that is the last that we hear of Moses until the beginning of Chapter 24 when we see him ascending the mountain. Even here it is unclear where this part of the story fits in an imagined timeline of the revelation narrative.

Why is the Torah so confusing as it tells what is arguably the most important story it has to tell—the giving of the Torah to Israel? Some years ago, the great Bible scholar Moshe Greenberg wrote about the Decalogue: “The attempts to reconcile these accounts internally and with each other are not convincing. The accounts apparently combine different versions of the event: (a) God spoke with Moses, and the people overheard; (b) He spoke with Moses and then Moses transmitted His words to the people; (c) God spoke to the people directly” (“Decalogue,” Encyclopaedia Judaica). Is this complexity due to issues in transforming the various strands of tradition that had been handed down throughout the ages into the final product that we know as the Torah? Have we caught those worthy editors who fashioned the Torah napping?

I think not. I would suggest three explanations that make sense to me. First, I would offer a technical, editorial explanation. It is reasonable to imagine that those editors (or perhaps that single editor—we do not know) believed that the sources they had at their disposal were legitimate representations of a sacred event beyond normal human comprehension. These reports or reports of reports were all in some way to be valued as profound and sacred. Hence trying to “harmonize” the various versions would do harm to all the versions by leaving things out or putting things in. Hence the editors essentially gave the later generations all of these reports and left it up to us to make sense of them and take them seriously.

Second, I would suggest a theological approach. Such a point of view is well represented by the German Jewish philosopher Leo Strauss. Strauss, in an essay about Genesis, makes the following general comment: “The mysterious God is the last theme and highest theme of the Bible . . . . The Bible reflects in its literary form the inscrutable mystery of the ways of God which it would be impious even to attempt to comprehend” (“On the Interpretation of Genesis,” ��’H�dz����� 21). The scholar Jonathan Cohen explains that for Strauss the contradictions found in the Bible “will be left in place and not reconciled by the editors, since these very contradictions bear witness to the impossibility of talking about God without contradictions” (“Is the Bible a Jewish Book?,” The Journal of Religion 87).

Finally, I would add a literary explanation, one that I learned from my former colleague at 91�첥, Dr. Edward Greenstein. He suggested that the contradictions and confusions we find in reading Parashat Yitro are the brilliant rhetorical efforts of the biblical editors to help us, in some very small measure, participate in the enormous and overwhelming experience of the revelation reported in the Torah. The confusions and contradictions are intentionally placed there to replicate for us the confusion of B’nai Yisrael at the foot of the mountain. In the same way that the Passover Haggadah tells us that all of us were part of the Exodus from Egypt, Parashat Yitro suggests that we were all at Sinai as well.

This commentary was originally published in 2019.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).

Yitro

All the Class of 2024 Senior Sermons

But how do you reconcile the idea of God’s transcendent power with such things as a failure to anticipate human flaws, or a weakness for the smell of roasting meat, or jealousy, or suffering the travails of exile? Texts such as these raise eyebrows because they seem to lower God in our estimation.

One can, however, look at these passages from a diametrically opposed vantage point. Why do we find these descriptions of God moving? Because when God behaves as we do, we don’t have to see it as a lowering of God in our estimation; instead, it can be seen as raising the esteem of our own human emotions and vulnerabilities. We share joy and suffering with God, and this elevates our human experience to the level of a Divine quality. And it can provide us with a measure of comfort and reassurance.

So as we approach the annual reading of Parashat Yitro, let’s focus on one particular matter in which the Divine may have human-like limitations. It is connected to the Torah’s oft-repeated image when God is said to be present, which is the image of the cloud. At the center of Yitro, Sinai having been reached, God says to Moses “hineh anokhi ba eilekha be-av he-anan”—I shall come to you in a thick cloud (Exod. 19:9).

