YITHRO
This short parsha (Chapters 18-20) is notable for the first direct appearance of YHVH to the people and for what we call the ten commandments. They are not, in this parsha, either called commandments, nor are they enumerated which both are not labeled as commandments, nor are they numbered. They are rather just introduced with “God spoke all these words, saying;” (20:1).
The parsha starts with an appearance by Yithro or Jethro, the father of law of Moses and a priest of Midian. Yitro brings Moses’s wife and kids to him, testifies to the power of YHVH, as discussed below and watches how his son in law is ruling the Hebrews. He tells Moses “This thing you are doing, it is not right.” (18:13). Yithro pushes Moses to set up a more hierarchical structure with middle managers who get to do the minor stuff. Managers get a bad rap in our world, but as someone who has worked with both competent and incompetent managers, I am here to testify that competent managers are a blessing and incompetent managers have the ability to destroy worthwhile organizations.
Yithro departs and we go from the mundane of lower courts of law to the hierophany, or appearance of the divine. The people travel to Mt. Sinai and camp there. They are told to prepare for the appearance of the divine, as we’ll discuss below. The divine appears and scares the people before he delivers what we call the ten commandments.
I want to look at four themes.
3 Core theological questions
The ideal relationship between YHVH and the people and the theme of exceptionalism of the Jewish people.
Preparation for the appearance of the divine.
Altars of unhewn stone
One God or many? What’s the relationship between the divine and the world? Personal or impersonal force? Theology isn’t easy, at least for me. I don’t think you have to have a clear, consistent theology in order to spiritually develop. A Shinto priest of Japan once said to the scholar Mircea Eliade that in Japan they don’t have a theology; they dance. But if you are a systematic thinker, not having clear answers here is going to a constant irritant. It is for me.
The parsha raises the question of theology because Jethro, a non Hebew, testifies to the power of YHVH and offers a sacrifice to YHVH. “Blessed be YHVH” Jethro says to Moses, “who delivered you from the Egyptians and from Pharoah, and who delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that YHVH is greater than all gods. And Jethro took a burn offering and sacrifices to God” (18:10-12). (Italics mine). YHVH has been telling Moses that he is the God of the Hebrews—but here is this non Hebrew worshipping him.
The first question I want to raise in developing your own theology is one God or many? We’re so used to monotheism that we are tempted to not quite understand the question. But our ancestors simply weren’t monotheists.
Our text clearly says that YHVH is one God amongst many. He’s out to show that he’s the most powerful God, so worship him, not any other. This after all, is why YHVH continually hardened Pharoah’s heart and had him renege on his deals—so YHVH could show the world that YHVH was the most powerful god. Here’s the first of the ten utterances or statements or things that YHVH tells the people. “I am YHVH your god who brought you out of the land of Egypt, the house of bondage. You shall have no other gods besides Me. (20:2-3). (Italics mine) This is the very first thing YHVH says directly to the Hebrews as a group. The very first thing, the most important thing. Worship me, not other Gods.
Worshipping only one God while maintaining belief in many is called monolatry, and I join plenty of scholars in arguing that this is the theology of the Bible. But a belief in many Gods is possible. You can choose to worship only one of them; that’s what the Hebrew Bible wants. Or you can worship different deities for different purposes. So you pray to a particular deity for battle success, a different one for when you want to get pregnant, a different one for success in business. This is the common theme in Asia in Buddhist populations where you pray to different Boddhisattvas for different purposes. It finds an echo in in Catholic saints. If you want to find something, as I understand it, better pray to St. Anthony because St. Patrick isn’t going to help you. One God or many?
