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A Year of Jewish Ethics #12: Exodus and Freedom

In my overview of ethics and Exodus, you may have noticed I didn’t talk about one central idea: freedom! Well, the Jewish conception of freedom deserves its very own presentation.

In Judaism freedom has many layers. The term for free people is b’nai chorin; a free person might be a bat chorin or a ben chorin. One of the first blessings we say in the morning expresses gratitude to God she-asani bat chorin or she-asani ben chorin, for making me a free person.

Obviously from the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim, freedom means not being subject to a tyranny or tyrant, and not being forced to work without earning a fair share of the fruits of one’s labor. Flipping that around, we have a positive obligation to do what’s in our power to increase political freedom and eliminate economic exploitation. Whether that’s in how we vote or how we treat people we pay to work for us, or in more continual or large-scale civic action.

When the rabbis of the early Talmud were discussing how to tell the Exodus story at the Pesach Seder, there was a disagreement about the exact arc -- the beginning and the climax of the story. The sage Shmuel said that the story begins with “We were slaves to Pharaoh in Mitzrayim”, Avadim hayinu l'Phar'oh b'Mitzrayim -- suggesting that the story is fundamentally about political and economic oppression, and the Exodus achievement is crossing the sea into freedom. Rav said that the story begins with our idol-worshipping ancestors long before even Egypt, and that the real transformation in the story is arriving at Mt. Sinai. There, away from Pharaoh, we were given the freedom to accept the Torah and the Divine covenant. Rav’s concept of freedom includes the ability to choose a covenant to be bound by.

The debate between Rav and Shmuel foreshadows a distinction made by the modern Jewish political philosopher Isaiah Berlin between negative freedom and positive freedom. Negative freedom is freedom from unjust constraints. Positive freedom is freedom for. The choices a free person has the ability to make ought to be good choices, directed at a higher good and guided by Torah. The Exodus story is obviously about both. The demand Moshe brings to Pharaoh from the Divine is not just “Let My people go”, but “Let My people go that they may serve me" Shalach et ami v'ya'avduni.

The freedom at Mt. Sinai involves trading a surface freedom for the ability to choose wise guidelines and commitments to live by. Being able to make a covenant and bind ourselves to it is part of the Jewish concept of freedom.

Sometimes what gets in the way of our positive freedom isn’t force from the outside, but forces on our inside. In fact all the way back at the beginning of the Torah, in the Garden of Eden, the first woman exemplifies for us the nature and operation of freedom as she weights the fruit she has heard she may not eat, but which the snake says will bring her godlike powers. The Torah describes her moment of deliberation, as she sees that the fruit is good to eat, exciting to the eyes, and fascinating to contemplate. In that moment, she is free to assess the outside authority of God and the snake, her relationship to her husband – all of that coming from the outside -- and the superficial and deeper dimensions of the fruit, the present and the possible future that might flow to her if she eats – these are on the inside.

Being free means using our capacity to assess authority when authority gives us both rules and the space to follow or question. It means sorting out our perceptions and judgments, noticing what is on the surface which might appeal to our desires in the moment, and what might be deeper implications or consequences.

Being b’nai chorin, free people, means bringing more decisions into this kind of awareness. It means cultivating that in others whether as educators or parents or friends, and creating spaces for others to act with that kind of freedom. And not ourselves being arbitrary authorities or exerting emotional force or manipulative words to push someone away from their freedom.

That’s why to me there is a connection between the first of the Ten Commandments and the first rule in the law code that immediately follows. The First Commandment doesn’t sound like a commandment – “I am Adonai Your God who brought you out of the land of Mitzrayim, out of the house of slaves.” The first law is about possessing and freeing a household slave after six years. I don’t think it’s really a permission to own slaves. On the contrary, it’s a recognition that each of us at some point finds ourselves exerting coercive power over someone else, in one way or another. We have a responsibility not only to relinquish that, but to bring a person who is not free enough toward their own positive freedom.

Lessons For Our Moment, From When the Ten Commandments Were Individually Delivered

This is a version of the D'var Torah on Parashat Yitro that I gave in 2021/5781. I've lightly updated it to reflect the changes in the pandemic and the presidential administration since then. It centers a midrash I've linked, and my own take on that midrash.

