YISRO
Torah
Isaiah 6:1-7:6, 9:5-6 (Sephardi ritual: 6:1-13).
WE ARE ALL CONVERTS
It is fitting that the parshah which tells of the Giving of the Torah at
Thus no one can claim
that the Torah belongs to him by right through ancestral or other merit. There
is no room for pride, arrogance or the exploitation of the Torah for worldly
advantage. The Torah is not the property of an exclusive caste. It
"belongs" only to one who keeps it. The Torah was given in the
Wilderness, no man's land, on the lowest of all mountains -- Sinai, the eternal
symbol of humility. For only through humility can we "receive" and
accept the Torah, which belongs to G-d alone. Receiving the Torah means having
the humility to accept it as it is, the way it has come down to us, without
trying to "modify" it according to our own ideas and wishes.
And when we are willing
to accept and follow the Torah as it actually is -- fulfilling NA'ASEH
VE-NISHMAH, "we will (first) DO it and (then) HEAR (and understand)
it" (Ex. 24:7) -- then we can come to understand how the Torah lifts us
out of our slavery to this-worldliness, with its many false gods. Then we can
hear the voice of redemption that calls to us every day: "I am HASHEM your
G-d who brought you out of the
Slavery to the idols of the
mundane world is ignominious. Yet the Torah accords the greatest honor to those
who have the courage to leave this servitude behind and "go out into the
wilderness" in search of G-d -- like Jethro.
According to tradition, Jethro had investigated every
conceivable way of interpreting and living in this world, every world-view and
"lifestyle". Only when Jethro came to HaShem and His Torah did he know he had found the truth.
"Now I KNOW that HaShem is great above all the
gods" (Ex. 18:11). The Zohar comments:
"When Jethro came and said, 'Now I know that HaShem is great…' then the Supreme Name was glorified and
exalted" (Zohar, Yisro
69). In other words, the revelation of G-d's light
and power is greatest precisely when it comes out of darkness and concealment.
Only when we have seen evil and know its power can we understand the greatness
of G-d's saving hand. Only one who was a slave truly
understands what it means to have been freed. This is "the superiority of
the light that comes out of darkness" (Ecclesiastes 2:13).
Thus Jethro
the Convert was accorded the honor of having the parshah
narrating the Giving of the Torah named after him, and of contributing the
hierarchical system of "captains of thousands, captains of hundreds,
captains of fifties and captains of tens" through which the Children of
Israel are governed. Jethro's name also contains and
alludes to the name of another humble convert who was accorded the greatest
honor: Ruth the Moabitess, who was the great
grandmother of King David, MELECH HAMASHIACH.
* * *
TWO
MILLION PROPHETS
Rambam (Maimonides)
in "Foundations of the Torah", the opening section of his
comprehensive Code of Law, explains the significance of the revelation at
Sinai, which was witnessed by at least two million people:
"The people of
"Then how did they
come to believe in him? The answer is: At Mount Sinai, where we ourselves (not
a stranger) saw with our own eyes and where we ourselves (not someone else)
heard with our own ears the thunderous sounds and flashing lights and how Moses
approached and entered the thick cloud. We heard The Voice speak with him as we
listened: 'Moses, Moses, go and say to them…' From where do we learn that the
Assembly at
"It follows that the
very ones to whom he was sent were the witnesses to the truth of his prophecy,
and he had no need to perform any further sign, since he and they were both
witnesses to the matter. It is like two witnesses who both saw the same thing.
Each one is witness that his friend is telling the truth. Neither witness needs
further proof of what his friend is saying. Similarly, all
"Accordingly if a
prophet arises and works great miracles and wonders and seeks to deny the
prophecy of Moses our Teacher, we do not listen to him and we know clearly that
those signs were brought about through magic and witchcraft. For the prophecy
of Moses does not depend upon signs, such that we should compare the signs of
one prophet to the signs of another. We ourselves saw it with our own eyes and
heard it with our own ears. The prophets who deny the truth of Moses' prophesy
are like witnesses who tell a person who saw something with his own eyes that
it was not as he saw it. The person simply does not listen to them, for he
knows for certain that they are false witnesses." (Rambam,
Yesodey HaTorah 8:1-3).
* * *
"AND
"And
This is particularly
difficult to imagine for those who have delved into the intricacies of Talmudic
law and reasoning, and who know how the Torah repeatedly seems to fly
completely in the face of reason and good common sense. How could those two
million Israelites collectively agree to accept this elaborate, complex,
reason-defying code in all its minute details? What brought them to do so? And
the fact is that today's observant descendents of those Israelites, despite the
fact of having come from communities spread out all over the world, still all
fundamentally agree to accept this code without changing a letter!