What’s the relationship of the divine and the world? Maimonides, following Aristotle, believed that God existed wholly outside the world and did not have much to do with it. This is the classic theist position. His Jewish critics went after him and even accused him of being a heretic because, as we see from out texts, the God of the Bible is active in history and Maimonides’ opponents believed he was denying this. Their view is a kind of panentheism, a view that the divine is both inside and outside the world. The divine, almost always conceived as a male even while some say he is beyond being gendered, lies outside and above and beyond the world, but he also is highly interested in the world and acts in it. He sends plagues and rescues His people from Egyptian bondage with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. This panentheistic view is taken up again in Hasidic and neo-Hasidic thinking of such figures as the Baal Shem Tov and Arthur Green. Panentheism is also given a really cogent expression by the late Carol Christ in a remarkably clear book entitled She Who Changes. A third view is that the divine exists wholly within the world and is coterminous with the world. This is the pantheist view of Spinoza and he was actually expelled from the Jewish community because of his vocal advocacy for it. What’s the relationship of the divine and the world?
Personal or impersonal force? If you believe in the divine as a personal force, it makes sense to pray to the divine and ask him/her/it to intervene—grant healing for someone, victory in battle, a prison term for Donald Trump etc. This is the traditional Jewish view. However, Maimonides, as I read him, did not believe in a personal force (Aristotle certainly did not) and Judith Plaskow, probably the leading contemporary Jewish feminist theologian, explicitly rejects this in a book she wrote with Carol Christ, Goddess and God in the World. Lao Tzu’s idea of the Tao is also an idea of an impersonal divinity. As a related note, those who believe in both multiple Gods and in some kind of underlying unity, such as we find in much Buddhist and Native American thought, usually wind up arguing for the unity as an impersonal force.
So to start putting some framework on a personal theological perspective, answer these three questions. One God or many? What’s the relationship between the divine and the world? Personal or impersonal force?
Our parsha offers us a view of the ideal relationship between the divine and the people. “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, how I bore you on eagles’ wings and brought you to me. Now then, if you will obey me faithfully and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possessions among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is mine, but you shall be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (19:4-6). Thus did YHVH command Moses to say to the Hebrews.
We have here a clear and often repeated demand for obedience. “If you will obey me faithfully and keep my covenant.” We owe that obedience to YHVH, the text tells us, because we belong to him. It’s a powerful metaphor. Judaism historically put a lot of focus on what it meant to obey the divine. The core tenant of what we today call Orthodox Judaism is the obedience to the divine by following, in every detail, the laws that the Rabbis have derived from the divine words we find in sacred text.
Further, the people are viewed as a divine possession. That’s a very, very different metaphor than the individualism that characterizes American belief. This anti individualism message is a big part of why Jews are so focused on the collective. And yet, it also creates a certain kind of limiting container that constrains personal development and non hierarchical relationships.
Jewish exceptionalism is part and parcel of this demand for obedience. If we obey, we are told, then we become a “kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” “Kingdom of priests and a holy nation” is one of the first claims of Jewish exceptionalism, of Jewish chosenness. It was highly controversial when Mordechai Kaplan, the founder of Reconstructionist Judaism, outright rejected the concept of chosenness and even changed the blessings over the Torah to reject it. David Ben Gurion, the first prime minister of Israel, is famous for having said that he would know that Zionism had arrived and the Jewish people had become a normal people when the prostitutes in Israel were Jews. That’s a rejection of exceptionalism.
Do you believe that obedience is a key factor in your actual or ideal relationship with the divine? Does the metaphor of “treasured possession” speak to you? Are we as a people any better or different than any other people? Should we aspire to be?
Lights, camera, action. How do we prepare? Chapter 19 details the first direct experience of YHVH for the Hebrew people. He’s been showing off his deeds, talking to Moses and having Moses relay his messages to the people. But this is the first direct revelation. There’s thunder, lightning, a very loud blast of the shofar, a thick cloud on the mountain, then smoke and the whole mountain trembling with the ongoing blare of the shofar getting louder and louder. The people are trembling (19:16) and that’s before the pyrotechnics get into full swing.