Zev Wolf of Zhitomir, an important early Hasidic teacher and a disciple of the Maggid of Mezritch, understood this ubiquitous image of God as a cloud in a very audacious and poignant way. In one of his teachings in the collection known as Or Ha-Me’ir (it is the first of his homilies for the festival of Shavuot), he begins with an insight into how we often fail to communicate the truth about ourselves (the translation that follows is in part from Arthur Green): 

Sometimes a marvelous piece of wisdom falls into an intelligent person’s mind, something that contains a real insight. But when you try to share that thought with another person, you are unable to reveal the wisdom that lies buried deep within your own heart. It would just be too subtle for them to understand. You therefore end up dressing it up with some sort of story that somewhat obscures the true thoughts. We then end up paying attention to what has been said, and are too unaware to pay attention to the wonderful inner truth or feeling that the words are trying to express.

Have we not all experienced this? A deep intuition that we just didn’t know how to convey to someone else? Or, much more poignantly, consider this: a deep feeling of love and connection that somehow ������’t be conveyed in the true form in which it resides within us. Or got so clumsily expressed that it was poorly understood or misapprehended. It results in an imperfect understanding of what’s in our heart, or even worse, a misunderstanding. Novels and operas thrive on this phenomenon, but one needn’t go to the theater or read great literature to encounter it. 

And conversely, haven’t we all sensed the occasional impenetrability of the inner thoughts and feelings of another person? That there was something more there than we were being shown? Sometimes this difficulty in communicating the deep thoughts and feelings is of little consequence. At other times, though, it can slow down the creation of bonds between two people. And in its most extreme form, it can create the most frustrating and tragic barriers to those bonds. 

But now comes Zev Wolf’s remarkable assertion:

Our holy Torah has the same difficulty.

The Torah cannot be guaranteed to be expressing the full depth of the Divine wisdom and the Divine love and empathy. Divine love is greater and more subtle than what can be expressed directly in words. And so, we may find that the Torah is hard to understand, or seems harsh, or overly concerned with details that do not speak to us. And Zev Wolf is telling us that we should recognize that God’s love for us is purer and truer than anything the words and the narratives can convey. 

And now, Zev Wolf connects it to the verse I referred to earlier: “I (Anokhi) shall come to you in a thick cloud.” The whole Torah, which is intended to be the unfolding of the Anokhi, the “I” that is God’s essence, will come to you wrapped in a cloud and with reduced intensity. Because even God cannot put all the deep hopes and dreams for the world and for God’s children into perfect words. And thus, when we listen to this clothed message, we may not hear all that is intended and all that is truly there.

What theological derring-do this is! Another way to put this is that God shares with us the limitation of putting the full depth of inner feelings and thoughts into words. Just as we are condemned often to be misunderstood, so does God have just that same trouble. The Torah cannot be a perfect mirror of God’s core; but if and when it disappoints us, we should remember with empathy (for God!) that there is yet greater good and grace in creation, and in the Creator, than any Scripture can convey simply. And we owe the Holy One that empathy.

Why did Zev Wolf offer to his Hasidim this extraordinary lesson about God and the Torah? So that they—and we—would be able to feel comforted in our own inabilities always to express faithfully what is truly in our hearts. For those inabilities, it turns out, are shared with God. And a kind and generous understanding of this universal impediment can overcome the barriers that this shared disability creates, whether between human beings or between humans and their Creator.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

At the moment God initiates a new covenant with the People of Israel, they must learn to demarcate the spaces of their new relationship. Some of these boundaries are lines drawn by God. Others are fences maintained by human beings. How can humanity and the Divine exist in the same space and time? And what can we learn about how humans can exist in relationship with each other from that encounter?

Parashat Yitro contains within it an impulse of rushing the mountain, of yearning to be in relationship with God, to experience the unlimited. This is the impulse that requires God to warn Moshe three times in thirteen verses not to allow the people up onto the mountain (Exod. 19:12, 21, 24). The Israelites are eager and ready for an encounter with God. While verse 12 instructs them to not only not to ascend the mountain but to not even touch the outskirts of it, verse 24 is ready for the people to attempt to break through to God Godself, ignoring all boundaries.