The midrash called Shir Ha-Shirim Rabba takes the opening of the Song of Songs and applies it to the revelation of the Ten Commandments. The verse says, and I don’t know if my blushing will come through on camera -- Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine. יִשָּׁקֵנִי מִנְּשִׁיקוֹת פִּיהוּ כִּי־טוֹבִים דֹּדֶיךָ מִיָּיִן. Like The Weavers: “kisses sweeter than wine.”

The midrash is one of my all-time favorites and as I tell it now hopefully by now some of you will be remembering from when I’ve told it before.

Rabbi Yochanan said that for each of the Ten Commandments, the Divine sent a personal messenger, a מַלְאָךְ mal’ach, to bring that particular mitzvah to each Israelite, to tell it to them, and then to have a discussion about it, for as long as necessary until the particular Israelite would say: I agree.

So imagine the mal’ach coming to you and saying: You shall not covet your neighbor’s house or spouse or servant or donkey or anyting else that belongs to them. And you say: I’ve already agreed not to steal anything  -- does God really care if I’m feeling jealous from time to time?

And the mal’ach says well it depends, maybe your envy will cause you unconsciously to pressure your neighbor to give you something you don’t really need and that’s not really going to make you better off. After all, this is your neighbor who would do anything for you and wants you not to be distressed, or maybe just wants to get you out of their hair. So how about instead of thinking about what they have that you don’t, you try to figure out what’s eating you?

And the Israelite says: Ah, that’s why you (meaning: God) included their spouse and their house and the people who labor for them and their animals. You mean sometimes we get focused on the easy life we think someone else is having right now, we think why can’t mine be like that, and then maybe we think they don’t deserve it, I do -- and that drives us apart?

And the messenger says: You’ve got it. Of course we use others to judge our situation, but that’s a first step, not a shortcut.

Envy is a clue to think about what’s out of whack. Maybe it’s something in your power, or maybe it’s out there in society, in the distribution of houses and donkeys and fields. Use that itch to think about those things, and maybe your neighbor even agrees with you about that and you can bond. Okay, says the Israelite, this coveting thing -- you’re not trying to control my mind, it’s trying to make sure we don’t  get so caught up in our minds that we drive ourselves apart from our neighbors.

And the mal’ach says: So it’s a law, agreed, no coveting? And the Israelite says: Yes! And then the midrash says the mal’ach gives them a kiss -- “let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth” -- and the Israelite feels great, and really connected. And the mal’ach goes back to the mothership for the next mitzvah.

Rabbi Yochanan imagines each Israelite during the revelation of the Aseret Hadibrot (Ten Commandments)  in their own spiritual bubble, with a personal angelic tutor who is very patient and a personal time warp. Rabbi Yochanan is solving a problem of grammar in the Ten Commandments, which is actually a bigger problem. The commands are delivered in the Hebrew singular even though all the Israelites are together. And even though every thing in the Ten Commandments only makes sense in the context of the collective. Honoring parents, and not murdering; letting your household rest on Shabbat, and not coveting -- those are all social. Even the issue of idols is about taking some power  or image recognized by everyone and projecting that as a godly power.

It’s all social, but Rabbi Yochanan says there’s a paradox -- first each person has to go into a kind of isolation, and then “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” The individual is wooed into the collective in a very deliberate way. Crossing the sea in a big crowd and singing together wasn’t enough. Each person has to feel loved with some love that is as big as everything, that is love from the Divine and the whole people, and also gets connected through a specific other. Only an individual who has been spoken to and kissed this way by a divine representative will say: What we have together is better than wine, better than the high that I experience from my own pleasure or the buzz I get from having my own ideas all on my own.

Up until now, the people had only negative experiences of the collective. Being miserable together, as slaves, who sometimes turned on each other. Watching Egyptian togetherness -- conformity, complicity in evil, mass psychology, the mob. Even when they got out, the Israelites knew themselves frequently as a group of complainers.

How could they trust themselves to be a group that could heal from slavery and get to the promised land? They needed shared ideas, and not shared idols. They needed a picture of fulfillment more motivating than coveting what some small group of them had.

Rabbi Yochanan in the midrash says that if each Israelite will feel loved enough to say “yes” for a moment, ten times, then we get to the  verse right after the Ten Commandments: “and all the people together perceived the voices and saw the bright lights” וְכָל־הָעָם רֹאִים אֶת־הַקּוֹלֹת וְאֶת־הַלַּפִּידִם v’chol ha’am ro’im et hakolot v’et halapidim.

