Yitro: Who Was Yitro?

So, we are beginning the parashah of Yitro. It is, of course, the parashah of G-d’s revelation to the people of Israel; it is the giving of the Torah, the purpose of the Exodus from Egypt, because it is the constitution of the very being of the Jewish people. Yet paradoxically, this parashah, which defines our Jewish being and our relationship to the land of our ancestors — since it is through the Torah that the land is justified — bears the name of Yitro. Who was Yitro? One of Pharaoh’s three close advisers. He had three advisers. When Pharaoh conceived his plan of bringing the Jewish people under his boot, Bilaam was a champion of that policy of repression against the Jewish people, meant to curb its capacity to expand and to assert itself on that foreign soil.

Yitro, for his part, was far wiser. He said that, given the services Yosef had rendered the nation in a time of crisis for so many years, one must not respond with ingratitude toward his descendants; the Jewish people should be treated with consideration and regarded as truly an integral part of the Egyptian population as a whole. This opinion displeased the king’s new policy and forced Yitro into exile. And finally, the third adviser was Iyov. Iyov simply kept silent. He did not want to take a position, either on one side or on the other. And our sages say that since Iyov preferred silence, he received, by a kind of rebound, the silence of G-d

in the face of his sufferings and his miseries. But this parashah, as we said, the parashah of G-d’s revelation to the people of Israel, bears the name of Yitro — an honor given him for the simple reason that he is the prototype of the convert who joins the Jewish people, in three ways that we will see shortly. And our sages credit him with having added a chapter to the Torah. What is this chapter he added? Is it truly an addition, or is it an extension? Some say it is an addition, because a follower of the Noahide laws, when he joins the Jewish people, does not merge those laws into the six hundred and thirteen commandments; he adds them.

And that is why the six hundred and thirteen commandments plus the seven Noahide commandments form a total of six hundred and twenty — the numerical value of keter, crown. The crowning of the Jewish people comes when it truly succeeds in creating a harmonious communication between the wisdom of the nations, through which they discover for themselves the laws that govern their communities, and the law revealed from above, by G-d, to the whole Jewish people. In other words, there are two laws: the one that is revealed, and the one that man discovers by himself. Which is more important? In reality, chokhmah among the nations — that there exists a science, a wisdom, an art of living among the nations — this one must believe completely: every human being is moved by the divine spirit in the measure that animates him, and is capable of discovering by himself rules of life that correspond, to a certain extent, to those of the Creator. What, simply, is the difference? As long as those rules are not revealed, one can play with them, adapt them to one’s own measure according to circumstances, according to the states of favor or of mood in which we find ourselves, and one can, for better or worse, accommodate them, tailor them like a garment to our measure. Laws dictated by the Absolute, on the other hand, cannot be accommodated. We must measure ourselves against them, and on a certain level we remain dependent on them. So there is indeed a form of constraint in this second law, the law of revelation, because it imposes itself on us from outside. In the law we discover by ourselves, by contrast, there is the expression of complete freedom, a willing adherence. And of course, you will tell me, that is the best formula: the best formula is never to feel compelled from outside to practice a law, but to be carried by it through an inner movement.

Yitro was, if you like, the protagonist of this way of thinking. Why? Because, according to our sages, Yitro is the prototype of all the idolatrous cults practiced in his time. He was a man of universal thought, who knew what each idol could represent, each current of thought, and even the passion it generated — so that these forms of belief remained within the bounds of Elokim, G-d the Creator of the universe; consequently the whole created universe attests to His presence, and we can indeed find it in the various forms of nature and in the various arts of living. Today we call them hobbies; in those days they were reasons for living pushed to the extreme. And Yitro had cultivated all these forms of belief and put them to the test — but it remains limited, limited as nature is. Because to go beyond the limits, one must truly step outside the laws of creation.

