Yitro
This is 3 years old, so I'm not sure how much responsibility I take for it. Maybe I should re-read it myself.
Most traditional commentators insist that Yitro journeyed to the wilderness following the revelation at Mount Sinai and not before, contrary to the order which these events are recorded. Although my inner leftie draws comfort from Ibn Ezra’s suggestion that the Torah diverges from chronology in order to position Yitro’s visit immediately following the battle with Amalek to reassure us of the existence of righteous gentiles friendly to Israel, I prefer sticking with the text. Rashi and crew doubt Moses’ ability to adjudicate prior to receiving the Law (with a capital L), although Yitro’s counsel only concerned practical judicial reform not legal content. The sages next question his stamina, proposing that if Moses were wearing himself out with the people’s problems he would have been simply too exhausted to traipse up and down Mount Sinai. Which is my point exactly, since the people certainly did not start disputing upon Yitro’s arrival or upon receipt of the Torah; they have been kvetching since time immemorial. And how could Moses make the ascent up Mount Sinai to obtain the weighty Torah already burdened by the entire community’s troubles, great and small?
Thus far in the Exodus narrative Moses has functioned as both spiritual and secular leader; as if serving as God’s envoy were not enough, he is the sole ruler and referee of the people. But with such a micromanager in charge, how are the Israelites, worn out from years of slavery and the flight from Egypt, going to be able to withstand the awesome encounter with God, let alone accept and comprehend the yoke of the Torah if they cannot decide even minor legal matters for themselves? Constructing without infrastructure is futile; revealing the Torah before acquiring basic self-governing skills is like studying calculus before mastering arithmetic.
Yet the third reason the sages place this visit after the theophany is because Yitro finds Moses already encamped at the mountain of God and the following chapter mentions the Israelites’ entrance into the wilderness of Sinai. Now we all know the Torah never repeats geographic information or gives conflicting accounts. Sarcasm aside, there is a reason, upon which all exegesis I read remained mum, that I passionately adhere to the textual chronology. If Yitro arrived in the wilderness subsequent to the revelation it follows that Zipporah and her progeny were not present when the Torah was revealed. Yitro journeys to the wilderness not just to hear firsthand what God did for Moses and for Israel, but to return Moses’ nuclear family. Yitro may give obeisance to God and acknowledge God’s supremacy over all others but, unlike his Israelite grandsons, he is Midianite and returns to his own land and people as soon as he deposits his ward, pays homage to God and administers paternal advice. I do not believe that Zipporah is deliberately excluded by scholars from what all Israel saw and heard, the question of her presence is just forgotten while the commentators dance the timeline shuffle.
Am I petulant or uppity for registering surprise when women, or women’s issues, get left on the theological cutting room floor? Why should the neglect of medieval scholars bother me when Zipporah’s husband is guilty of similar erasures and alterations?
When instructing Moses to ready the people for the third day God warns "the people to stay pure today and tomorrow." They are to launder their clothes and cleanse their bodies and minds in order to enter into a sacred state. Yet Moses instructs the people, or rather the men, to "not go near a woman," implying but not spelling out, as our progressive Chumash asserts, that "woman are to comport themselves similarly." God demands that the people distinguish between the sacred realm of revelation and the profane realm of everyday life but, in transposing God’s words and addressing only half of God’s intended audience, Moses includes all the people in the profane but grants only men access to the sacred. Perhaps Moses is operating within historical parameters and I should just take his embellishment of God’s words as par for the patriarchal course, but it is this linguistic license which ultimately costs Moses his entrance into Israel, when he chooses improvising with the rock rather than following God’s script.
When I come across such exclusions I feel much the same way I did as a child and my father came across me reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, said "Roald Dahl was a big anti-Semite," and walked away. Thanks Dad. Yet now I appreciate that he left the choice in my hands, for it trained me in the options I have with such information: I can ignore, and proceed without further thought; I can abandon, and never find out what happened; I can rationalize, and divorce the art from the artist; or I can revision, Rabbi Elyse Goldstein’s term meaning "to reexamine and alter – to see the text anew, to have a new vision, a ‘revision’ of Torah," thus engaging the material in a living dialogue.