Rashi describes the people here as having a longing for God that will drive them to cross those boundaries, which may sound like a beautiful thing. But the word chosen is תאווה, ta’avah, whose meaning implies not only longing but an intense, often destructive, bodily craving. The Israelites here are a people who hunger for God with such an appetite that they are willing to ignore God’s own instructions in order to catch a glimpse of the Divine Presence.

It is a romantic vision. The people want to be close to God, to merge themselves with the Divine. But like in any other relationship, the urge to breach one’s own boundaries and subsume oneself in the other is ultimately destructive, as is the urge to breach the boundaries of another and subsume the other into oneself.

Yet Parashat Yitro also contains within it a very cautious attitude toward Divinity, in which the people themselves are afraid of drawing too near or perhaps are physically incapable of that nearness. As Moshe responds to God in 19:21, the people not only won’t but ������’t invade God’s mountain because they had successfully erected boundaries around it. These are the people who both quake and remain still: וינעו ויעמדו מרחק (Exod. 20:15). They staggered back and stood still from afar, responding to the moment of Revelation both in movement and in shock but, and this is key, by putting distance between them and God.

This is the impulse that drives the people to beg Moshe to stand between them and God as interpreter, to hear God’s words from Moshe’s human lips. Already they have felt their consciousness pushed and pulled, twisted and wrung out. Already they have undergone a synesthetic trial, seeing the thundering sounds and voices of revelation. “You speak to us!” they demand, because God’s speech will break the boundaries of their minds the way humanity can break the boundaries of the sacred mountain (20:16).

The people are at risk of refusing God entirely, of holding themselves at so far a remove that they would not be in a relationship at all. It can feel safer to retreat behind psychological (and literal) walls than to risk the integration that comes with welcoming in someone else. Easier to buy into the myth of self-sufficiency than to open one’s life to others, to build something new upon a shared dream. With relationships come disappointments.

These warring push-forward-pull-back instincts at the moment of Divine encounter underpin the parallelism of 19:24:

יֹּאמֶר אֵלָיו ה׳ לֶךְ־רֵד וְעָלִיתָ אַתָּה וְאַהֲרֹן עִמָּךְ וְהַכֹּהֲנִים וְהָעָם אַל־יֶהֶרְסוּ לַעֲלֹת אֶל־יְהֹוָה פֶּן־יִפְרׇץ־בָּם׃

And Adonai said to [Moshe], descend and ascend, you and Aharon with you, so that the priests and the people will not break through to ascend to God, lest God burst forth against them.

Exodus 19:24

This verse paints a picture of a people and a God desperate to encounter one another but also in dire need of boundaries between them. A people and a God cognizant of some danger they might pose to each other. The people might break through destructively, יהרסו, break down the boundaries that have been built. God might burst forth as from an enclosure, יפרץ, breaching all limitations as only Divinity can.

It brings to mind the Kabbalistic understanding of Divine contraction, of God who makes Godself small in order to leave room for the rest of the world to exist. Here we have a God who has existed in smallness, perhaps even near isolation, and who is now ready to rejoin creation. Maybe only for the moment of revelation. Perhaps for eternity via a relationship with the Jewish people.

This is a dangerous time. The Talmud in Avoda Zara (3a) teaches that God only created all of creation conditionally—if the people of Israel accept the Torah at the foot of Mount of Sinai, creation will continue to exist. If they refuse, all of creation will be voided, the universe returning to a state of tohu vavohu, of formless mass, unbound, indistinct. So now creation is poised at the edge of destruction, all of time is ready to be unmade, and the people of Israel must make a choice not unlike anyone might make when faced with a new relationship. Unsure if it’s safe, unsure if it will be worth it. Or, on the contrary, already so entranced, already so full of love and hope that it is difficult to think clearly. A choice with high stakes.

