Parashat Yitro
January 22, 2022, 20 Shvat 5782
Torah: Exodus 18:1-20:23; Triennial 18:1-20:23
Haftarah: Isaiah 6:1-7:6, 9:5-6 (Ashkenazim);
Sephardim Isaiah 6:1-13
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In this week's Torah Sparks, you'll find a D'var Torah on the Parashah by Ilana Kurshan called "Sitting Atop a Sundial",
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb poses questions titled "Tabula Rasa?" and Bex Stern Rosenblatt writes about
"Stumps and Seeds" in the Haftarah.
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Sitting Atop a Sundial
Ilana Kurshan
Our parashah contains the words of the Ten Commandments, which God speaks to Moses and the people of Israel from Mount Sinai. The Ten Commandments are introduced by the verse, “God spoke all these words, saying” (20:1). The midrash comments on the seeming redundancy in this verse; why does the Torah need to specify that God spoke “all” these words? Wouldn’t it have been sufficient to say that God spoke these words? The rabbis understand that the additional word “all” comes to teach about God’s unique relationship to time, which has implications both for the way we understand the revelation at Sinai and for the way we experience life’s temporality.
According to one of the earliest midrashim on the book of Exodus, the Mekhilta, the Torah teaches that God spoke “all” these words to signify that God spoke all the Ten Commandments simultaneously, as one utterance (Mekhilta d’Shirata, 20:1). Unlike human beings, who can articulate only one syllable at a time, God can utter many words simultaneously, as if God’s speech transcends temporality. As a result, the Ten Commandments were not spoken at one particular moment, and were not addressed only to the Israelites who had left Egypt; rather, as the midrash in Exodus Rabbah (20:1) explains, all prophets received at Sinai the prophecies they would deliver in subsequent generations. The midrash quotes Isaiah, who says, “From the time that it was, there was I, and now the Lord God has sent me, accompanied by His spirit” (48:16). Isaiah received his prophecy in “the time that was” on Sinai, but only “now,” centuries later, has he been given permission to prophesy.
The midrash adds that it was not just the prophets, but also the sages of every generation, who received their wisdom on Sinai. Since God spoke “all these words” at once, in one timeless utterance, all the sages heard them as well, and thus their wisdom—which fills the Talmud and the midrash and countless subsequent commentaries—was spoken at Sinai as well (Exodus Rabbah 28:6). In this sense both the Written Torah and the Oral Torah were given at Sinai, and every new insight we have into God’s Torah is essentially the recollection of a teaching our souls once heard directly from God. The rabbis add that the words spoken at Sinai had no echo, which makes sense, since they did not unfold in time, but were spoken simultaneously to everyone who had been and would be created. Every soul received its share of Torah at Sinai, states the midrash, citing Moshe’s words to the people in Deuteronomy (29:14): “I make this covenant…not with you alone, but with those standing here with us this day before the Lord our God and with those who are not with us here this day.”
In further elaborating on the verse that introduces the Ten Commandments, the rabbis explain that it is not just God’s speech that transcends time, but all of God’s various activities. “Come and see that the ways of God are not like those of mortal man,” declare the rabbis (Exodus Rabbah 28:5), invoking a common midrashic trope. Unlike a mortal king, who cannot “wage war and at the same time be a scribe and a teacher of little children,” God can simultaneously execute both the Exodus from Egypt (waging war against Pharaoh at the sea) and the revelation at Sinai (dictating and teaching Torah). God is not hampered or limited by time, but can speak and do everything all at once. Likewise, God can turn dust to man and man to dust in the same instant, which explains how life and death can take place simultaneously, and how one person might rejoice while another weeps bitterly (Exodus Rabbah 28:4). God, in other words, is the ultimate multi-tasker; before God can even get around to drafting a to-do list, God has already gotten it all done.
For the rabbis, God’s unique temporal capabilities attest to God’s intimate connection with humanity. God can hear the prayers and cries of all human beings simultaneously, regardless of where they are called out and why, as per the verse from Psalms, “O You that hears prayer, unto You does all flesh come” (Mekhilta d’Shirata 15:11). Furthermore, God can respond to all prayers instantaneously, as per Isaiah’s prophecy, “And it will be that before they call, I will answer; while they are still speaking, I will hear” (65:24). As Lynn Kaye notes in her book Time in the Babylonian Talmud (Cambridge, 2018), “God’s temporal precision is an expression of ‘closeness,’ analogous to physical presence in the material world.” God can transcend time, but God is also closely in touch with mortal human beings who exist very much in time.