A path to solidarity is what we need right now. We need it to stay alive, we need it to be more than just alive. It’s tempting to think of groups, especially political groups, only in terms of mobs and groupthink. It’s easy to perceive comformity, or to see insider groups that do sloppy work together. Those are real dangers of groups.

So Rabbi Yochanan says solidarity has to be built a person at a time, out of two elements: it’s built out of discussion, and out of loving affirmation. It has to originate on top of the mountain; there has to be somewhere for everyone to look up. But the real work is up close, person by person.

We can’t just assert solidarity or unity. It doesn’t come via the media or speeches. We have to make it by wooing people with our ideas and with our love. On the political level, when I first wrote this D’var Torah, I wanted President Biden and Vice President Harris when they were in office to go out and identify individual communities, let’s say the counties in this country where they got the lowest percentage of the vote, and have a midrash kind of conversation -- here are some principles and ideas, let’s talk about them, talk back and I’ll answer. And even if we don’t find a yes ,we’ll go back to the mothership in DC and come back shortly for the next conversation.

Same for Republican leaders in Congress --  do that. Find whatever community organizng group or congregation will do that with you in those counties. Set up a health clinic for the community there, and have the conversations.

On an individual level, in our own synagogue and our local community, we have to be the personal ambassadors for solidary rooted in reasoned conversation and love, for anyone who opens their ears or their arms.

We are going to need more of this kind of solidarity, to comfront the challenges of Am Yisrael and the United States, and to build our own community as a place that is welcoming and helps each of us reflect and be challenged, grow and flourish. It can’t be done if all we do is criticize when groups fail, which they often do. We need to build the collectives where we trust, and ask what it would take to give ourselves over in solidarity, to say yes to what the divine messengers are offering us.

It’s so hard to imagine getting to that kind of solidarity these days, to believing it’s possible. And it’s hard to imagine that we require it -- but I think there is no alternative. Some critical mass of solidarity is a matter of life and death. It doesn’t have to be everyone but it has to be more than it’s been in a long time. At Mt Sinai time could stand still to get that kind of solidarity, and even then it only held for a short time even for B’nai Yisrael.  We can’t stop time like that. But we each need to be receptive to messengers who come and offer us rational conversation and love, and we need to find opportunities to be those messengers.

“Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth, for your love is better than wine.” That kind of intimacy, that kind of solidarity -- it can be scary; we know it was in the Torah. Resisting solidarity will always have its rewards for people -- the wine, the yayin, is a symbol for a real intense feeling that you don’t share but have just on your own. It’s not lasting, but it’s powerful. I myself (Jon) do covet -- and what I covet are pockets of solidarity in this world that are somewhere else. But then I know the question is how not be jealous, but to learn how to do solidarity better right here. So let’s think about how we can open ourselves when the mal’achim come and try to connect us more deeply, and how to be those divine messengers ourselves, patiently trying to build the solidarity we need for life and healing, to overcome isolation, for justice and for peace.     

Shabbat Shalom.

 

The Torah Is Not a TED Talk

This is a D'var Torah I shared February 11, 2023 for Parashat Yitro, but I'm publishing it now right before Shavuot, when we read the same section of the Torah, Exodus 19-20.

This book -- the Torah -- has been read and encountered by millions of people through so many generations, and changed their lives and changed the world.

Here are some books that have also been read and encountered, by millions of people -- Aristotle’s Ethics, the Harry Potter series. Some by nearly as many generations as the Torah, some by only a few -- and nonethless they too have changed lives and changed the world.

Are they all kind of the same?

A couple days before Rosh Hashanah of 5781, I read an article in Slate magazine online, by Amanda Prahl, and it was about kindness. It was about kindness in the TV show Ted Lasso, and the article was wise and engaging. It had me at “kindness” -- but the whole thing was phenomenal. I thought Ms. Prahl’s observations would make a great D’var Torah. I guess what I really thought was: It’s two days before Rosh Hashanah and this is better than my upcoming D’var Torah, in let me count how many ways!

Had I had more than two days, I might have worked on incorporating Ms. Prahl’s essay into a D’var Torah of my own. I did speak about kindness on the two days of that Rosh Hashanah, but not directly, and without nearly the perfect touch of Ms. Prahl. I might have woven her article into and around some stories from the Torah or midrash, had I had the same. If you’re a Ted Lasso fan just read her article!