On the one hand, we can distance ourselves so far from Sinai that we never hear the Torah from the voice of God or the mouth of Moshe and in doing so nullify all of creation. On the other hand we can throw ourselves at God and climb the mountain and in doing so nullify ourselves.

Or we can step between the extremes and accept a relationship with God wherein the boundaries of God and humanity are respected. Even if it means staying at the foot of the mountain. Even if it means seeing sounds and suffering terror. Even if it means risking that some of the Divine might be mistranslated through human error throughout the generations so that we’re always left questioning what it is that God demands from and for us so that our relationship might continue.

Standing at the foot of a new relationship can be frightening. But, Moshe says in response to that fear, “don’t be afraid,” even as he follows it up with, “the fear of God will always be with you” (20:17). In other words, muster the courage to reach out, especially when someone (or Someone) else is already holding out a hand. And live in relationship with the understanding that boundaries must be honored, and awe of the other always found.

As long as we neither run away from the mountain nor seek to ascend it—neither shy away from the boundaries nor attempt to breach them—we may just find ourselves in the middle of something new and sacred. And that is revelatory.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

וַיִּסְעוּ מֵרְפִידִים, וַיָּבֹאוּ מִדְבַּר סִינַי, וַיַּחֲנוּ, בַּמִּדְבָּר; וַיִּחַן-שָׁם יִשְׂרָאֵל, נֶגֶד הָהָר  

Setting out from Refidim they had arrived at the Sinai desert, encamping in the wilderness, and there Israel camped, facing the mountain, while Moshe went up to God. [1]

(Exod. 19:2)

The Torah is set to be given at an unknown site, in an encampment of no-man’s land, and surrounded by the wilderness. This setting amidst desert-wandering is appropriate for the giving of Torah and the people themselves, as strangers here, are worthy of receiving it. The parashah’s opening attests to this with a reminder that the name given to Moses’s son, Gershom, was an expression of the experience of being a stranger in a strange land:

שֵׁם הָאֶחָד, גֵּרְשֹׁם—כִּי אָמַר, גֵּר הָיִיתִי בְּאֶרֶץ נָכְרִיָּה.

One was named “Gershom”, for Moshe had said “I have been a stranger in a foreign land.

(Exod. 18:3)

There is a profound recognition given to the significance of living as strangers in a strange land. The significance of Gershom’s name is elaborated upon in Midrash Shemot Rabba, relating it to Joseph—also as an individual who had been “exiled”—and the naming of his sons:

דרך צדיקים לשום שם על שם המאורע. ביוסף מהו אומר? ויקרא את שם הבכור מנשה “כי נשני אלהים את כל עמלי” (בראשית מ”א) . . . כדי לזכור הנסים שעשה עמו הקב”ה. אף משה קרא בנו גרשום על הנס שעשה לו הקב”ה שגר היה בארץ נכריה והצליחו הקב”ה שם

It is the way of wise people to give a name [to a child] for an event that has happened. What do we know of Joseph? That he called his firstborn Menashe because “God has made me forget my arduous strife and my father’s home”  (Gen. 41:51) to remember the miracles that the Holy One blessed be He has done for him. Even Moses named his son Gershom for the miracle that God did for him, because he [Moses] was a stranger in a strange land, and [even in this case] the Holy One blessed be He succeeded.

(Shemot Rabbah 1)

Moses himself was a stranger, and despite this, or because of this, he went on to become a great leader and a prophet who communicated directly with God in the desert. This is a feat that is praised by the Midrash. Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer further links prophecy with the experience of the stranger:

חביבים הגרים, שכל הנביאים קראו עצמן גרים. אברהם, גר ותושב. משה, גר הייתי. דוד אמר, כי גר אנכי עמך, ואמ’ גר אנכי בארץ אל תסתר. אבותינו קראו עצמן גרים אנחנו לפניך

Cherished are strangers! All of the prophets referred to themselves as strangers. Abraham—stranger and citizen. Moses, I was a stranger. David said ‘I am a stranger in your midst, and also I am a stranger in your Land—do not hide [Your face]. Our ancestors referred to themselves as strangers [so as to say] we are before you [serve you].[2]

If our ancestors referred to themselves as strangers, then there is an innate appreciation of the role of being an outsider in forging a prophetic connection with the divine. In this sense, there is a connection between the stranger and the giving of the Torah.