The very faith of Jews in
the Torah for thousands of years in the face of almost constant adversity and
persecution is itself proof of the uniqueness of the Assembly at Sinai, when we
all collectively witnessed the same one truth of G-d and agreed to accept the
Torah. Only a completely unique divine revelation could have been powerful
enough to instill in two million people a faith that has lasted for thousands
of years, a faith for which, over the generations, many millions laid down
their very lives.
It is ironic that many
people today question the historicity of the revelation at Sinai. We live in an
age that prides itself on instantly recording its own daily history in the form
of incessant news in the press, on TV, radio and Internet. And we are witnesses
to the way in which the media have become manufacturers of endless streams of
idolatrous images that totally distort the meaning of the world they supposedly
reflect.
If we are to begin to
internalize the magnitude of the Giving of the Torah, which took place without
media coverage, we must try to think ourselves out of our own noisy,
sophisticated world. We must try to project ourselves back into the stark,
awesome, silent grandeur of the "wilderness", the MIDBAR, where man's
existential reality as a GER, a wanderer and a stranger in this world, is writ
large. Out of the silence of the MIDBAR spoke a voice: MEDABER. And the voice
was forever inscribed in the hearts of those who heard it and taught it to
their children from generation to generation.
* * *
THE
DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A PERSON AND A STATUE
In the above-quoted
passage from Rambam about the uniqueness of Moses'
prophecy, he states that "the prophets who deny the truth of Moses'
prophecy are like witnesses who tell a person who saw something with his own
eyes that it was not as he saw it."
The prophets to whom he
is referring include those who founded the two major world religions which are
rooted in and yet deviate from the Torah: Christianity and Islam. Both drew the
bulk of their teachings from the Torah. Yet both implicitly and explicitly deny
the finality of Moses' prophecy, seeking to "undo" the laws of the
Torah (such as circumcision, the dietary laws, complete Sabbath observance and
many others).
The relaxation of the
stringencies of Torah law by these man-made religions made them more acceptable
to the non-Israelite nations. As Rambam states at the
very end of his Code of Law (Hilchos Melachim 11:4 uncensored version):
"Man does not have the power to grasp the thoughts of the Creator of the
Universe. For our ways are not His ways, nor are our thoughts
His. All that happened in the wake of Yeshu of
Nazereth and that Ishmaelite who arose after him came
only to straighten the way for Melech HaMashiach and to rectify the entire world to serve HaShem together. Thus it is written: 'And then I will turn
to all the nations a pure language so that all of them will call upon the name
of HaShem and serve Him with one accord' (Zephaniah
3:9). The whole world has thus become filled with the knowledge of the Torah
and the commandments. This knowledge has spread to the farthest islands… And
when the true MELECH HAMASHIACH arises and succeeds, they will all immediately
know that 'their fathers inherited falsehood' and that their prophets and their
fathers deceived them."
Despite the attraction of
the two new religions for non-Israelites, neither one of them ever made serious
inroads among the Jews. Indeed it was precisely because the founders could not
attract the Jews that they turned to the non-Jews for recruits.
In Rambam's
IGERET TEIMAN (letter to the Jews of Yemen written in 1172 C.E. encouraging
them to reject the forced conversion to Islam to which they were being
subjected), he explains why the two new religions held no attractions for those
who understood the intricate depths of the Torah:
"Their only wish was
to compare their lies to the Law of HaShem. But the
work of G-d bears no comparison to the work of man except in the eyes of a
little child who has no understanding of either. The difference between our
religion and the other religions that seek to compare themselves to it is like
the difference between a living, conscious man and a statue. The statue is
carved out of a piece of wood overlaid with gold or silver or chiseled out of a
piece of marble and made to look like a man. An ignorant fool does not know the
difference between G-dly wisdom and this artifact
made in the form of a man. The statue looks like a man in its structure and
outward appearance. But it only seems like a man because the ignorant onlooker
doesn't know what is inside either a man or a statue. However, the wise man
knows the difference between what is inside the two. The wise man knows that
inside the statue is nothing, while the inside of the living man, ADAM, is
filled with truly amazing wonders and works that testify to the wisdom of the
Creator -- the nerves, the flesh, the bones, the bodily limbs and their all
their interconnections…"
Shabbat Shalom!
Avraham Yehoshua Greenbaum