Israel Grows Up

This week’s Torah portion is Yitro – named after Jethro, Moses’ Father in Law, who brings Moses’ wife Ziporah, and their two sons meet Moses and the Israelites at Mt. Sinai. Jethro advises Moses to establish a system of judges and courts. Moses takes his advice and Jethro departs. The people prepare themselves for the great and terrifying day on which God will speak to them, what we call The Revelation – the only time in human history that God’s words were heard simultaneously by a whole group of people, in which God speaks the Ten Commandments. Subsequently the people become afraid, asking Moses to speak with God and let them know what God requires of them.

In reading about these miraculous events in which God regularly speaks to Moses and then speaks to the entire Israelite people, some ask: Why is God so distant now? Why are there no prophets, no revelations? To find an answer to these questions, we can look at the Torah text itself. God says to Moses: “So shall you say to the… Children of Israel. You have seen what I did to Egypt and that I have borne you on the wings of eagles and brought you to me. And now, if you listen well to Me and observe My covenant, you shall be to me the most beloved treasure of all peoples, for Mine is the entire world. You shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation…The entire people responded together and said, everything that God has spoken we shall do.” (Ex. 18:3-6, 8). This passage begins with the metaphor of the eagle’s wings. Like a mother eagle, God flew us out of Egypt and set us down in a safe place. God personally saved, protected, and carried us. With our arrival at Mt. Sinai, our infancy came to an end.

Now there was to be a new relationship between us and God. What happens next is a kind of adolescence. There will at first be a primary intermediary: Moses. He provides the temporal leadership and also the moral leadership; and there will be Priests, who are religious intermediaries. But there will also be rules by which we can learn to become more independent: at first the Ten Commandments, and then laws of a civil society, which we will read in next week’s Torah portion. Gradually, God plans to wean us away from direct intervention and direct communication. There is a Chassidic story from the 18th Century that describes the change in our relationship: Someone once asked the Baal Shem Tov: Why does one who ordinarily feels close to God sometimes experience a sense of remoteness from the Divine Presence? The Baal Shem said, When a parent begins to teach a baby to walk the parent steadies the child with both hands …..Then bit by bit the parent moves away, holding out both arms, so that the child can take hesitant and later confident steps toward the parent. God may seem to move away from us sometimes, but perhaps only to help us grow by helping us to take steps toward God on our own.(adapted from Gates of Repentance)

The text from Yitro lays out a plan to take the place of prophecy and Direct communication. It is a plan by which we can outgrow our total dependence on our Divine Parent and gradually grow into religious adults. By allowing each person to hear the 10 Commandments, there was a leveling of access to God. Judaism was never a mystery religion in which the Priests had special, esoteric knowledge that the rest of the nation did not possess. The prophet Isaiah said, 45:19-20. I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth; I do not say to the seed of Jacob, Seek me in vain; I, the Eternal, speak righteousness, I declare things that are right. Assemble yourselves and come; draw near together…” The laws and commandments provide equal access to God and a means by which to draw near. The last Prophets in Judaism, Ezra and Nehemiah. lived more than 400 years before the common era. The priesthood was swept away in the year 70 CE by the Romans’ destruction of the Second Temple.

After the year 70, we began to be able to realize the last part of God’s plan: you shall be to me a kingdom of Priests, a holy nation,” which apparently God desired all along: a religion which needs no intermediaries; in which each person is her or his own priest. The program which led from our dependence in Egypt to a growing independence of choice and action is still proceeding today. One of the later Chassidic masters said, “people are becoming more religious on the inside.” We are moving in the direction of becoming a nation of priests and a holy nation. This is our task: to become more and more religiously independent, taking more of our own spiritual growth to the next level by growing in our spiritual awareness so that we can bind ourselves to the guidance and wisdom that is available to us, through our connection to the Divine Presence. We are never alone and without guidance. It’s just that our guidance comes in other forms: in events and subtle messages that help us to choose what is good. We are still walking the path away from God that circles right back to God: a part of the original plan. When we observe the 10 commandments we participate in our growth into more spiritual beings. We become more spiritual on the inside, given the dignity of being true partners with Divinity. May we embrace the progress that has been laid out for us, choosing independence and reaching out for the guidance that we are being sent.