Appearances of the divine are called “hierophanies” in the academic study of religion. Hierophanies are almost always unexpected. They come to us through grace, to use the Christian term, not through anything we have earned. They are unpredictable. As religious practitioners we may pray for them, yearn them, fear them but we cannot simply produce them on demand. Suzuki Roshi says that enlightenment experiences are an accident, and the purpose of practice is to become accident prone. So it is weird to start with that this hierophany is announced in advance.
It's also a bit strange that it is so public. Visions are usually solo—that’s why we go on vision fasts. Paul had his conversion vision on the road to Damascus—everyone else nearby was just walking.
How were the people supposed to prepare for the awesome appearance of the divine? Here’s what our text gives us. YHVH says to Moses “Go to the people and warn them to stay pure today and tomorrow. Let them wash their clothes. Let them be ready for the third day, for on the third day YHVH will come down in the sight of all the people on Mount Sinai.” (19:10-11) What does “stay pure” mean? Moses provides the answer in verse 15 “Do not go near a woman,” meaning don’t have sex. I don’t believe there is such a thing as a 100% adequate preparation, but this isn’t even remotely close. No wonder “And all the people were seeing the thunders and the flashes and the sound of the horn (shofar) and the mountain smoking. And the people saw, and they moved and stood at a distance and said to Moses “You speak with us so that we may listen, but let not God speak with us or else we’ll die.” (20:18-19)
This notion of purity is all kinds of problematic. The idea that sex is polluting is at the heart of the patriarchal devaluation of women, the body and everything we call “nature.” It is how humans have justified the divorce between humans and the more than human world. The consequences of that are our current process of committing both ecocide and suicide, as we destroy the world that is the very foundation of the possibility of our biological life.
The concept of purification makes sense to me. If we are going to encounter the divine, we need to make ourselves ready; it’s not like buying a ticket to a movie theatre. Purification through prayer, through ritual, through fasting, through separating ourselves from our everyday life, absolutely. All that applies equally to everyone, regardless of gender. But let us recognize a volley in the war against women, against the world, against ourselves.
It’s easy enough to say we want to experience the divine, but as this chapter teaches us, to experience the divine is a profoundly scary thing, not at all for the faint of heart. If you want to grow, if you want to become a spiritual adult, courage is a prime virtue. You get to tremble, sure, and you have to be like Moses and Aaron and climb the mountain. Contrary to the text, “Let not the priests or the people break through and come up to YHVH , lest YHVH break out against them” (19:24), I don’t think we can afford to restrict direct access to the divine to just the very select few.
How do you think of purification? What means can you use to purify yourself in preparation to encounter the divine? How important do you think courage is as a spiritual virtue? When have you been courageous in your own life?
“You shall make an altar of earth for me, and you shall sacrifice on it your burnt offerings…and if you’ll make an altar of stones for me, you shall not make them cut.” (20:24-5). Why uncut stones? The demand for uncut stones follows immediately after the end of the ten commandments and Moses reassuring the scared people to not be afraid (20:20). After the spectacle of the hierophany, there’s a demand for simplicity. Why?
I read this as a counterpoint to the drama. Return to the earth, to something simple, YHVH seems to be saying. Make simple altars like the altars of Abraham and Jacob when they wanted to say thank you to the divine. Ground yourself on the ground. We need both the voice from the mountaintop and the unadorned earth.
How, if at all, does your practice incorporate both the mountaintop and the unadorned earth?
QUESTIONS
One God or many? Underlying unity? What’s the relationship between the divine and the world? Personal or impersonal force?
Do you believe that obedience is a key factor in your actual or ideal relationship with the divine? Does the metaphor of “treasured possession” speak to you? Are we as a people any better or different than any other people? Should we aspire to be?
How do you think of purification? What means can you use to purify yourself in preparation to encounter the divine? How important do you think courage is as a spiritual virtue? When have you been courageous in your own life?
How, if at all, does your practice incorporate both the mountaintop and the unadorned earth?