To step outside the laws of creation means no longer belonging to this created world. That is not possible. So as long as we are in the created world, we have a certain tendency to fashion the divine after our own way of thinking, our own way of seeing things, our philosophical outlook. And this deity can be of the left, of the right, or of the center. Well, we serve the same G-d under several labels. Now, what the Jewish world brought to faith through the prophets is that Hashem — as opposed to Elokim — Hashem is Being. Being lies beyond all these elokim, all these divinities. All these divinities remain limited within the world — let us say, within man’s philosophical or psychological world. Sometimes it is more a matter of passion, of sentiment; we yield to our free will and adopt this faith in G-d, but we have given it no foundation, no breath of life, and we keep it within limits — within our own limits.

Now the Torah told us, by placing Yitro before the Ten Commandments, that unless we integrate wisdom […] the wisdom of Shlomo — this wisdom that emanates from the divine, that G-d gives to man — unless we integrate it into our way of grasping G-d’s presence in the world, we will go astray: under cover of our faith in G-d, we will serve various forms of G-d’s manifestations. And that is what Yitro denounced. This is very important, because the principle that separates the Jewish people from all the other nations, and that keeps us from having the same dialogue with them, is that we do not manage to make all these beliefs, all these philosophical currents of thought, all these arts of living converge under a single banner — that of the Name Yud-Kei-Vav-Kei, that of Being, that of the very essence of all things. And so we live in two separate worlds: the Jewish people on one side, and the world, the rest of humanity, on the other. And as we saw last week, standing apart from the other nations only feeds a permanent antisemitism, because we want to remain distinct from others. But that is not the goal. The goal of the revelation is to fuse humanity into one movement of thought with different branches, but converging toward a single point, one and the same point. That is what we will call the Jerusalem below, or the Jerusalem above.

And who can do that? Only someone who comes from outside, not from within the Jewish people. That is why Yitro goes out to meet this revelation, and he will open the way to the possibility of joining the wisdom of the nations to the revealed order — and thereby erase Amalek. Last week’s parashah ended with the commandment to blot out Amalek. Now we know that Amalek has the numerical value of safek, doubt. Doubt is when we ask ourselves: is it truly the Eternal who dwells in our midst, are we always acting in His name or not? And we are in doubt; we even doubt ourselves. So this doubt must be uprooted at all costs, banished completely. The nations nurture this doubt about us. And that is why there are nations that persecute us, hate us, reject us. But be careful: we must not lump all the nations together. There are what are called chasidei umot ha-olam.

Chasidei umot ha-olam are the righteous among the nations. There are righteous among the nations; there are those who can indeed be sensitive to what we represent, to the message we bring to the world — and this is attested by our survival of every plan of extermination the peoples have plotted: the Jewish people is still here. We crossed the Sea of Reeds, and we have already rendered Yam Suf as “the Sea of the End.” We make a leap beyond death; every time, we are still here. Yitro himself, by the way, is one of these chasidei umot ha-olam. But note: these are not peoples; there are no peoples that are chasidei umot ha-olam. There are individuals scattered within each people who can be considered chasidei umot ha-olam. And they constitute the messianic bridge between the people of Israel and the rest of humanity.

What is special about this man endowed with seven names, just like Moshe? He is, if you like, Moshe’s counterpart among the other nations. What Moshe brings to the people of Israel is faith in Hashem, as opposed to Elokim. And Yitro brings the faith that Elokim finds its end in Hashem: that all the divinities in which we believe find their fulfillment in the One. So it all depends on how one sees things: whether, through the detail of all the elements, once mastered, we will arrive at the One, or whether, starting from the One, we will integrate all the other details of life. That is, if you like, the dialogue between Yitro and Moshe.

Both grew up in Pharaoh’s palace. Both knew Egyptian culture well, and its limits. When we speak of Mitzrayim, Egypt, we are always speaking of meitzarim, narrow bounds. We are always speaking of the limits of a way of thinking, the limits of a civilization. Of course, it is the great empire, the great science. There are great scholars in Egypt, but their science remains bound by the laws of creation, and does not go beyond them. That is to say, they cannot embrace a time that is not furnished with the elements of nature — a time that is pure spirituality, without being filled with material elements. We, however, were made to live that time in its pure abstraction, through Shabbat, and it is we who furnish our time. It is not time that is furnished by the elements of nature; it is we who integrate the elements of nature into our time, and we who integrate the elements of morality into the law so as to give it the seal of the Absolute. But be careful: it matters greatly that we seek a morality that takes precedence over the act.

