Yithro: the Law as a Unifier

 

The climax of this week’s parsha is the Sinai experience. Mount Sinai is portrayed as the great collective experience of the Israelites. It is the event that attested to a direct interaction between Gd and Israel. The stone tablets with the ten commandments are the certificate of that experience.  The law itself is the lasting authentication of the experience.

Witnessing the incredible is no longer convincing. The entertainment industry has made impossible experiences commonplace and increasingly intimate. The glasses and gloves and haptic vests of virtual reality make any implausible experience visible and palpable. Rock concerts are Sinai re-enactments. These inventions impugn the significance of the event. Did humans really land on the moon, or was it all staged?

The tablets of testimony were made unavailable.  The story in this week’s parsha is disturbed by the details that are described later. These tablets are shattered. The physical evidence is destroyed. The replacement tablets are immediately entombed in the ark, not available for public or private viewing. Only the narrative survives.

The law itself, what was inscribed on the tablets, is what survives. By virtue of the sanctification of that law the story of the awesome collective experience endures. The law evokes the memory of the unification of the Israelites and their interaction with the Divine. The law is the central principle that creates the nation, and the giving of the law is the foundational story.

Attendance at Sinai becomes the defining experience. The tribes of Israel are those that beheld the spectacle and respected this law. The sentence that preceded the arrival at Sinai reports:  (18;27)

Moshe sent his father-in-law off,

 and he went home to his land.

Yithro’s absence means that he and his people are separate. Although  it was Yithro who suggested the principle of a public declaration of the law, he absented himself, and presumably his people, from the great declaration . This sequence of events is somewhat related to the topic of the current daf yomi  ( Sanhedrin 59). The current topic in the Talmud Page of the Day is the Rabbinic understanding of the distinction between the law as it applies to Israelites and Gentiles. This section of Talmud is an origin of the idea that  there are seven universal laws, six that were understood by Adam and a seventh ( the prohibition of eating the flesh of an animal while it is still alive)  was proscribed to Noah and his descendants. Israelites were given 613: the Torah ( by gematria, the  Torah's value of 611} combined with the two commandments heard directly from God at Sinai. The Torah, our unique law, defines the Israelite.  (12;49)

תּוֹרָ֣ה אַחַ֔ת יִהְיֶ֖ה לָֽאֶזְרָ֑ח וְלַגֵּ֖ר הַגָּ֥ר בְּתוֹכְכֶֽם׃

There shall be one law for the citizen and for the stranger who dwells among you.

 

The law conveys history forward. The judgments of the past are brought forward as rules. The sanctification of the ten commandments imbues them with the privilege of analysis.  They are studied until they make sense. They are hallowed and repeated as the basis of rationality and wisdom. At core, they are sacred.

The sanctity of the law, the laws that apply to all, devolves from its acceptance. Now we see that agreement threatened by populism. The impulse of the moment, the prejudice conjured by politicians, ineffectual greed, eclipses the consistency that makes the law meaningful. When the application of the law is distorted, it no longer unifies; it is weaponized.

 If the law is not flexible, it is not just.   When the starving serf "steals" the grain he has produced by his labor from the lord of the manner it is not the same as a crypto fraud. But the law cannot be so fluid that the lawyers for the rich and powerful can circumvent necessary justice by creating technical delays and brokering political deals.

 

I hope that the law is not a nice idea whose time has passed. The torah still binds me to my Gd and my people

no AI