Yitro (Exodus 18:1 - 20:23)

Among the many annoyances that stuff our e-mail inboxes are jokes and chain letters. One of the chain letters that has been circulating among rabbis and synagogue leaders describes the attributes of the perfect rabbi.

The perfect Rabbi preaches exactly fifteen minutes. He condemns sins but never upsets anyone. The perfect rabbi starts his day at the 7:00 AM morning minyan and works until midnight.

The perfect rabbi is also a janitor.

The perfect rabbi earns $50 a week. He always wears good clothes, buys good books, drives a good car, and gives about $50 a week to the poor.

The perfect rabbi is 28 years old and has preached for 30 years. He has a burning desire to work with teenagers and he spends all of his time with senior citizens. The perfect Rabbi smiles all the time, but with a straight face, because he has a sense of humour that keeps him seriously dedicated to his work.

The perfect rabbi makes 15 calls daily on congregation families, shut-ins and the hospitalized, and he is always in his office when needed.

If your rabbi does not measure up, simply send this letter to six other synagogues that are tired of their rabbi, too. Then bundle up your rabbi and send him to the synagogue on the top of the list. In one week, you will receive 1,643 rabbis, and one of them will be perfect.

What makes any joke funny is the kernel of truth that it comprises. The fact is that I, like most of my colleagues, do not live up to those impossible expectations. But before you wrap me up in brown paper and twine, perhaps you should have a look at the way the Torah describes the role of a rabbi.

Parashat Yitro provides a different standard for what a rabbi should be. In Parashat Yitro, the perfect rabbi is Moshe Rabbenu – Moses our Rabbi.

Up until now, Moses has been a great leader. Moses freed Israel from the bonds of Egypt, and led Israel across the parted sea. And then things began to bog down. “Moses sat as a magistrate among the people, while the people stood about Moses from morning until evening.” The Moses we meet in Yitro has become the “perfect rabbi.”

His father-in-law, Jethro, sees Moses hard at work, doing what a perfect rabbi is supposed to do, and Jethro says: “The thing you are doing is not right; you will surely wear yourself out, and these people as well.”

Jethro was not happy with what he saw. He saw Moses deciding disputes. He saw Moses answering questions, he saw Moses instructing people in the laws and teachings of God. He saw Moses doing all the things that his congregation expected him to do, and Jethro was not at all pleased. He thought Moses had lost sight of his purpose.

So, Jethro turned to Moses and set him straight. The first thing he did was to define what Moses was supposed to be doing with his time. Jethro said to Moses: “You represent the people before God: you bring the disputes before God, and enjoin upon them the laws and the teachings, and make known to them the way they are to go and the practices they are to follow.”

He tells Moses that the job of a leader is to see the big picture, to decide policy, and to provide vision.

Once he has finished telling Moses what it is that he is supposed to be doing, Jethro instructs Moses to appoint others to handle the details.

In modern terms, Jethro tells Moses to stop trying to micro-manage the nation. He tells him to take a broad view, to set a clear course, and point the nation in the right direction. What Jethro does is give Moses a basic lesson in leadership skills.

This story about Jethro’s visit is told right before the revelation at Sinai. Yet, it has been noted that the story seems to be out of place. At the beginning of the story, we are told that “Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, brought Moses’ sons and wife to him in the wilderness, where he was encamped at the mountain of God.” That just can’t be right. It can’t be right because the arrival at Mount Sinai is only described in the next chapter. Obviously, then, Israel must first have encamped at Mount Sinai, experienced the revelation, and only then did Jethro arrive.

But if that is the correct chronology, why is the story of Jethro moved forward in time? And why is it done in so clumsy a manner that it is obvious that it is out of chronological order?

Our Sages say: eyn seder mukdam u’me’uhar batorah, “There is no chronological order in the Torah.” What that phrase implies is that the Torah consciously deviates from the timeline when it wants to make a point. These deviations are obvious not because of poor editing, but because we are supposed to be aware of the departure from the chronological order, and then ask ourselves what the Torah is trying to emphasize by abandoning the time line. What is the lesson or the value that is being transmitted or reinforced by this literary device?

In our case, we find that Jethro instructs Moses to appoint assistants before the revelation at Sinai. Why? Is the lesson that we are meant to learn simply that the Torah could not be given before the establishment of the judiciary? Perhaps, but couldn’t that be done just as easily and effectively afterwards?

