Sermon: Yitro

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 8 February 2021

In the Talmud, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi tells a story about the giving of the Ten Commandments that we do not find in our Torah portion this morning. I am going to begin with that story, which (in the spirit of midrash) I have slightly adapted and embellished.[1]

He tells the story of how, at the moment of revelation, Moses is transported into the heavens, into God’s celestial court, in which he is greeted with hostility by the angels.

The heavenly host question God’s decision to give revelation to human beings. ‘You have kept this secret for 974 generations before even the creation of the world,’ they exclaim, ‘and now you are going to give it to these creatures? Surely it should stay up here with us! It says in the Psalms that Your glory is in the heavens – so, nu, keep it here with us!’

At this moment, God turns to Moses and says, ‘You tell them why.’

But Moses is scared to speak in the face of the angels: ‘I fear being burned by the breath of their mouths!’

So God says, ‘hold on to my throne, and no harm will come to you.’

Girded by this reassurance, Moses grasps God’s throne and turns to the angels of the heavenly host, and says: ‘In this revelation you covet so much, it says “I am the Eternal Your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt.” Were you ever slaves in Egypt? Did you ever suffer the sting of the slave-driver’s whip? Do you understand what it means to be redeemed by plagues and wonders, standing at the shore of the sea, waiting for a miracle to save you?

‘It also says, “Remember the day of Shabbat and keep it holy.” Do you labour and toil six days a week, so that at the end of those six days you yearn for some rest and peace?

‘And it says, “Honour your father and your mother.’ Do you have parents who brought you into the world, raised you, and whom you face the prospect of one day having to lose?

‘And it says, “You shall not murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not steal.” Do you suffer from all the jealousies and suspicions and rivalries of humanity, that you would do any of these things to each other?’

When Moses finished speaking, the angels agreed that, indeed, humanity should be the ones to receive God’s revelation.

We receive the commandments because (unlike the angels) we are real – and being real means being chaotic, fallible, imperfect. It means being subject to all the contingencies and vicissitudes of life and the world.

But, in the words of the Enlightenment Swiss philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we are also ‘perfectible’ – we have the ability to move towards the perfect, even if we do not ever arrive at the destination. We have the ability to improve ourselves and our condition.

Now, we might also be suspicious of the idea of ‘perfectibility’. We might say are we not good enough as we are? Indeed, at the beginning of the first pandemic lockdown, there was much to be said for this scepticism. When there were those who spoke of lockdown as an opportunity to write that novel you had always wanted to write, or losing weight, or saving the planet, there were also those whose goal was simply to survive, to get through the trauma, to come out at the other end still intact.

So much of the time, we find ourselves responding to others’ definition of what is meant by ‘perfect’ – those angels (who are not in heaven, but) who sit on our shoulder and whisper in our ears that we are not worthy, that we have not achieved the required level of perfection. And, like Moses, we fear that if we get too close to them, they will end up burning us.

The idea of divinity itself poses this problem of perfectibility. In his book on the Ten Commandments, the American-Israeli writer David Hazony draws our attention to the fact that the Shabbat command that we read today is unusual, in that it commands us to rest on the seventh day every week because God rested on the seventh day after the creation of the world.[2]

In his commentary on the Torah, Ovadiah ben Ya’akov, an Italian philosopher and mathematician (as well as an expert on Torah), also known as Sforno, points out that this explanation for the imperative that we rest on Shabbat is to remind us to be like God, in a continuation of the idea that, from the beginning, humanity was created in the divine image.

There are not that many things we are told to do because God did it. Usually, we are told to do things because God says so. Occasionally, we are told to do things because it is good to do so. There are not that many things we are told to do because God did it. One of the other things that does fall into this category comes in the middle of the book of Leviticus, in a section in which a number of the Ten Commandments are repeated – Kedoshim tihyu, ki kadosh ani Adonai Eloheychem ‘You shall be holy, for I, the Eternal your God, am holy’.[3]

Once again, there seems to be a lot of pressure here to be perfect -according to whose definition of perfect? What on earth does it mean to be holy?

Hazony answers this concern by posing yet another question: why does God rest? If we are to be more God-like by resting on Shabbat, what are we going to get out of it that God got out of it? Was God tired from all that creating? Surely we could respond, like Moses in the story, that we need Shabbat because we have a hard life of toil, but that God surely has no need for it.

Hazony answers his own question: the reason God needs Shabbat is lest we might otherwise conclude that God was identical with creation, and that God did not exist separately from it. That God exists only to provide the things in the world, and is not somehow more than that.

So, similarly, Hazony says, Shabbat is a reminder to us that we are not what we make. We should not be defined solely (or perhaps at all) by our ability to respond to the demands and expectations of others. We are not what we eat. We have value simply in our existence, simply in our ability to be in the world.

Therefore, Shabbat is our opportunity to work on ourselves – to work out what it is for us to be perfect in a way that is authentic to us.

When the tyrant, Rufus, asked Rabbi Akiva what made Shabbat different from other days, Akiva answered with a question: what makes individual human beings difference from each other?[4] Shabbat is not only a day distinguished from others, disaggregated from the week, so it is an opportunity for us to stand, like the two shabbat candles, as individuals that have our own identity that is separate and unique, before, like the Havdalah candle, we are woven abck into the tangled and complex demands and necessities of life.

We do have the ability to be more perfect – but we must be the source of what it means to be more perfect, and everyone’s answer to that question will be as different as our appearance and our personality. As we learned in our study passage, the face of God, the taste of the manna, appear to us all as something different; as something that is particularly relevant to us.

Shabbat gives us that opportunity to step back and distinguish between what it is that others expect of us, and what we might reasonably expect of ourselves. And it gives us the opportunity to set our own goals and aspirations that might have nothing to do with what we produce in the world, and what usefulness we have to others. It allows us to see how we might become more perfect versions of ourselves. That is our defiant response to our own ‘perfect’ angels.

Shabbat Shalom

[1] Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 88b-89a

[2] https://www.simonandschuster.co.uk/books/The-Ten-Commandments/David-Hazony/9781416562405

[3] Leviticus 19:2

[4] Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin 65b