God’s very nature dictates formlessness, hence the second commandment prohibiting idolatry. Although God authored creation, associating the metaphysical with natural forms presents the temptation to sever symbols from what they represent. The flag is a symbol for our great democracy but the cynic in me wonders how many patriots waving disrespected weather-beaten flags will turn up at the polls come November. Similarly, while the Second Temple stood the Ten Commandments were recited along with the three paragraphs of the Shema as part of the daily liturgy; the Palestinian Talmud reports that once the Temple was destroyed this recitation was not transferred into synagogue liturgy to prevent misleading the people into thinking that only the Ten Commandments were revealed at Sinai and not all the mitzvot.
One of the English language’s finer qualities is that it is ungendered. It is an involuntary reaction at this point, but I cringe whenever I hear God referred to as "He," much like students in my twelfth grade English class flinched when our iconoclastic teacher referred to God as "She." For me, the masculine pronoun is a symbol, an idol. When God is ascribed gender limits are set, limits which negate the revolution of radical monotheism. In fact, God rotates names and descriptions – the name we do not speak, Adoni, Eloheynu, El Shaddai, Shechinah for the Divine Presence, ruler, parent – this keeps our vocabulary, and thus our thinking, about God fluid. When discussing the unimaginable I do not want to restrict my imaginative vocabulary to only half of creation, only half of those who stood at Sinai and, well, leave myself out. Contrary to the traditional morning prayer I am glad God made me a woman. For, as the Vilna of Gaon said "No one can by themselves observe all the commandments, for some are addressed to priests, others to women, to owners of fields and houses and so forth. Only all of Israel together can do God’s will completely."
Nachum Sarna points out that, until Sinai, Israel has been the passive beneficiary of God’s active role in history. In preparation for the theophany God reminds the people, "You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me," lest they have forgotten that they were brought out of physical servitude to enter into spiritual service. Now it is time for God to collect on miracles past. But God does not petition the Israelites as the God of Creation but as the God of History, reminding the people of God’s attentiveness and responsiveness, much like my parents appealing to me by reiterating that they unfailingly drove me to music lessons and swim practice, not that one winter’s night they conceived me. Rashi points out that God had a bone to pick with the Egyptians for a long time but only settled scores with them once the Israelites came along; God’s actions were compassionate, not retributive, and performed for a specific beneficiary.
Knowledge of God’s singular love is the basis of the demand to listen and keep the covenant; the Israelites are to obey not because God has said so but because they were collectively born on eagles’ wings. The eagle is the master of space: horizontal, vertical and diagonal. It flies faster and higher than all other birds and soars quickly aloft. Unlike other birds who bear their young between their claws the eagle bears its young upon its wings; the Israelites do not accept the covenant at Sinai because they are in God’s clutches and have no alternative, but because they were chosen to soar atop God’s law.
Flying upon eagles’ wings links together the history of "you have seen" to the future promise of "I brought you to Me." Not to spoil it for those who have only seen the movie, but at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy Aragorn’s troops are at the gates of Mordor and facing certain defeat until a cry of "The eagles are coming!" is heard and, like the birds’ flight, the reader’s heart soars with the characters’ spirits in ecstatic redemption combined with the sensation of being a minute part of something much larger than the self. Whether looking down in flight upon what Ha-hayyim calls "the clouds of glory" or looking up to the clouds of smoke at Mount Sinai, the Israelites are witnessing their own lack of substantiality in relation to God’s might, God’s kavod, what Milan Kundera calls the unbearable lightness of being.
After the thunder, lightening, horns and smoke subsided God said to Moses, "You yourselves saw that I spoke to you." The paradox of seeing what is spoken drives home the enigmatic nature of this encounter with the divine. The revelation at Sinai is without precedent or explanatory context and is above analysis or analogy. Well, I will attempt a weak analogy because, like the Israelites, I need to mediate experience with language: this paradox is like one of the rare occasions I see a movie or play that is so fantastic I do not want to talk about it afterwards. Rather then engage it intellectually, I want to wallow in its phenomenal afterglow and thus let it seep into my deepest understanding. Yet this overwhelming spectacle and cacophony is framed by linguistic reminders. Is God asking for reassurance, like our need to hear "I love you" spoken by a beloved despite daily evidence? Or, to borrow the title from Salvador Dali’s famous painting of melting clocks, is this about the Persistence of Memory?