I think that the lesson is meant to be something else. The description of Moses at the beginning of Yitro pictures a Moses who has stopped leading and started managing. He no longer provides moral vision. He is too preoccupied with governing. The story of Jethro is put before the revelation at Sinai as if to tell us that Moses could not ascend Sinai as a manager or a governor or as a judge. Moses could ascend Sinai only as a leader.

Why? Why could Moses not bring Israel to the revelation at Sinai as an act of good governance?

The answer to that is simple. Governance is about maintaining equilibrium. It is about order and about preserving the status quo. Governance is about making everyone happy. It is about keeping everyone satisfied. Moshe Rabbenu – Moses our Rabbi – was not supposed to keep everyone happy and satisfied. Like every rabbi, he was supposed to teach Israel Torah.

Receiving the Torah is not an act of governance. It is revelation and it is revolution. The theophany at Sinai was a transforming event that changed Israel then, and changes us forever. Change is brought about by leaders. Change is not the business of managers or of governors or even of judges. Change is the definition of leadership. It is the standard by which leadership is measured.

Change is not what is expected of perfect rabbis, but it is what rabbis are supposed to do, whether their congregations expect it or not. Why? Because, as William Safire wrote in his final Op-Ed column in the New York Times: “When you're through changing, you're through.”

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

Beshallah (Exodus 13:17 - 17:16)

“This is my God and I will praise him.” (Exodus 15:2)

When the people Israel crossed the Red Sea, two things happened: the waters split, and between man and God all distance was gone. There was no veil, no vagueness. There was only His presence: This is my God, the Israelite exclaimed. Most miracles that happen in space are lost in the heart; the miracle of the Red Sea became a song, “The Song of the Sea.” (Abraham Joshua Heschel)

The words of poetry have no meaning. They are the brush strokes of a painting. They show what the poet cannot tell. Poetry conveys the ineffable in sounds that can be seen. It cannot be understood, because it does not explain or describe. It is the emotion itself; it is a sensation.

The Song of the Sea is the poetry of revelation. It is awe. It is the spiritual reality of becoming and of knowing.

When we allow ourselves to experience the Song of the Sea, hear its music, feel its majesty, and see its wonder, we share Israel’s immediate experience of God as This.

Avinoam Sharon


© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

Bo (Exodus 10:1 - 13:16)

In this week’s Torah portion, parashat Bo, we are instructed to observe the festival of Passover, and to tell our children: Ba’avur zeh asah Adonai li b’tzeiti mimitzrayim.

“It is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.” That is how the Revised Standard Version and the Jewish Publication Society translation render that verse. The problem is that the translation makes no sense whatsoever. What is because of what the Lord did? What is it? We are not even given a clue.

The King James Version translates the verse a little differently: “This is done because of that which the Lord did unto me when I came forth out of Egypt.” At least that makes some sense. But is “this” the holiday? Eating matzoth? Not eating leaven? And even then, what does the verse mean? What are we supposed to be teaching our children when we recite that verse to them? Is the sum total of the message simply that we make a Passover Seder in commemoration of the Exodus from Egypt? That’s it? Is that supposed to make the event significant for our children in their own lives? Does that make the Torah come alive for them?

Well, some important medieval and modern commentators seem to think that the message is, nevertheless, just that. Yet reading the Hebrew, I cannot shake the feeling that the verse means more. Reading the Hebrew reinforces my conviction that the Bible is not merely an expression of historical reminiscence, but that it carries a living message for us here and now.

The Spanish commentator Abraham Ibn Ezra seems to have had the same feeling. According to Ibn Ezra, if the verse meant that “this” or “it” is done because of what the Lord did long ago, then the verse should read ba’avur asher (for that which) asa Adonai (the Lord did), and not ba’avur zeh (for this) asa Adonai. The Hebrew word zeh (this) points to the here-and-now, not to the past.

