Yitro
Exodus 18:1-20:23
Isaiah 6:1-7:6, 9:5-6
Families exist in our genes and our minds. We belong to a family genetically and cannot escape this sort of membership, although we can join a new family by marriage or adoption. Even marriage becomes a genetic connection to the family, not to its past but to its future.
We belong to a family in our minds — as long as we feel connected to the relatives, visit them, attend their weddings and funerals. Adoption creates membership by mental activity. Membership can also dissolve by mental action. Family members can leave to join other families or simply disappear. If all the members, or all except one, abandon a family, it dissolves. Genetic connections remain, but without the mental ties, the family ends.
The Finkelman family, for example, continues to exist in that my relatives have not dropped out. At least for that reason, but perhaps for other reasons as well. We might, possibly, have a theme, even a destiny. Even if we never articulate the theme, someone might, by looking over the acts of the generations of Finkelmans, guess at a meaning for our collectivity.
One could say the same of nations. Spain exists in minds. As long as people feel themselves part of the Spanish nation, it exists. If people lose the sense that their participation in Spain confers a national identity on them, Spain ceases to exist as a nation. Does that sound farfetched? Spain exists as a nation today because Catalonians, Aragonians and Castilians do not, by and large, still consider those titles their national identity.
Perhaps Spain also has a theme, a meaning, or even a destiny. Certainly there exist particular Spanish ways of acting, speaking, thinking. We might all feel poorer if no one any longer acted, spoke, thought, felt like a Spaniard.
Jews, whether we think of ourselves as an extended family, people or a nation, continue to exist because we belong to this group in our minds. Do we also have a theme, a destiny, a meaning? The Bible asserts that we do.
Right before the revelation at Mount Sinai, God asked Moses to present a conditional offer to the children of Israel: “And now, if you will hear my voice, and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasure of all the nations, for the whole world is mine. And you will be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exodus 19:5-6). The status depends on our decision: If we hear the voice, if we accept the Torah, then we become a nation, a special people, a unique kingdom.
What if we do not?
One possible answer: We exist as a nation, but not a treasured one, as a kingdom, but not of priests. A normal nation, like all the others, without any special mission.
Rabbi Avidimi bar Hama bar Hasa in the Talmud vividly imagines that we never had this option. He depicts the mountain suspended in the air above us, a ready instrument for God to use to crush us if we refuse. God as much as says to us, “If you do not accept it, there will be your grave” (Shabbat 88a).
Even by the plain meaning of the text, without the dramatic vision of an airborne mountain, the offer has an element of coercion. Released from slavery in Egypt by miraculous intervention, we stood, a huge multitude of people and their cattle, in an inhospitable desert, depending on divine protection. We have no alternative arrangements, no plan B.
At that moment, “The whole people answered together: Whatever God has spoken, we will do!” (Exodus 19:8). So, according to the Bible, by accepting the revelation we accepted the role of treasured nation. Perhaps we could not have endured refusing the offer.
And now, what now? Can we endure as a normal nation, an ordinary family, like all the others? Or perhaps our continued existence depends on our continuing to choose “Whatever God has spoken, we will do.”