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Yitro

by Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon

This week we read the Torah portion of Yitro, the great moment of the revelation at Mt. Sinai , which includes the climactic events of the Ten Commandments and the theophany at Sinai, the most direct revelation of all.  It is a testament to brevity and concision, just a few paragraphs that form the core of Western ethical thought.   It is these few words that have become the essence of western religious experience ever since.  Important stuff.

But in today’s world the entire concept of revelation is a complicated and challenging one for most of us.  Do you personally believe in revelation at all—that is, that God reveals a greater power, will, and plan to us directly?

Skeptics—which, at heart, includes most of us today—can easily highlight a series of improbabilities in the central tale of this epochal Jewish narrative of revelation.  First, are we to actually believe that at Mt. Sinai God revealed God’s own essence to us directly?  That somehow, in some supernatural way, a group of Israelite freed slaves communicated directly with a being much greater than themselves—and this only happened once, more than three thousand years ago?  And are we also to believe that not only did the Israelites think God connected with them, but also that God spoke actual words, and our ancestors not only understood them but committed them to memory?

Let’s address these challenges as well as we can.  First, clearly our tradition teaches that there have been moments of overwhelming connection to God—and the greatest of these is the ma’amad har Sinai, the event of standing at Sinai, which most people believe took place—if it happened—about 3200 years ago. Our ancestors certainly believed that God communicated directly with them, and that a certain covenant, a moral contract was created at that spectacular moment. 

There are many ways to view revelation.  While the text of Parshat Yitro, this week’s portion in Exodus, sees the experience of Sinai as a unique experience—filled as it is with dramatic pronouncements, lightning, thunder, earthquakes and so on—Jewish tradition has always taught that “each of us stood at Sinai, including all the generations of Jews not yet born.”  In other words, we are all participants in revelation in our own way.  Just as we all must see ourselves as having come out of Egypt as freed slaves, so we all must come to understand our relationship with God directly.  God direct revelation—God’s will revealed to us for our own lives—must be given to us, and accepted by each of us, directly.

My grandfather, Rabbi and Professor Samuel S. Cohon, had a concept of progressive revelation—that each of us, in every generation, has the ability to conceive of and perceive God in his or her own way.  Moses’ generation called it the revelation at Sinai.  Our generation might call it divine inspiration, or even creativity, a way to channel the divine energy that flows through our world always, and sometimes gifts us with a spark of greatness or genius. 

Is this revelation today, for you or for me?  I suggest that it is.  When we feel that remarkable connection to the universe that allows us to create—to write, to sing, to play music, to dance, to love freely—we are experiencing a kind of revelation.  It is when God is revealed to us in the holiness we can touch in our own lives.  Revelation simply means knowing God’s presence, through beauty, inspiration, and caring. 

But in Yitro there is more.  For the content of revelation here is the Ten Commandments. What are these, really? 

The Hebrew phrase for the commandments is “Aseret hadibrot”, the ten statements, which implies that they are both more and less than commandments.  The Ten Commandments begin with the statement “I am the Lord your God,” a oneness that bases our religious tradition on the belief in one God.  One God requires one code of morality, one consistent ethical system.  And that is the basis for much more than a series of specific rules.  It is an essential statement of the meaning and purpose of all human life.  We can, and should, be good.  Life is a moral exercise, a chance to live in a way that advances goodness and holiness in the world.

Not a small task.  But an essential one that brings meaning to everything we do.