But I think that what was really bothering Ibn Ezra wasn’t the wording of the verse as much as the purpose of the Torah. That would also seem to explain what bothered Rashi. Rashi comments: Ba’avur zeh – ba’avur she’ekayem mitzvotav. Rashi also wants to know “for what?” And he answers: “in order that I perform His commandments.” According to what Rashi is saying, when we sit at the table performing the rituals of the Passover Seder, and we repeat the Biblical verse, we are not stating that we are performing the mitzvoth because God freed us from bondage. After all, performing God’s will is not a form of debt repayment. Rather, we are telling our children that the reason God freed us from bondage was in order that we may perform his commandments. When we sit at the Passover Seder and repeat the Biblical verse to our children, we are telling them that it was in order to do this – to have this Seder and to keep these commandments – that God freed us from Egypt.

Being Jewish is not about commemorating the past, but about living in the present. Mitzvoth are not performed as a form of worship; they are a way of life. If we performed mitzvoth simply as repayment of our old debt to God for freeing us from bondage, we would still be slaves. We would be serving a higher purpose, we would be the slaves of God rather than of Pharaoh, but we would still be slaves. The purpose of mitzvoth is not worshipping God; they are not about acknowledging His holiness. Mitzvoth make us holy through the exercise of our own free will.

Israel was released from slavery in order to be free to perform the commandments, not in order to be bound to obey them.

In 1940, my grandfather decided to flee Brussels rather than risk living under German occupation. For many of his friends and family, fleeing seemed the greater risk. They were civilians. Many of them had lived through the First World War. They had experienced occupation. They couldn’t understand why my grandfather would uproot his family, turn his children into refugees, and perhaps put them in danger, when he could have simply stayed put in Brussels and watched the war pass by. What was the risk? Food shortages? Maybe a little forced labour for the younger men. And even if the rumours they had heard were true, then maybe some of the men might be sent to labour camps. Certainly not the kind of risks that justified becoming a refugee with no roof over your head, no guarantee of food, no income, and the real dangers of wandering across Europe at war in the hope of finding a safe haven.

But my grandfather saw things differently. He wanted to know who would guarantee that kosher food would be available under the German occupation. If he or his sons were sent off to work in a labour camp, would the Germans give them time to pray? Would they be able to observe Shabbat? For my grandfather, freedom meant being at liberty to live as a Jew; freedom meant being able to perform mitzvoth.

I believe that the message the Torah is trying to convey is that the Children of Israel were not freed from slavery so that they could dutifully worship God in the desert. They were freed from slavery so that they would be free to worship God, free to live a Jewish life, and so that we would be free to perform mitzvoth, whether in the desert or in the Land of Israel, or anywhere else, then as now. The verse is not just about the past. It is about the present as well. That is why each of us can say: Ba’avur zeh asah Adonai li b’tzeiti mimitzrayim – God set me free from Egypt so that I could do this.

The Passover Seder is a celebration of freedom, our freedom to perform God’s will, and our freedom to live as Jews, not just a commemoration of our release from bondage. That is what we are supposed to tell our children

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

Va'era (Exodus 6:2 - 9:35)

When I was in the army, there was one particularly argumentative lieutenant serving under my command. He was an excellent officer. I could always count on him to get the job done. But I always knew that every assignment would first be met by a fight. No order would get a simple “yes, sir!” First, the order would be questioned and disputed from every angle. The assignment had to be explained and justified. Once, in a moment of frustration, I fell back on the compelling force of the words “that’s an order,” but only once. Normally, I would simply explain why I had made my decision, or why we were required to implement a particular policy or take a specific course of action, and then my lieutenant would carry out my order with his customary devotion and excellence.

Now, don’t imagine for a minute that I was so convincing that I was able to sway that lieutenant’s opinion every time. I was not. Sometimes I knew that I had not succeeded in winning him over. Sometimes he told me so to my face. But once he had gotten his answer, he always performed his duty admirably.

One day he called me, very troubled, and asked if he could speak freely. It was an odd request, since he had never hesitated to express his opinion. But this time was different. He had been offered a promotion. Until then he had been in charge of a small unit over a hundred kilometres from my headquarters. The promotion would not only place him right across the hall from my office, it would make him my assistant. He called to ask me how I felt about that. Over the years, we had more than our share of heated arguments, and he wasn’t about to change. There was a lot of history between us, and although the position he was being offered was very attractive, the last thing he wanted was to serve on the staff of someone who hated his guts.