Judaism must not become a “religion”; faith in G-d must not become so blind as to ascribe intrinsic value to the deeds we perform, without their being accompanied first and foremost by a willing adherence — because it is moral, because we have also internalized it, we have understood it. That is what is called a ger. What is a ger? The ger, the convert, is one who has known how to bring all the elements he discovered by himself, and has put them to the test of the Absolute, that is, of G-d’s revelation. And that is why this parashah will bear, above all, the name of Yitro — because Yitro is the one who came right after the Exodus from Egypt, though not everyone holds that view. And what did he come to do? First of all, he brought back Moshe’s wife and his two children.

Yes, Moshe had separated from his wife and his two children in carrying out his mission. One does not sacrifice one’s family life by devoting oneself to the cause of the people, or even to the cause of the Holy One, blessed be He, Himself. On the contrary, one’s family life falls under the banner of that service, of the obligations one has toward G-d. And that was a first lesson. For Vayishma Yitro, “Yitro heard”: what sets him apart is understanding, listening, seeing things in their entirety. Many peoples heard of all the wonders of the Exodus. Well, it caused a shock at the time, for two days, three days, a week. And then it was filed away among the phenomena of history or the phenomena of nature.

Here we find the man who probes the event. And so our sages asked: what did he listen to? What did he hear? Yet the text tells us clearly: “all that G-d had done for Moshe and for Israel His people, that Hashem had brought Israel out of Egypt” (Exodus 18:1). So that is what he heard. Apparently this verse does not satisfy our sages, who ask what the real subject of his deep reflection was. So, they said, kriat Yam Suf: he saw the splitting of the Red Sea — that is, as I said earlier, this passage of the Jewish people beyond death, the miracle of the Jewish people’s survival, and the fact that there is an immanent justice.

The Egyptians had wanted to drown the Jewish people in the waters, and yet it was they who were drowned — they were drowned in the waters of the Sea of Reeds. There is an immanent justice; there is a Judge. That gave him something to reflect on. That is the first idea. The second idea is that he also saw the battle, the victory won over Amalek — that the Jewish people knows how to defend itself. It is no longer the Jewish people that, in Egypt, in its concentration camp, let itself be treated as others pleased, obeyed orders and gave in […] without a word.

And now it engages Amalek in battle and wins a victory — a victory that is not only physical but moral. So here is a people that benefits, on the one hand, from an exceptional providence, and that is driven, on the other, to fight on its own against all who would reduce it to silence. He appreciates both these movements. For those who say Yitro appeared before the giving of the law, that suffices. But not all the sages share this view. The convert who joins the ranks of the Jewish people is not always the one who marvels at the providence accompanying this people, at the survival of this people in whatever circumstances, or at the daring exploits of this people when it is given the means to defend itself. No. He is filled with wonder by the Torah; he realized that it was the extraordinary contribution of this Torah.

Why? Because at first it presented itself as a constraint, but then, on the contrary, it became the expression of the Jewish people’s complete freedom of action, because it had been internalized to the point that the people embraced it. Which means there are two laws. There is the Written Law and there is the Oral Law. There is the Written Law, which the Holy One, blessed be He, gives to the Jewish people; there is the Oral Law, the one that the Jewish people gives back to the Holy One, blessed be He. There is a certain interpretation of the law that is proper to man and yet not foreign to G-d’s thought. Man is G-d’s privileged interlocutor; he is the one with whom G-d, so to speak, studies His law.