We might be tempted to wish that as human beings, we could emulate God’s temporal prowess. If only we could speak and do everything at the same time, how efficient we would all be! And yet as Mark Twain is credited as saying, “Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.” So much of the meaning in our lives is a product of our temporality. Our emotions are powerful because they are distinct from one another; if we always felt the same way, a wedding would not be a height of joy, nor would the loss of a loved one be an occasion for acute sadness. Likewise, if we always knew everything we’d ever know, we’d miss out on the pleasure of learning and discovery. Since we exist in time, the periods of our lives are distinct from one another: Shabbat feels different from the rest of the week, youth feels different from maturity, and a graduation is a moment of poignancy because it signifies the end of a stage of life that will never recur and the beginning of a future that is still uncertain. Unlike God, who is depicted in the midrash as sitting atop a sundial (Mekhilta d’Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai 12:29), we human beings experience time casting its long shadow on our lives, and illuminating us with its radiance.
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Tabula Rasa?
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Text: Shemot 20:4-6
4“You shall not make for yourself a carved image—any likeness of anything in heaven above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water beneath the earth; 5you shall not bow down to them nor worship them. For I am the Lord your God, a jealous God, counting/visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, the third generation and fourth generation for my foes, 6but showing mercy to thousands, to My friends and to those keeping My commandments.
This is part of the so-called Ten Commandments (in Hebrew: Ten Statements) given at Mount Sinai.
· What is the prohibition in this section? Why might people be drawn to the actions that this forbids? Why do you think that the consequences of this iniquity will affect future generations?
· How do you feel about God’s warning that the iniquity of the parents will affect the next generations? Why? How realistic is it?
· Why does God’s mercy seem to extend much farther than his punishment? How might it manifest itself?
Commentary: Ibn Ezra Shemot 20:5
What does Scripture mean by visiting the iniquities of the father upon the children? …If a father was wicked and his son did not follow in his footsteps, then the son does not bear the iniquity of the father… God is patient with the wicked because it is possible that he will repent and bear a son who is better than he. Now if the son walks in the footsteps of his father… then God will not be patient…
· In what situation does God punish a generation for the acts of a previous generation?
· How does Ibn Ezra explain the apparent lack of punishment for some wicked people?
· Are there situations today in which a generation suffers the consequences of the actions of the previous generation(s)? Does Ibn Ezra’s distinction of when such consequence takes place hold true in those cases?
Ibn Ezra fears that some might find an apparent contradiction between the section we are studying in Shemot, and a commandment in Devarim 24:16: “Fathers shall not be put to death for children, nor shall children be put to death for fathers; a person shall be put to death for his own offense.” *
Commentary: Ibn Ezra Devarim 24:16
Fathers shall not be put to death … “the fathers shall not be put to death for children” is a commandment directed to Israel. However, God is the one who metes out punishment in visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children.
· What is the contradiction that Ibn Ezra feared that some might find? What is the inherent difference between the cases? How does that account for the difference?
*A more extensive study of this verse can be found
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Stumps and Seeds
Bex Stern Rosenblatt
One of the recurrent themes in the Tanakh is the promise of regeneration after near complete destruction. It’s a necessary theme - we experience near total destruction over and over again. Not only do we have to believe that times will get better, times also do consistently get better before they get worse. This week’s haftarah portrays that elegantly. We read this week of the call of Isaiah to be a prophet. It’s strikingly similar to the call of many other prophets, including the call of Moses. They both protest, claiming to be unworthy and unsuited to the task before being reassured by God that God will be with them. But Moses and Isaiah are located on opposite ends of the destruction-regeneration spectrum. Moses leads the people out after near destruction. Isaiah prophesizes the coming terrible destruction to a people who are doomed not to heed his word.
The final image of the chapter is striking. We read, as translated by Robert Alter,
“And the LORD shall drive man far away and abandonment grow in the midst of the land. And yet a tenth part shall be in it and turn back. And it shall be ravaged like a terebinth and an oak which though felled have a stump within them, the holy seed is its stump.”
It’s a typical image of regeneration following destruction. Israel is represented as a tree which has been cut down, only the stump remaining. Yet a tree can send up new trunks out of its felled stump, so long as the root system is intact. Likewise, Israel will create a new version of itself after the majority of the people have been wiped out. Another possible translation, as suggested by Rashi, presents an image of a tree casting away its leaves, with only the trunk left behind. In this image, destruction is more natural and also more positive. The holy seed is found through the necessary process of casting away the frivolous surroundings. Nothing good was harmed in the discovery of the holiness.
Shel Silverstein also created a striking image of a stump. In the finale of his book for children, The Giving Tree, after a tree who loves a boy has given him everything she had, nothing of the tree remains except for the stump. The boy, grown now to an old man, returns to the tree to sit and rest on the stump. “And the tree was happy.” Here, there is no future, no next step. The boy and the tree have grown old together, reduced each other to nothing. And there is nothing more to give, nothing more to come from either of them. The stump, at least, is happy.
Perhaps, reading Isaiah and The Giving Tree in light of each other, we can make sense of both of them. The Giving Tree has given of herself so completely that she nearly ceases to exist. But there is an existence as a stump. Sometimes, it is when we are reduced past any point we thought was possible, that we discover what our essence is, that we can decide to be a holy seed.
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