To his surprise, I told him that not only was I not opposed to his taking the job, I had recommended him for the promotion, and I had requested that he be put on my staff. I told him that the reason I had requested him was that I didn’t want or need yes men around me. I needed officers who could take the responsibility to lead. I told him that if he didn’t have the audacity to challenge me, then he wouldn’t have the courage to do his duty as an officer.

I didn’t hate him. I respected him for his strength of character, his honesty and his forthrightness. I told him that former IDF Chief-of-Staff. Lt. General Haim Laskov said that an officer must display two kinds of courage: battlefield courage and civilian courage. Battlefield courage – bravery – is the easy part. The hard part is to have the moral fibre to stand up for what you believe, to be truthful, and to tell your commander what he doesn’t want to hear.

Bureaucrats take the easy road. But no one follows a manager. People follow leaders. Leaders bring about change, and change isn’t easy. Taking responsibility requires strength of character. As Laskov said, it takes courage “to clean the stables of holy cows.” It takes courage to do one’s duty even when it’s hard, and even when it’s unpleasant and unpopular.

I was reminded of that when I read about Moses and Aaron. Moses and Aaron are two very different people. They each react differently to God’s call and to the mantel of leadership. Moses argues with God. “Who am I that I should go to Pharaoh?” “What if they do not believe me?” “I have never been a man of words.” At his next encounter with God, he argues: “Ever since I came to Pharaoh to speak in your name, he has dealt worse with this people; and still You have not delivered Your people.” And after that, Moses argues: “The Israelites would not listen to me; how then should Pharaoh heed me?” “I am a man of impeded speech, how then should Pharaoh heed me?”

Moses challenges God at every step.

But what kind of man is Aaron? God says to Aaron “Go to meet Moses in the wilderness,” and Aaron says? Aaron says absolutely nothing. He goes. Aaron hears Gods voice, and he obeys without question. No wonder, then, that Aaron becomes the High Priest. Aaron is absolutely faithful.

Of course, this is not the first time that we have read the Bible. We know how the story proceeds and how it ends. The argumentative Moses will climb Mount Sinai. He will return from the mountain, and he will smash the tablets. He will do that when he sees that the ever-obedient Aaron has acquiesced to the demand of the people to “make a god.” And despite his excuses, Moses will understand “that the people were out of control, since Aaron had let them get out of control.”

Aaron is not brave. Aaron is not a man of moral courage. Aaron answers the call to build a golden calf as readily as he heeds the call of God. Aaron is not a leader. Religious fervour and blind obedience are no guarantee of moral character. They may be acceptable in a High Priest, but they are not assets in a leader.

Moses questions. Moses asks why, and he asks how. Moses challenges. Midrash Raba asks how could Moses challenge God? How could Moses confront God with the accusation “You have not delivered Your people”? Rabbi Akiva answers that justice should have punished Moses for his accusation, but God understood that Moses was speaking out of concern for Israel.

What Rabbi Akiva meant is that Moses didn’t question God because he was disloyal, nor because he sought to challenge God’s legitimacy. He questioned God because he was a man of principle, who cared for Israel and felt it was his duty to express his concern before he went back to Pharaoh. Although God reassures Moses, He does not really explain, but Moses returns to confront Pharaoh anyway. Moses is not an arrogant rebel; he is a courageous leader. It is Moses who will lead Israel to freedom.

As for my young lieutenant, he is now a lieutenant colonel. I imagine that he is still questioning orders and confronting his superiors. The courage to question and debate is inherent to the moral fortitude that is required of true leaders. Blind obedience is as much an abdication of responsibility as is the refusal to do one’s duty. But once the vote is in, loyalty and leadership are expressed in the strength of character of those who do not cringe from the task of clearing the stables of holy cows and of dismantling golden calves.

Avinoam Sharon

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon

Sh'mot - Tsunami

Of Jacob’s twelve sons, we really only know six. Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Judah, Joseph and Benjamin are important characters in the events related in Genesis. Each plays a role. Each has a personality. We have a sense of who they were. This is not to belittle the other six – what were their names? Dan, Gad, Asher, Zebulon, Naftali, and Issachar. Yes, if I try hard I can remember all six, but it takes some doing. They are, no doubt, important. In many ways, they are no less important than the others. After all, without them, there would be only six tribes. Nevertheless, we cannot truly say that they serve as an example for any particular values. Whatever part they may have played in our history, as ancestors, they played little if any part in the development of our cultural history and our national consciousness. And so we have a hard time remembering their names.