Memory is a funny thing. The human brain is not a computer with files stored in organized folders waiting to be called up. Rather, neurobiologists theorize that each time you remember something you are not remembering the actual occurrence but the last time you remembered it, with all the associations you felt and thought at that time. Memories are cumulative and if they are not activated periodically they slip away. Human beings crave narrative, we make sense of experiences both mundane and revelatory through the telling of stories, whether to ourselves or others. We are dealing with the God of History, the God of Stories and, if they are to be effective over time, miracles must be remembered.
So, here I am as I was a year ago, and as I was at Shavuot, listening and telling a story of the unfathomable, trying to see where I fit into the narrative, internalizing the memory of an ancient miracle and transforming it into a personal experience, for all of Israel stood at Sinai and answered as one.
On the verge of entering into a covenant with us God cordoned off Mount Sinai, allowing only Moses to ascend. The people were forbidden to break through to the Lord to gaze. Although the radiance of God surely would have blinded the sight and comprehension of those who trembled even from the relative shelter of the foot of the mountain, I believe God enforced this distinction for another purpose. Like our souls’ namesake, Psyche, who desired to look upon her lover Cupid in the light despite warnings of tragedy, human beings desire to witness what they do not yet understand, a sort of visual hubris. Avivah Zornberg writes that the optical desire to see God is transgressive, it threatens to ruin self and the modes of human consciousness. If we looked upon God, the unseeable, would we understand the nature of the Divine any better than when we tell stories, especially when they are ambiguous? The objective of Revelation was not to gain visible evidence of God’s existence but, through the vehicle of Torah, to develop our humanness, including our curiosity and our need to connect with each other and God, which we do through questioning, disputing and exchanging stories.
When I write I basically break every rule I was taught in high school. Rather than starting with a hypothesis and trying to prove it, I jot down a few concepts that excite or aggravate me, trust in James Joyce’s theory every author has only one idea, and pray that these six themes in search of a thesis will all excite or aggravate me for the same reason. In writing on Jewish topics I consistently find myself enthusiastic about the Torah and disgruntled with traditional interpretations thereof. The mystic in me can accept that the Oral Torah was given on Sinai along with the Written. But what the authors of the Mishna and Talmud understood implicitly, that the beauty of the Oral Torah is its state of flux and constant evolution, fundamentalism ignores as it does its best to convert the Oral Torah into a second Written Torah, arresting Judaism in the process.
Most traditional commentators insist that Yitro journeyed to the wilderness following the revelation at Mount Sinai and not before, contrary to the order which these events are recorded. Although my inner leftie draws comfort from Ibn Ezra’s suggestion that the Torah diverges from chronology in order to position Yitro’s visit immediately following the battle with Amalek to reassure us of the existence of righteous gentiles friendly to Israel, I prefer sticking with the text. Rashi and crew doubt Moses’ ability to adjudicate prior to receiving the Law (with a capital L), although Yitro’s counsel only concerned practical judicial reform not legal content. The sages next question his stamina, proposing that if Moses were wearing himself out with the people’s problems he would have been simply too exhausted to traipse up and down Mount Sinai. Which is my point exactly, since the people certainly did not start disputing upon Yitro’s arrival or upon receipt of the Torah; they have been kvetching since time immemorial. And how could Moses make the ascent up Mount Sinai to obtain the weighty Torah already burdened by the entire community’s troubles, great and small?
Thus far in the Exodus narrative Moses has functioned as both spiritual and secular leader; as if serving as God’s envoy were not enough, he is the sole ruler and referee of the people. But with such a micromanager in charge, how are the Israelites, worn out from years of slavery and the flight from Egypt, going to be able to withstand the awesome encounter with God, let alone accept and comprehend the yoke of the Torah if they cannot decide even minor legal matters for themselves? Constructing without infrastructure is futile; revealing the Torah before acquiring basic self-governing skills is like studying calculus before mastering arithmetic.