The Jewish people is the chavruta, the study partner, of the Holy One, blessed be He, and the Holy One, blessed be He, is the chavruta of the Jewish people. Is it a matter of building a mishkan? Well, G-d can draw the broad outlines, but the one who will actually build the mishkan is the people itself. And when the people does so, it does so not under constraint but because it feels the need to build it. So what he admired was this ongoing spiritual dialogue between the Jewish people and its Creator. And that impressed him greatly, because there is a movement of extension of the law, of interpretation of the law, which draws it a little out of its shell, off its hinges, and gives it an extraordinary breadth that covers many domains.

But for that, one must commit oneself to study. Yitro, since he comes from outside and not from within, is the man who could truly serve as a bridge between the Jewish people and the rest of humanity. For the dialogue between G-d and the Jewish people attains the fullness of its being only when it resonates just as strongly in the relationship between the Jewish people and the rest of humanity, the rest of G-d’s creatures — thereby removing the partitions within which each one is content to live. And that is what leads some to say that Yitro in fact came after the giving of the Torah. And after the giving of the Torah, he noticed that Moshe was devoting himself entirely to the education of his people, to judging the people, and he said: careful, here you are going to diminish yourself; here you are truly going to restrict your capacities.

The point is not to judge the people, not to judge others — it is to teach them to judge themselves. Leave the people full latitude to deal with their own internal problems. But you — devote yourself to revealing to them, from above, the possibilities of moving forward, and of not remaining at a limited stage of interpretation and thought. If one keeps staying at the level of the people, discussing everyday problems, one never gets anywhere. There has to be a source of inspiration. Things must truly be renewed; one must rise above the level of this one’s and that one’s disputes — they will settle those themselves. Try to bring a fresh breath. And this is an important point: when one takes on the leadership of a community, when one takes charge of a family, giving oneself entirely to the cause of the family or the cause of the community is not everything.

One must know how to leave time for oneself — to replenish oneself, to learn, to retrain, to renew oneself — because as a person grows, those around him follow along with him. That is the new dimension Yitro brings to Moshe. For one might ask what Moshe did not already know: that a judicial apparatus was needed, with appointed judges and clerks and officers — surely he had seen all that in the administration of the Egyptian empire. No, that was not the point. The point was the way one remained attuned to the spiritual. This is a very important idea, because a person’s flourishing is at stake: if he always stays within the confines of any one art or any one way of thinking, however sublime, unable to leave it, unable to air it out through some other flight of the spirit, then his life becomes repetitive, and it has nothing left to pursue.

Now, let us not forget that when we draw near to the revealed word, we are in the sphere where being opens onto the infinite, onto the world beyond the limits of creation — to the point that our speech can itself become the mortar of a new creation. That is why it is said that Yitro is the bearer of a new Torah. A new Torah? Will there be a new Torah? The prophet alluded to the fact that in times to come there will be a new Torah, but one inscribed on hearts, not on the mind of man; that is, a way of thinking nourished by the movement of the heart, by generosity of thought, by the generosity of self-giving and by an aspiration toward the rest of humanity. At that point, one must not view another person’s relationship with G-d as though it were a relationship with man. Each has his level, each his own way, and each according to the mission that is his own. The essential thing is not to set up sects, currents, factions here and there, but to fuse the whole, to build a national community as a universal community, each one responding to a single direction of thought, if you like, to a single point of reference — while standing at some distance from it at times; not everyone can stand in the same place.

We can live in the same time, but we cannot occupy the same place. That is how it is, but this in no way diminishes anyone’s worth. That is the important teaching that precedes the giving of the Torah, when Moshe hastens out to greet his father-in-law — his father-in-law who comes and joins the people. But note: he joins it only to bring his message and leave again. For our sages teach us that we are dealing with three attitudes of Yitro: the Yitro who came before the Torah, the Yitro who came after the Torah — just as we have people who join us before the founding of the State of Israel, and people who join us after the founding of the State of Israel — and people who leave us and return to their point of departure.

