Climbing Mount Sinai: Yitro

Climbing Mount Sinai

D’var Torah for Parashat Yitro

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

How we interact with the world around us depends on how we are raised.

As any new parent knows, an infant’s needs have to be satisfied as soon as possible.  I remember many a midnight feeding when my daughter was just a few months old.  I would put the formula bottle in the microwave (don’t judge me!) and warm it up for just a few seconds.  The crying never ceased, but as the seconds ticked down on the glowing timer, I would count along:  “Ten, nine, eight, seven…” To this day I think my daughter likes math because of this early exposure to numbers.

Later, as they begin to realize that there’s a larger world around them, we teach our children to share.  It goes along with learning to be part of a group, all sharing whatever limited supplies are available at any moment.

Human beings, more than other animals, need to be taught the mechanics of group interaction.  Not because we don’t have the genes for it—we do.  Rather, it’s because we also have an exaggerated notion of self.  All too often we are prone to think we deserve something, not necessarily because we earned it, but because we are unique, and therefore special. 

I saw a seagull snatch a piece of food in its beak and rapidly fly away with it.  Not rapidly enough, it seems, as within seconds it found itself chased and surrounded by four or five other gulls, all trying to get a piece of whatever it was the first bird had.  A similar mechanism works within us human beings, only magnified several times over due to our inflated sense of self-worth. 

Taking for ourselves what does not belong to us is not acceptable behavior; this rule is drummed into us from the earliest age.  We have to be taught this law over and over, and if we are caught in the act, we can be sure to be punished for it.

Such is the nature of human beings and of the laws we create in order to protect the group of which we are part.

In this week’s Torah portion, Yitro (Ex. 18:1—20:23), the Israelites receive the Ten Commandments.  It’s a powerful scene, told in a way that engages all our senses:  an enormous blast of a shofar gets louder by the minute; fire and smoke surround Mount Sinai, scene of the revelation of God to the entire People of Israel (past, present and future); the mountain itself starts shaking and quaking; and above it all, the voice of God thunders from heaven, declaring God’s presence so powerfully that the people beg Moses to lower the volume and speak for God.

Clearly this is important.

Yet when we read these laws, they seem so simple and self evident, we wonder why all the drama.  These commandments are not very different from prior law codes, such as the one of Eshnunna, a Mesopotamian center that thrived around the year 3000 BCE, a full 18 centuries before Moses; or the later (500 years before Moses), more famous code of Hammurabi.  It seems clear from all these law codes that human nature hasn’t changed much from the earliest times.  People have always tried getting away with murder.

What the Torah tries to do at this point is to simplify everything.  At least for now, leaving to a minimum the reward and punishment aspect of the individual laws, the Torah wants us to look at ourselves and then to examine our interaction with the world around us. 

The first and most obvious difference between the Ten Commandments and the other, previous law codes is that this set stems not from the current ruler, but from God.  No human being is above the law; no temporary ruler cannot deify himself and thus be exempt from God’s laws.  God is the ultimate and eternal source of these laws; God alone is the judge.

The first four commandments thus deal with our relationship with God.  God is the only God, the only one we may worship, in tandem with with no other gods.  We may form no physical image of God.  The Sabbath is set aside as the day sanctifying our relationship with God.

The fifth commandment has us beginning to understand our relationships with other people, starting with our parents.  They are the ones who have given us our physical form, who passed on the spark of life to us, who sheltered us, provided us with food and security until we could do so for ourselves and.  As such, parents are partners with God and deserve to be taken seriously and respectfully.

The next four commandments regulate our relationships with others around us.  We are not to murder, commit adultery, steal or give false witness.  These four revolve around the issue of trust.  Can others trust us as much as we would like to trust them?  Can we do something in stealth, imagining that there would be no repercussions, no consequences?  With God as judge, jury and witness, the answer is obviously, no, we may not.  There will be consequences, there must be no doubt of that.  Nothing is hidden from God.

Finally comes the most difficult commandment of all:  We must not covet.  Desiring something so much that we might be led astray in getting it is a danger, a pitfall many of us fall into time and time again.  Call it addiction, call it lust, it’s a hunger that can never be satisfied.  The tenth commandment is actually the most powerful of them all, for it would have us control ourselves.  It gives us power over our own behavior.  With this commandment, we become judge, witness and jury.

We can be masters of our fate, as long as we obey this most difficult of all commandments.  It’s hard, because we want.  We are born wanting, we live our whole life in expectation of having our needs satisfied.  We throw tantrums, quarrel and fight wars when we feel that our needs are not gratified.  We lapse into our basic, animal state of being when we give in to our desires.

An interesting exercise would be reading the Ten Commandments in reverse.  Start with the tenth, the one that deals with our most basic instincts as human beings, then climb upwards.  As though climbing a tall mountain, with each new level, we rise above the common, above the lowest denominator, and reach for the highest level of all.  Finally we achieve the kind of partnership Moses would have us attain:  a sacred yet personal partnership with the Kaddosh Baruch Hu, The Holy One, Blessed Be God.

Sinai is a mountain that exists not only in a specific geographical region.  There is a Sinai within each of us, waiting to be explored, waiting to be climbed.

© 2014 by Boaz D. Heilman