What is Torah? Is it one of the many great books? Like Aristotle’s Ethics, which is a longer book about ethics than, say, Exodus and Leviticus and Deuteronomy combined? What is a D’var Torah -- is it in the same category as thoughtful articles and great TED Talks? If I had woven a secular writer’s beautiful essay on kindness into a Rosh Hashanah sermon, would that make it Torah?

Rabbi Moses Maimonides, the medieval scholar who is the greatest of all Jewish philosophers, says essentially: Yes. If it’s wisdom, and if it’s truth, then by definition its source is in the Divine. It’s Torah, and we have to expand our conception of Torah to include it.

And yet. There is more to Torah than really good content.

In the Zohar, Rabbi Shimon said: Woe to the person who says that this Torah has come to present stories in regular words. For if this were so, even in our time we would be able to make a Torah using ordinary words, better than any of the stories in the Torah... even the nobles of the world have among them superior words. We could just go and make a Torah out of those words.

Rabbi Shimon’s point is that the Torah is not unique because it’s one of the great books. And a D’var Torah might sound like a TED Talk, but it’s not just a really good TED Talk, and often it’s not even as good by TED standards.  (Although to be clear, I am always trying to be as good as a good TED Talk!)

It’s not that the Torah isn’t good content well-delivered. That’s just not all it is. The midrash says that the Torah is black fire inscribed on white fire. It is that something different that we need to define. We can’t completely define that something -- we can gesture at it, just as we point at the Torah and reach toward it when we see it in the air and sing V’zot HaTorah, this is the Torah.

So mah zot, what is it?

The introduction to revelation we read today in Exodus 19 begins: Bachodesh hashlishi l’tzaytz b’nai yisrael me-eretz mitzrayim, bayom hazeh -- ba’u midbar Sinai.

On the third new moon after B’nai Yisrael’s Exodus from Egypt,
On this day,
They come to Mt. Sinai.

As our rabbis understand it, the Torah says of itself both that it comes from a particular place and time in the past, and it comes from today, whenever today is. Torah is most Torah when the day you are encountering Torah is new and fresh, and the Torah itself is new and radical to you. This day when you encounter Torah in its fullest dimensions is in the immediate afterglow of the Exodus, even if it’s 2400+ years later. Torah isn’t just the message but what Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel calls the event -- a portal not backwards in history but outward, toward the top of the mountain and toward the fellow Israelites next to you.

We say this same thing twice a day in the Shma. V’hayu had’varim ha’eleh asher Anochi m’tzavcha hayom al l’vavecha. These words, which I charge you with today, shall be on your heart.

And the words of Torah themselves -- Heschel calls them prophetic understatement. Prophetic, understatement. I think Heschel’s doing his thing of taking something that seems unbelievable and saying: You think that’s unbelievable? That’s actually the easy one and here’s the hard one.

Heschel thinks that the problem people think they have is believing that God could reduce all of God’s thoughts for all time to this book, much of which is about animal sacrifice, and that God could somehow reveal God’s entire essential self and message to this small people at one particular point in time.

What Heschel thinks is more unbelievable is that the words in the Torah, however they got there, could possibly carry Divine wisdom and a Divine charge. As Rabbi Shimon said in the Zohar, they are just words, and we’ve seen mere humans make stories and philosophy out of words that are just as amazing if not more. Believe that these Torah words uniquely contain truth? That’s hard to believe, says Heschel.

So Heschel says the Torah is not such a wild leap but a prophetic understatement. The words themselves are not complete. They hint at only a fraction of what they are about. They are the first step on a ladder -- but without them you can’t begin to climb. They are each stone at the foot of Mt. Sinai -- but without standing on them you can’t go anywhere else. Words of Torah are prophetic understatements -- the words themselves are only the beginning.

So of course the Torah has animal sacrifices. And stories and laws, and maps and recipes, and architectural drawings and shopping lists, and poems and songs and sarcasm and comic relief, and if you go out further in the Bible into the prophets you’ve even got a sports section every so often! If you’re going to make something out of human words, you’ve got to use them in every way possible.

What is unique about the Torah is not what is written -- it’s where it can take you, where it can take us together, and where it can take the world as a consequence. The words and verses, one by one and one after another, written in scrolls and books don’t do the job alone, and reading and speaking them and even chanting them are just the start.