Why? Quite simply because Yitro did not remain among the Jewish people. He joined the Jewish people, brought his message, inscribed his parashah, gave, let us say, his push to the way the dialogue between G-d and humanity — between the Jewish people and humanity — is perceived. And he returned to his point of departure. Why? Because in who he is, he too has his word to say. He took from the Jewish people what served him, and he will adapt, if you like, his way of thinking to his people — because he is a kohen: he is the great shepherd, the high priest. But in returning, he did not go back as he had come; he is enriched by something, he carries it within himself. And it is little by little, in this way, that we ourselves must broaden our way of seeing ourselves around the theme of the Torah, of surpassing ourselves through the laws of the Torah, and of establishing our communication with the other peoples so as to reduce — no, to banish — the hatred that arose at the moment the Torah was given to the Jewish people and the other nations did not want to benefit from it because they were not ready. But that is no reason to exclude them.

They are not yet in a position to grasp it, to grasp it in its entirety. The task now is to open it up so as to remove its dividing walls, and little by little to see it spread and extend, “as the waters cover the sea.” So much for this first introduction to Yitro, who taught us, among other things, Baruch Hashem, “Blessed is Hashem.” You know, until then no one had said Baruch Hashem. Yitro had to come, and we learned from his mouth to say that the source of the good that G-d bestows on man should never run dry — and it is simply up to us to bring that good about. And to the extent that we rise above our pettiness, every day is a new world for us.

But a world in which harmony must reign — not among people who naturally get along because they share the same faith, the same ideas, the same love. No. Rather, between people who stand at different, opposing, diametrically opposed points of view. And despite everything, chesed, a thought of kindness, must really try to plane down all the snags and all the obstacles along the way. Yitro achieved this, and that is why it is said, kashim gerim le-Yisrael ke-sapachat — “converts are as hard for Israel as leprosy” (Yevamot 47b): because in the end they are sometimes the bearers of lessons we have not sufficiently absorbed, since the comfort of living within the limits of our faith is stronger than a life that exposes us to the various trials of life.

There we are — if you have questions, with pleasure. “Yes, Rav Benizri, I wanted to ask you: from what you are saying, it seems to me that the Torah is inclusive toward the outside, toward other peoples. But then, is halakhah inclusive as well? And ultimately, is the Jewish people itself, in its social fabric, inclusive, as the Torah would want?” — That is a very good question, if I may. The laws of halakhah are the instruments through which you will put into practice your own aspirations, your own ideals, your ideal of life. They are your instruments, these instruments. You cannot give them away, entrust them to another person. He does not have the same needs.

He does not know that… When it is said goy she-shavat chayav mitah — “a gentile who keeps Shabbat is liable to death” (Sanhedrin 58b) — liable to death? He wanted to keep Shabbat! But no. Keeping Shabbat means keeping the spirit of Shabbat, keeping it from within. It is not simply a garment; halakhah is not a garment we just put on like that, the way one meets one’s requirements. Halakhah must truly serve a purpose — but one that is not limited to your own person. It is simply a means for you to stay alert to the realization of your goals in life. That is how it is: everything you have studied in life you do not use at that very moment, but it is there, waiting, held in reserve; and when the time comes, you will bring it out.

The Jew lives his halakhah because he is subject to demands that others are not; they are not bound by them, not as much is asked of them. They are asked to keep the seven Noahide laws. Of the others that is all that is asked; they are not asked to keep the taryag mitzvot, the six hundred and thirteen commandments. So, to be accepted, the seven Noahide laws suffice. That is enough. That is enough. For the others, it is enough. Since the purpose they have set themselves, the goals that lie before them, remain within their own limits and do not go beyond them — well, if they do not want to go beyond them, that is their affair. If they do want to go beyond them, they will then take upon themselves

the world of halakhah, and undergo a period of geirut. A period of geirut is one that obliges a person to study things from within, to adhere to everything from within — not to practice halakhah simply because one studied it, and so on, and then cast it aside, because in the end one studied it only for the conversion exam: “We tried it, it’s over, we can put it aside.” No. The ger is one who, from within, charts his own path, because no one obliges him; they could have kept to the seven Noahide laws and that is all. Indeed, as I said at the beginning, the seven Noahide laws are added to the six hundred and thirteen commandments; they do not come to subtract from the six hundred and thirteen.