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Parashat Yitro: The Ten Commandments -- Obvious or Revolutionary?

The Ten Commandments.  We see them everywhere, the two tablets.  On synagogue buildings and over the aron kodesh, the ark containing the Torah scrolls.  In pictures of Moses across the history of biblical art.  At courts of law.  The tablets are so familiar we might stop noticing them.

And the words on the tablets.  In a way, they are so obvious:  Don't murder, steal, or commit adultery.  The one time God chooses to speak to everyone, to be heard universally -- why are these the words God says?  Doesn't everyone know this already?  Hadn't God already given this as a tradition back in the time of Noah?  Wouldn't any good philosopher already derived the same laws from reason, without recourse to revelation?  Hadn't most societies figured out or imposed these laws to keep order, if not for higher reasons? 

And yet these are the words that God chose to say in God's one and only moment of universal prophecy.  We only have to look around us to see why.  More than three thousand years after the revelation at Har Sinai, the words of the Ten Commandments are still revolutionary.  Page through today's paper, and every column is about how the world is still not living by the words on the tablets.  Murder, greed, deceit, disloyalty in all their forms are still here.  They are tenacious, though not by any means the norm.  But against such tenacity, against centuries that still tolerate murder and stealing and betrayal, the world needs God's voice.  The booming voice from the mountain.  The teaching voice, as the midrash describes it, speaking to every person in the way he or she needs to hear it.

That's the second tablet.  The first tablet also makes a claim.  I am Adonai your God, Who brought you out from the land of Egypt, the house of slaves.  What does this have to do with murdering and stealing?  I think part of the message of the first tablet is this:  I know -- says God -- what a world of idolatry and murder and greed looks like.  You know it too.  And I give you My word that the world does not have to be this way.  But building and preserving a moral world requires you not to forget Egypt, and not to forget that you are humans.  You are not gods, and no one who rules over you will ever be a god.

This is the command against idolatry, and also the mandate to observe Shabbat -- a day of limitation, and a day of imaginging the world in its perfect state. 

I don't look at today's world and see mainly lawlessness.  The Ten Commandments are not a lonely voice in the wilderness.  But we are not finished hearing them.  In Exodus 19:1, the Torah says not "on that day they came to Mt. Sinai" but "on this day", and the midrash says:  This day, whichever day you read or hear these words, is like the very day they were first announced. As we stand up this Shabbat, and hear those words again chanted from the Torah, we can still hear them as if they are new.  As if they are as radical as they have ever been.  They are words that will never be quite obvious, and never be too old.

Parashat Yitro -- Make Room for Revelation

There are two distinct stories in Parashat Yitro, and we usually think about them entirely separately.  The most important part of the parasha are chapters 19-20 of Exodus, known as Ma'amad Har Sinai, the revelation "standing at Mt. Sinai."  Here, God offers the Israelites as a whole a covenant, and when they agree God speaks directly from the mountaintop to them, proclaiming the Aseret Hadibrot, the Ten Commandments (literally the ten "speakings").

Before that, we read about a discussion between Moshe and his Midianite father-in-law Yitro.  Yitro sees that Moshe spends all day adjudicating conflicts, large and small, among the people.  Yitro suggests that Moshe institute a system of courts, with lower officials hearing minor cases and only the more difficult ones coming before Moshe.  The biblical origin of our tiered system of courts, or perhaps of bureaucracy in general.

What is the Yitro story doing here?  It could go almost anywhere in the story of the march through the desert.  It would make even more sense in a couple of weeks, after the detailed laws beginning in Exodus 21 in Parashat Mishpatim that form the basis for Moshe's work as judge.

There is a connection between these stories, and it centers on Moshe himself.  In Exodus 18:18, Yitro says that if Moshe continues to take on every controversy by himself, "you will wear yourself out and these people as well."  It's only after Moshe gives up some of his work that he is available for God to summon to the mountain and receive the Torah.  It's only after Moshe steps back from the minutia that fills his every hour, that he is in a position to experience God's revelation.  It's only when the people don't have to stand in line all day to talk to Moshe that they are freed up to listen to the Ten Commandments.

In Conservative Judaism, we say that God's revelation was not a one-time event that took place in the third month after the Israelites left Egypt.  The text of Ma'amad Har Sinai almost hovers over the Torah -- it's one of the few chapters that does not begin with the connecting vav, the "and" that links it in sequence with what came right before.  You could say that God's voice was speaking the Revelation all the time, but that it took Yitro's advice to get Moshe in a position to hear it.

As dramatic and momentous as the Ten Commandments are -- as much as we yearn for God's word to be clear and powerful in our lives -- we need to make time and space in our lives to receive them.  To look up from the details, to take a break from consuming responsibilities, so that we are not weary, but ready.