Yet the third reason the sages place this visit after the theophany is because Yitro finds Moses already encamped at the mountain of God and the following chapter mentions the Israelites’ entrance into the wilderness of Sinai. Now we all know the Torah never repeats geographic information or gives conflicting accounts. Sarcasm aside, there is a reason, upon which all exegesis I read remained mum, that I passionately adhere to the textual chronology. If Yitro arrived in the wilderness subsequent to the revelation it follows that Zipporah and her progeny were not present when the Torah was revealed. Yitro journeys to the wilderness not just to hear firsthand what God did for Moses and for Israel, but to return Moses’ nuclear family. Yitro may give obeisance to God and acknowledge God’s supremacy over all others but, unlike his Israelite grandsons, he is Midianite and returns to his own land and people as soon as he deposits his ward, pays homage to God and administers paternal advice. I do not believe that Zipporah is deliberately excluded by scholars from what all Israel saw and heard, the question of her presence is just forgotten while the commentators dance the timeline shuffle.
Am I petulant or uppity for registering surprise when women, or women’s issues, get left on the theological cutting room floor? Why should the neglect of medieval scholars bother me when Zipporah’s husband is guilty of similar erasures and alterations?
When instructing Moses to ready the people for the third day God warns "the people to stay pure today and tomorrow." They are to launder their clothes and cleanse their bodies and minds in order to enter into a sacred state. Yet Moses instructs the people, or rather the men, to "not go near a woman," implying but not spelling out, as our progressive Chumash asserts, that "woman are to comport themselves similarly." God demands that the people distinguish between the sacred realm of revelation and the profane realm of everyday life but, in transposing God’s words and addressing only half of God’s intended audience, Moses includes all the people in the profane but grants only men access to the sacred. Perhaps Moses is operating within historical parameters and I should just take his embellishment of God’s words as par for the patriarchal course, but it is this linguistic license which ultimately costs Moses his entrance into Israel, when he chooses improvising with the rock rather than following God’s script.
When I come across such exclusions I feel much the same way I did as a child and my father came across me reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, said "Roald Dahl was a big anti-Semite," and walked away. Thanks Dad. Yet now I appreciate that he left the choice in my hands, for it trained me in the options I have with such information: I can ignore, and proceed without further thought; I can abandon, and never find out what happened; I can rationalize, and divorce the art from the artist; or I can revision, Rabbi Elyse Goldstein’s term meaning "to reexamine and alter – to see the text anew, to have a new vision, a ‘revision’ of Torah," thus engaging the material in a living dialogue.
God’s very nature dictates formlessness, hence the second commandment prohibiting idolatry. Although God authored creation, associating the metaphysical with natural forms presents the temptation to sever symbols from what they represent. The flag is a symbol for our great democracy but the cynic in me wonders how many patriots waving disrespected weather-beaten flags will turn up at the polls come November. Similarly, while the Second Temple stood the Ten Commandments were recited along with the three paragraphs of the Shema as part of the daily liturgy; the Palestinian Talmud reports that once the Temple was destroyed this recitation was not transferred into synagogue liturgy to prevent misleading the people into thinking that only the Ten Commandments were revealed at Sinai and not all the mitzvot.
One of the English language’s finer qualities is that it is ungendered. It is an involuntary reaction at this point, but I cringe whenever I hear God referred to as "He," much like students in my twelfth grade English class flinched when our iconoclastic teacher referred to God as "She." For me, the masculine pronoun is a symbol, an idol. When God is ascribed gender limits are set, limits which negate the revolution of radical monotheism. In fact, God rotates names and descriptions – the name we do not speak, Adoni, Eloheynu, El Shaddai, Shechinah for the Divine Presence, ruler, parent – this keeps our vocabulary, and thus our thinking, about God fluid. When discussing the unimaginable I do not want to restrict my imaginative vocabulary to only half of creation, only half of those who stood at Sinai and, well, leave myself out. Contrary to the traditional morning prayer I am glad God made me a woman. For, as the Vilna of Gaon said "No one can by themselves observe all the commandments, for some are addressed to priests, others to women, to owners of fields and houses and so forth. Only all of Israel together can do God’s will completely."
