Exodus18:1-20:23
Isaiah 6:1-7:6, 9:5-6
I Samuel 20:18, 42
by Rabbi Pinchas Lipner
This week’s Torah portion opens with the verses: “Now Yitro, the priest of Midian, father-in-law of Moses heard of all that G-d had done for Moses and for Israel, his people, how the Lord had brought Israel out of Egypt” (Exodus 18: 1). “And Yitro, the father-in-law of Moses, came with the wife and sons of Moses unto Moses in the wilderness” (Exodus 18:5).
The Talmud in Zvachim 11b asks the following question: “What did Yitro hear that compelled him to leave Midian and to join the Jewish people in the wilderness?”
Three suggestions are mentioned in the Talmud: “He heard about the miraculous victory of the Jewish people over the Amalekites; he heard about the revelation at Mount Sinai, the giving of the Torah to the Jewish people; or he heard about the splitting of the Red Sea and Israel’s miraculous redemption.”
How is it that any or all of these events excited Yitro more than, for example, the 10 plagues that G-d visited on the Egyptians for Israel’s sake?
In order to grasp Yitro’s reasoning, it may be helpful to examine the motivation of the Egyptians and the nation of the Amalekites. What on earth were the Egyptians thinking when they opted to chase after the freed Hebrew slaves to the Red Sea? Were the 10 plagues insufficiently persuasive? Their country, its economy and its population lay in ruins. Then they decided on the bizarre course of pursuing the Jews into the desert, where their entire military was destroyed.
After all of this, the Amalekites, knowing of G-d’s utter destruction of the Egyptians, blithely followed suit by attacking the broken nation of slaves in the desert.
It would appear that at least the Amalekites knew from the start that they would be waging a losing battle. The Tana Bei Eliyahu apprises us that when the Jews left Egypt, Elifaz (son of Eisav) called his son Amalek to advise him that if he wanted to benefit in this world and the next, he should help the Jewish people. Amalek refused and declared that he would be prepared to destroy himself and the whole world in his determination to eradicate the Jews.
One cannot help but recall the same determination on the part of the Persian population in the fourth century BCE. The Megillat Esther recounts that although they were aware that the Jews would be armed and prepared to defend themselves, many Persians attacked anyway, risking life and limb to effect their version of the “final solution.” And it is well known that shortly before the German defeat at Stalingrad in World War II, Hitler’s generals urgently pressed him to divert all efforts and materials from the extermination of the Jews to the war effort. Hitler insisted that his war against the Jews was more important to him than winning the war in Europe.
It appears that the Egyptians, Amalek, Haman and his followers, and Hitler were all motivated by hate, and hate is irrational; but what motivated such hate?
In the case of Amalek, if not the others, it would seem that familiarity bred contempt. Amalek’s father, Elifaz, we are taught, was raised by our forefather Isaac. Amalek saw the truth and beauty of Judaism from his own background but chose to reject it. In order to justify this rejection he turned the Jews and Judaism into something despicable.
He was too close to the Jews to remain neutral, as were the Egyptians. Unwilling to admit philosophical defeat, the Egyptians needed to oppose their instinctive awareness of the righteousness of the Jews by vilifying them. Such hatred leads to self-destructive behavior.
Yitro, by contrast, was galvanized to take an opposite course. He had hoped to remain neutral, to sympathize from a distance with the Jews, but he realized that a person who had witnessed all the miracles could either join with the Jews or learn to fight them. He observed how the Egyptians and the Amalekites had destroyed themselves in their own frenzy. He saw that hate had driven them insane and he feared for his own sanity.
The lesson is here for all of us to see. Our emotions sadly exercise greater control over us than we do over them. As in the case of the Amalekites, passivity toward the Torah will slowly but surely degenerate into hostility. May we learn to save ourselves from the Amalek within all of us.
Shabbat Shalom.