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CHUMASH CANDESCENCE
PARASHA YITRO
EXODUS 18:01 TO 20:23
DR ARTHUR SEGAL
"RECLAMATION AND REVELATION"
Imagine, if you will, a movie trailer advertisement that yells loudly at
you as your popcorn flies into your lap:"Coming in Technicolor---Charleton
Heston staring as Moses in "JETHRO"!!!! This week's parasha takes the
children of Israel to Mt. Sinai for the Revelation, the giving of the Ten
Commandments and Torah. Yet the portion is not named after these Ten
Utterances, but after Moses' father-in-law, Jethro, a Midianite priest.
Our rabbis teach that God chose the wilderness of Sinai to reveal Torah
so that no one nation could say "Torah was given in OUR country," so it
is fitting in this regard that this Torah portion was named after a
person who was not a "member of the tribe."
Our rabbis also teach that all of the 613 commandments given in the Torah
all stem from one or more of the Big Ten. Even the law against gossiping
is said to be stealing a man's reputation and actually murdering him. Of
the 613 mitzvoth, most cannot be performed today as there is no Holy
Temple, and many other mitzvoth are only valid in the original territories of the
twelve tribes or if the Sanhedrin (Jewish court) has jurisdiction. (The
Sanhedrin has not functioned fully since the Roman conquest.) As individuals we
need to reclaim the revelation for ourselves so that we can perform those
mitzvoth that help us remember to adhere to the Ten Commandments.
The universality of our religion was promoted by our prophets. By their
time, no longer was God thought of as the tribal protector-judge of
Israel. Our teachings, in part, were co-opted by Christianity and Islam.
Maimonides stated that the popularity of Christianity and Islam are part
of God's plan to spread the ideals of Torah throughout the world. The Ten
Commandments move society closer to a perfected state of morality and
toward a greater understanding of God. Western law and democracy finds
its roots in Torah.
This premise leads to some interesting conclusions as we are now into the
third Gregorian millennium. In a thought-provoking article in Tikkun
Magazine (Nov.-Dec. 1999), Rabbi Rami Shapiro, of Miami's Temple Beth Or
and director of the Shema Center for Jewish Mediation makes five points,
which I have elaborated or amended.
1. We need to stop thinking in terms of Jews and "non-Jews." We must
cease defining people by what they are not and begin to understand them
for what they are. There are Hindus, secularists, Muslims, Buddhists,
Christians, atheists, etc. And we need to stop labeling them as non-Jews,
Gentiles, or worse yet "goyem."
2. We need as Jews to remember as we read this Torah portion that we all
stood at Mt. Sinai when God declared us to be a holy, set aside, people.
God did not command us to be Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, or
Reconstructionist. We need to direct our energies away from labeling each
other and away from denominational competition. We need to focus on what
we have in common and not on man-made walls and rules that keep us apart.
There are two types of Jews: serious and not serious. Serious Jews, Rabbi
Shapiro continues, range from the most halachic to the most humanist. We
share a love of a commitment to Jewish civilization, the basics of which
we read in this week's Torah portion.
3) We need to develop a similar service and liturgy that brings us closer
to God and not puts us into a paper chase to read every last prayer in a
rushed and non-meaningful way. Talmud Berachot makes it very clear that
Kavenah (concentrated intention and attention) is the most important
element of prayer and that an abbreviated version of prayer said in one's
vernacular is more meaningful than a rushed full prayer said in a
language one does not understand. We need to create a new liturgy that
opens us to God in our prayers and to each other as a united, loving,
caring community.
4. We need, to quote Rabbi Shapiro, "to mainstream the mystical." There
are three fundamental aspects to Judaism: culture, ethics, and spirituality.
For the past fifty years, Rabbi Shapiro posits, we have emphasized the
first often at the expense of the last. One no longer has to be Jewish to
enjoy Levy's Rye Bread, but we as Jews have failed to make Jewish
practice compelling. We must reclaim the inner life of Judaism and speak
to our souls in a powerful and mystical way. We need to recapture the
feeling Abraham had when he prayed to God and not let the walls that we
built over the millennia keep us from God. By living spiritually and
walking humbly with God, as our prophet Micah suggested, and remembering
what was taught in this week's parasha, we will not only be good to
ourselves, but also to our community, and our society. Tikkun olam,
repairing the world, can really only begin when we repair our own souls.
5. Last, when we read Parasha Yitro, we must remember the light we were
(and still are) and were meant to be to the other nations. We need to
reclaim Yeshu the Jew, as opposed to Jesus the Christ. Let's face it,
Yeshu is the most influential Jew of all time. We have allowed the
horrors done to us (and others) in his name to prevent us from claiming
him as one of our own. Yeshu was a first-century Jewish mystic, reformer,
and perhaps even a healer. We need to understand not the religion about
Jesus, but our OWN religion, which was the religion of Yeshu.
So many of the things that are originally Jewish, but that the Church
does well, we as Jews shy away from as "non-Jewish or goyish." We, as
Jews, need to develop healing services. We need to have mitzvah or ahavath
chesed committees to help the rabbi do his work within our community the
way churches have pastoral committees. When disaster strikes, let our
shuls be open to provide shelter and food. This is not just a
Christian-thing, this is a Jewish-thing.
So, to close, as we listen to the Torah read this Shabbat let us
individually and communally vow to personalize the Revelation and
reclaim for our use and for our doing all that is truly Jewish.
Shabbat Shalom,
RABBI ARTHUR SEGAL
Overheard at a local retirement community : One mitzvah can change the world, two will exhaust you.
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