We find this once again in Sh’mot. As I have pointed out before, the book of Exodus begins with twelve women. Most of us never really pay any attention to that. If we start counting, then we find: Shifra, Pu’a, Yocheved, Miriam, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Zippora, and…and Zippora’s six unnamed sisters. They are there in the story. They are important enough for the Bible to mention them, but we don’t notice them.

This problem of not noticing the people around us is one of the great evils of our society. This week, the fact that we are not consciously aware of half of the world, led to the deaths of 150,000 people, who only died because no one noticed them, and no one told them to get off the beach.

That is not a joke. Unfortunately, it is the unadorned truth. The seismographic centers around the world knew about the earthquake, and accurately predicted the tsunami. As frighteningly fast as a tsunami may move, the UN spokesman said that it still took an hour until the wave hit land in Indonesia. Six hours passed before the African coast was hit. Had the people in the affected areas been told to walk a mile inland, or to seek high ground, just a hundred feet up, many – perhaps most – would have been saved.

Of course, that is just wishful thinking. We are talking about backwards, third world jungles that are out of reach of modern communications, and that lack the infrastructure to make early warning possible. That, at least, is what I understand from the UN’s call to extend the now forty-year-old early warning system to the Indian Ocean and Southeast Asia. It seems that there was just no way to relay the information to the threatened areas.

Why do I doubt that?

Perhaps it’s because I read this week that a young Israeli woman in one of the disaster areas ran up a NIS 100,000 phone bill by allowing survivors to use her cellphone to call home (Cellcom has announced that it will pick up the costs). A place can’t be all that cut off from civilization and impossible to reach if it has communications infrastructure that allows you to turn on your Israeli cellular phone and call home.

All of the countries that were hit have telephones. Radio is not an advanced technology that is out of reach of third-world countries. Indeed, the governments of third-world countries are famous for their effective use of radio for propaganda. One African country that heard the news managed to use the most primitive methods to get the warning out – going so far as to have fisherman shout from boat to boat – and no one died. One wonders why the communications infrastructure was not used all over in order to save lives.

I fear that the answer may simply be that nobody cared enough.

Can you imagine that scientists in Japan and Hawaii and elsewhere around the world knew what was about to happen, and yet people were killed in hotel rooms equipped with telephones, radios, and televisions? Can you believe that people died on the coast of Africa hours after the news of the tsunami had already been broadcast on CNN? I can imagine it only if I accept that nobody really cared enough to make an effort, and if I admit that the reason the UN is now calling for an international conference to discuss expanding the early-warning infrastructure is that calling for a conference or establishing a commission is the usual way that Kofi Anan and his henchman avoid admitting that their devotion to whitewashing murder has led to a continuing chain of cataclysmic failures to protect victims.

In Sh’mot we read about Moses. A prince of Egypt went out and saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew slave. There was no one around to help. There was no infrastructure. So he intervened himself. He saw two of his fellow Hebrews fighting, and he tried to stop them. He fled to Midian and he saw a group of shepherds drive the daughters of Jethro the Midianite priest from the well. Moses didn’t say that he was a foreigner, a fugitive, and that it wasn’t his place to get involved. He saw what was happening, and he got involved.

Moses noticed the suffering of slaves when he was an exalted prince, he intervened when he was among his own people, and he came to the rescue of the nobility when he was a refugee. In the first few lines in which the Torah introduces Moses, we learn that his station in life, his relative position in society, and his personal interests did not blind him to the rest of humanity, nor affect his sense of justice and his moral character.

Unfortunately, the lesson of Moses is lost upon most of us. Moses could lead because he showed himself to be a person who also stood up for the six unnamed daughters of Jethro. Moses was worthy of God’s mission because he had shown himself to be a person who cared as much for the anonymous as for the mighty, and could therefore lead all twelve tribes.

Today, we live in a world in which terrorists are glorified, UN peacekeepers are expected to turn a blind eye to genocide, and the President of the United States is vilified for taking a moral stand. In such a world, is it any wonder that 150,000 people lay dead because no one cared enough to pick up a phone?

© 2005 Avinoam Sharon