We have to recreate the event of Mt. Sinai together -- which is why we re-enact today’s reading every time we read the Torah, calling people up the mountain and sending the words to every single person standing every single place around it.

We have find the Torah together with all our generations. That’s what’s great about the chumash, the book with the Torah text and commentaries. The best chumashim and now the best websites surround you with teachers and translators from every era. As I never tire of saying to our kids when they come of age and hold the Torah, the noise these ornaments make should make you think of everyone who has ever chimed in on any word, trying to find the rung after the rung on the ladder which is that particular word.

We get help to find the Torah from beyond ourselves, somehow. My favorite midrash about the Ten Commandments imagines us standing at the foot of the mountain ready to talk to with our own individual mal’ach, a Divine messenger who wants to engage each of us separately with each one of the Ten Commandments, to explore their ins and outs and our objections and what-if’s and really?-s.

All of that is not a book, and it’s not a TED Talk.

We need not just to read the Ten Commandments as a list of principles, which they are, but to experience them as both so obvious -- I mean really we could come up with every single one of them in a brief meeting -- and also so radical, because look how missing they are in the world. We need to let the words say to us not just implement me, but also: Figure out why I’m necessary, and what is it about you humans that could make this possible, and what it is about you humans that you have to get to the bottom of that is in the way of don’t murder and don’t covet and why aren’t you resting and renewing. That’s the black fire on white fire.

And when we bring the Ten Commandments or any teachings of Torah out into our lives or the wider world, we’re supposed to try to bring those fires.

Imagine if whenever you mentioned or taught words of Torah, or argued about them, you knew they were alive with divinity and humanity more than the other words people use that are just on paper or in air -- and all that divinity and all that humanity were standing with you when you brought up those words.

That’s hard to do, especially when the other words in our conversations are less hot -- words presented in regular essays and stories and books and position papers. Each time we bring down the Torah and cool the fire off enough to use it, we bring something unique to the table, but we risk the Golden Calf -- we risk freezing the fire, making an idol of a single teaching, even a central one like Tzelem Elohim (the image of God), and stopping our own inquiry into the word and into who we people are in relation to what those words are asking.

So that’s why we come back with regularity every Shabbat to recreate the event at Mt. Sinai, to experience the words as fire, together with each other and with our many generations.

I am often guilty of not doing that. I have often treated the Torah even at its best as a position paper, as a really good article. When that works, for you or for people I work with on pressing issues of the day, dayenu, that might be enough for the time being.

But that’s not going to work all the time, because there are other books and other articles, and often Torah is meant to be the event of experiencing Torah wisdom, not just the content of that wisdom. It’s meant to be the commitment to what the Torah is teaching and to figuring out why and how that could be and why it’s not already. 

We usually know right and wrong already, and know what we want to say about it. Torah is more.

This dimension of Torah does not require Hebrew and it’s not just Jewish. If we relate to Torah the way I’m gesturing at, then we’ll know if a book or a great article from any source is just really good content, or if it too is Torah.

To know Torah as Torah, we have to be willing to be shaken up often when we encounter it, to know that our commitment is on the line anytime we learn Torah or try to impart it. That doesn’t come from just listening to a D’var Torah or reading one -- it requires you as well as I to be active participants. But Torah is so unique and so good that Torah itself will help us allow ourselves to tremble that way, and to open ourselves.

Because this is what the words of Torah are, according to Heschel, and none of these other books are like it:

No other book so loves and respects the life of man... It has the words that startle the guilty and the promise that upholds the forlorn... It continues to scatter seeds of justice and compassion, to echo God’s cry to the world and to pierce humanity’s armor of callousness....

There are no words more knowing, more disclosing and more indispensible, words both stern and graceful, heart-rending and healing. A truth so universal: God is One. A thought so consoling: God is with us in our distress.... A map of time: from creation to redemption. Guideposts along the way: the Seventh Day: An offering: contrition of the heart. A utopia: Would that all people were prophets... a standard so bold: ye shall be holy. A commandment so daring: Love your neighbor as yourself. A fact so sublime: human and divine pathos can be in accord. And a gift so undeserved: the ability to repent.

If that’s Torah, what soul would not want to be receiving it, every day.

Whenever you hear words this way, or whenever words you read bring you that picture -- then you know what you are engaged in is not just good content, but Torah.

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.