Yitro was a man of Midyan. The owner of a flock, a father to seven daughters, and a priest to his people: he must have been, in a relative way, a wealthy man. To Moshe, the son of the Pharaoh’s court, Yitro would have seemed a peasant. Yet Yitro was the one who had sheltered Moshe after the Egyptian had killed a fellow citizen; a man who Rashi tells us was a nogeis, a representative of Pharaoh’s power. In the act of killing the son had forfeited his father’s court and fled fatherless. To shelter such a man was to risk the wrath of a government with the power to annihilate. Remember, please, that Pharaoh was not just mortal: according to those in Egypt, Pharaoh held the Royal Ka and was tasked to maintain the maat of the world. For when Pharaoh heard of this thing, Pharaoh had required the exact equivalent in return. Moshe was running for his life.
Yet Yitro was not a bondsman of the Pharaoh’s kingdom, nor did he believe in that divinity of state and leader. Yitro was a nomad of the desert and its waterways. It was in his camp that Moshe learnt to be a good herdsman, which Shemot Rabbah teaches is the skill that earned Moshe the right to shepherd the Israelites from Egypt. It is through encounters with Yitro that Moshe met God on a holy mountain, God’s mountain: on Ḥoreiv, where Moshe beholds a burning thornbush that does not burn up, and on Sinai, where God went down before the eyes of all the people. Yitro was the father of Tzipporah, one of his seven daughters, and through her he was Moshe’s father too. Moshe, a son of the palace-court to a son of the tents of the camp.
Where was Midyan? It’s unsure. Perhaps it was in the North Arabian Peninsula, around the oasis of Qurayyah. Perhaps it was on the eastern shores of the Gulf of Aqaba, like Ptolemy suggests. Or perhaps it was the name of a confederation of tribes, and not the name of a geographical place at all. The Midyanim roamed the Sinaitic Peninsular, at least, and maybe stretched down into current-day Saudi Arabia. Our Torah tells us only that Moshe fled east from Egypt and rested by a well. Similarly unsure is the status of the mountains of Ḥoreiv and Sinai. Are they a mountain of two peaks, two names, or two different places? Outside a polity like Pharaoh’s, in the wilderness, things become harder to define.
In between Moshe’s meetings on the mountain, the mountain of two names or of two places, Yitro teaches Moshe the doings of the law. Here is what Moshe does all day: he sits in the middle of his people from the morning to the evening and rules on their disputes in accordance with God’s Law. “What is this thing you are doing?”, Yitro chides Moshe: “why do you sit separate from all the people, while they stand about you from morning until evening? The thing you are doing is not good. You will wither and fall – you and also this people with you – for this thing is too heavy for you, and you cannot do this alone.”. Yitro instructs our teacher how to apply a system of law. Note this also: in front of Aharon and all the elders of Israel, Yitro takes a rise-up offering and sacrifices for God.
Where does Moshe learn the art of delegation? It is not from the court of the Pharaoh, nor from the mouth of God on the mountain. It is from Yitro the man of Midyan, who is not an Israelite. Why not from Pharaoh? Pharaoh’s way is a system of absolutism, where the ruler and the state are one and unified in one body. It is Pharaoh, and Pharaoh alone, who decides to incur the penalty of the deaths of the firstborn on himself and on behalf of his people. A government like this, where the fate of hundreds are decided by the will of one human being, is not a government worth learning from. This is the culture in which Moshe grew up. We must imagine that Moshe spent the forty years of his sojourn with Yitro and Tzipporah unlearning it.
Then why not from God? God invests Moshe with the task of changing history. God acts. God lays the framework. God is not a Pharaoh: for unlike the subjects of Pharaoh the people of God can do as they wish. God gives the Law, and the task of interpreting and abrogating and enforcing it is the animus of existence. For God to insist on the minutiae of the affairs of the world is to create a system of absolute control, which is a system of violence. No, the Torah is not in the heavens. God trusts us to apply what we have been given to the best of our abilities. It’s not for lack of pleading. “What shall I do with this people?!”, Moshe cries to God. “Before long they’ll be stoning me!”.
Then why from Yitro, a priest of Midyan and not an Israelite? The Mekhilta of Rabbi Ishmael tells us the Torah was given publicly, in a place free of ownership, so that all who want to take it can come and take it. Yitro knew the truth of dealing with the work of the world. He had, after all, seven daughters and a flock of sheep. He must have been, in a relative way as I mentioned earlier, a wealthy man. Between the great exodus from Egypt and the giving of the tablets on Sinai, Moshe learns from Yitro how to delegate. Sometimes the things we may think of as unimportant are just as necessary for our survival. Sometimes we must descend from grand history and live in the present, among people with needs and with finite resources to give.
Later on, God speaks to Moshe a command, to “bind up the Midyanim and beat them”. But today we dwell at the foot of God’s mountain, and Moshe goes out to meet his wife’s father, and he bows to him and kisses him and each ask, each man to his beloved, after the other’s wholeness; and they go into his tent.
Shamaya Mirviss-Carvajal, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.