Nachum Sarna points out that, until Sinai, Israel has been the passive beneficiary of God’s active role in history. In preparation for the theophany God reminds the people, "You yourselves have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to Me," lest they have forgotten that they were brought out of physical servitude to enter into spiritual service. Now it is time for God to collect on miracles past. But God does not petition the Israelites as the God of Creation but as the God of History, reminding the people of God’s attentiveness and responsiveness, much like my parents appealing to me by reiterating that they unfailingly drove me to music lessons and swim practice, not that one winter’s night they conceived me. Rashi points out that God had a bone to pick with the Egyptians for a long time but only settled scores with them once the Israelites came along; God’s actions were compassionate, not retributive, and performed for a specific beneficiary.
Knowledge of God’s singular love is the basis of the demand to listen and keep the covenant; the Israelites are to obey not because God has said so but because they were collectively born on eagles’ wings. The eagle is the master of space: horizontal, vertical and diagonal. It flies faster and higher than all other birds and soars quickly aloft. Unlike other birds who bear their young between their claws the eagle bears its young upon its wings; the Israelites do not accept the covenant at Sinai because they are in God’s clutches and have no alternative, but because they were chosen to soar atop God’s law.
Flying upon eagles’ wings links together the history of "you have seen" to the future promise of "I brought you to Me." Not to spoil it for those who have only seen the movie, but at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy Aragorn’s troops are at the gates of Mordor and facing certain defeat until a cry of "The eagles are coming!" is heard and, like the birds’ flight, the reader’s heart soars with the characters’ spirits in ecstatic redemption combined with the sensation of being a minute part of something much larger than the self. Whether looking down in flight upon what Ha-hayyim calls "the clouds of glory" or looking up to the clouds of smoke at Mount Sinai, the Israelites are witnessing their own lack of substantiality in relation to God’s might, God’s kavod, what Milan Kundera calls the unbearable lightness of being.
After the thunder, lightening, horns and smoke subsided God said to Moses, "You yourselves saw that I spoke to you." The paradox of seeing what is spoken drives home the enigmatic nature of this encounter with the divine. The revelation at Sinai is without precedent or explanatory context and is above analysis or analogy. Well, I will attempt a weak analogy because, like the Israelites, I need to mediate experience with language: this paradox is like one of the rare occasions I see a movie or play that is so fantastic I do not want to talk about it afterwards. Rather then engage it intellectually, I want to wallow in its phenomenal afterglow and thus let it seep into my deepest understanding. Yet this overwhelming spectacle and cacophony is framed by linguistic reminders. Is God asking for reassurance, like our need to hear "I love you" spoken by a beloved despite daily evidence? Or, to borrow the title from Salvador Dali’s famous painting of melting clocks, is this about the Persistence of Memory?
Memory is a funny thing. The human brain is not a computer with files stored in organized folders waiting to be called up. Rather, neurobiologists theorize that each time you remember something you are not remembering the actual occurrence but the last time you remembered it, with all the associations you felt and thought at that time. Memories are cumulative and if they are not activated periodically they slip away. Human beings crave narrative, we make sense of experiences both mundane and revelatory through the telling of stories, whether to ourselves or others. We are dealing with the God of History, the God of Stories and, if they are to be effective over time, miracles must be remembered.
So, here I am as I was a year ago, and as I was at Shavuot, listening and telling a story of the unfathomable, trying to see where I fit into the narrative, internalizing the memory of an ancient miracle and transforming it into a personal experience, for all of Israel stood at Sinai and answered as one.
On the verge of entering into a covenant with us God cordoned off Mount Sinai, allowing only Moses to ascend. The people were forbidden to break through to the Lord to gaze. Although the radiance of God surely would have blinded the sight and comprehension of those who trembled even from the relative shelter of the foot of the mountain, I believe God enforced this distinction for another purpose. Like our souls’ namesake, Psyche, who desired to look upon her lover Cupid in the light despite warnings of tragedy, human beings desire to witness what they do not yet understand, a sort of visual hubris. Avivah Zornberg writes that the optical desire to see God is transgressive, it threatens to ruin self and the modes of human consciousness. If we looked upon God, the unseeable, would we understand the nature of the Divine any better than when we tell stories, especially when they are ambiguous? The objective of Revelation was not to gain visible evidence of God’s existence but, through the vehicle of Torah, to develop our humanness, including our curiosity and our need to connect with each other and God, which we do through questioning, disputing and exchanging stories.
posted by Mi at 11:30 AM
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