Some Lessons from Parashat Yitro

1) On Torah and Busyness:

Moshe was only able to get the Torah once he cleared his schedule.

The parsha begins with the view of Moshe’s life from the vantage point of Yitro, his father in law. What Yitro sees is a leader overwhelmed by detail, working from morning until night adjudicating disputes among his people. Yitro wisely advises Moshe to delegate, to find others to do some of the easier work so that he is left to concentrate on the harder cases.

Moshe follows this advice. The result? The biggest divine revelation of all time – Mount Sinai. And the giving of the biggest divine gift of all time – the Torah.

The Torah is only given when Moshe is free enough to hear it.

What are we not hearing because of our overscheduled lives? What divine gifts, what pieces of Torah, are we not receiving because we occupy our brains from morning until night with a million details? What might we hear if we did slow down?

2) On Sharing the Burden:

Do you think you need to do everything yourself?

Sometimes we look around and see all the problems in our private and public lives and feel that we must attend to them all ourselves. This must be how Moshe felt and why he spent all his time judging every single dispute, night and day, without break. I must do it all, he thought.

Lo tov, “not good,” is how Yitro describes this scenario. These words are reminiscent of God’s words to Adam: lo tov heyot haAdam levado. “It is not good for man to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him.” It is never good to do things alone, to think that only I can do everything that is needed in this world. The world was created with two people to let us know that we are not meant to do everything, that we are meant to share in the burden, to be a team.

The message is not laziness – let someone else do it. The point of letting go is a positive one -- to make sure you are putting your energies where they belong; Moshe had to let go of doing all the judging himself in order to be open to a different task, for which he was uniquely qualified – consultation and communication with God.

Not doing it all yourself is also a question of honoring the other and honoring the talents of the other. There were plenty of honest upright people fit to be judges. Doing it all himself meant that Moshe was not giving meaningful work to these others, honoring the contributions they have to make.

In regard to tzedaka, the gemara in Bava Batra says that the act of facilitating another person’s tzedaka giving is even greater than the act of giving tzedaka yourself. Facilitating the giving of others means getting out of oneself enough to recognize the contributions that others have to make. To think we must fix all the problems ourselves comes partly from a place of arrogance and self-centeredness. To step back and recognize that others have their place just as we have ours, is to step out of oneself and turn lo tov into tov.

3) The Lesson of Yitro’s Advice: Their Wisdom is Torah, Too!

The parsha of the giving of the Torah begins not with the Torah that God gave us, but with the wisdom of Yitro, a non-Israelite.

Perhaps this juxtaposition is intended to expand our notion of Torah, to remind us to seek wisdom not just in the four walls of the Bet Midrash and in our own tradition, but also among those wise people of the world as a whole.

The source of wisdom is both above and below, both inside and outside. On the cusp of getting the Torah, it was as if God wanted Moshe to know – I am about to give you something special, but don’t let it close you off from the world’s wisdom. Keep it alongside. Be open to wisdom wherever it appears.


4) Family and Torah:

The Torah is not given to the Israelites until Moshe's family -- his wife and 2 children -- arrive. The ultimate experience of Torah is not a solitary one, but one which necessarily involves one's whole family.