But why does one have to be a stranger to receive the Torah? How can the idea of not having a home offer an opportunity for holiness and revelation to happen?

91�첥 Chancellor Emeritus Arnold Eisen offers a fascinating contemporary approach:

Expulsion from the childhood garden, alienation from the earth, and estrangement from other human beings . . . Most of what we call civilization is a product of that homelessness.[3]

We can interpret Eisen’s idea in the following way: these three movements—expulsion, alienation and estrangement—lie at the core of the paradigm of the giving of the Torah at Sinai. However, whilst there is no homeland at this stage, there is a promise of redemption which, together with the instruction of the Torah, provides a way of life. The ramifications of this paradigm of three movements go far beyond the revelation at Sinai. Exile remains paramount in Jewish history, and the revelation in the wilderness serves as a historical precedent for the Jews exiled to Babylonia.

The philosopher Franz Rosenzweig links the revelation to its exilic context in The Star of Redemption:

Thus in the dawn of its earliest beginnings, as well as later in the bright light of history, this people is a people in exile, in the Egyptian exile and subsequently in that of Babylonia. To the eternal people, home never is home in the sense of a land . . . ”[4]

The prolific Jewish thought and writings of the Babylonian exile are exemplified through the vast exilic literature, wherein the pathos of the yearning for the homeland is so poignant, and expressed in song:

אֵיךְ נָשִׁיר אֶת שִׁיר ה’ עַל אַדְמַת נֵכָר

How can we sing the Lord’s Song in a strange land?

(Psalms 137:4)

Exilic wandering serves to sustain a distinction between the human and divine realms—wherein the separation itself is innately connected to holiness—a dichotomy expressed in the word קדוש (kadosh), which means both holy and separate.

The philosopher Jacques Derrida connects the idea of receiving the Torah as a “welcoming” in a moment when we:

“greet the infinite transcendence of a separated holiness, [we are urged] to say yes at the moment of a separation, indeed of a departure that is not the contrary of an arrival—is it not this deference that inspires the breath of an a-Dieu?[5]

The “separation” from the land actually offers an opportunity to welcome holiness, to welcome the Torah into our lives and consciousness. A “departure” from the land does not represent “the contrary of an arrival” of Torah. Rather, it is the “deference that inspires” engagement with revelation and yearning for future redemption.

The notion that the greatest holiness is sought out by the stranger in the wilderness now gains a profound meaning. Instructions on conducting a life of sacred meaning and of building an ethical society are given whilst on a journey—of immigration—of migration and of a search for a home. This idea is given much prominence in Jewish life and liturgy today in the well-known song Shir La-Ma’alot שיר למעלות— the Song of Ascents (Psalm 126), which was sung upon return to the homeland by those who did return. But poignantly it is also sung by those who did not; by those who live in a state of homelessness; by those who live in a state of flux and transience. We learn from Parashat Yitro that redemption can be attained in this state of flux and uncertainty, and just as the Song of Ascents was sung in Babylonia, may we merit to sing our own song of redemption, and in this way aspire to holiness in our worlds and our lives.

The publication and distribution of the 91�첥 Commentary are made possible by a generous grant from Rita Dee (��”l) and Harold Hassenfeld (��”l).   

[1] Koren Tanakh, trans. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks.

[2] Mishnat Rabbi Eliezer, New York 1934. My trans.

[3] Arnold Eisen, Galut: Modern Jewish Reflection on Homelessness and Homecoming, 15.

[4] Franz Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 300.

[5]Jacques Derrida, Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas, 61.