Tomorrow morning, we will read the giving of the Ten Commandments on Mount Sinai. It’s a powerful moment, all the people huddled around a mountain, having a full experience with sound and light and movement, learning Torah. For the first time. It’s their first exposure to this beautiful element of God, this part that will be teaching and learning, that will be ethical instruction and law, guidelines of who they’ll be as a people. And it’s nestled in Parshat Yitro, centering us on Moshe’s father-in-law and their relationship with each other.
The Torah tells us that Yitro brought Moshe’s wife and his sons “to the wilderness” to reunite them after the splitting of the sea and after the Israelites’ travels began. There’s a Midrash that wonders why the Torah had to tell us this - after last week’s big show of the splitting sea, don’t we know that they are already in the wilderness? But it comes to teach us that Yitro was sitting in the lap of luxury, and yet his heart urged him to go out into the wilderness, a place of nothingness, to hear words of Torah.
I think the Midrash is making a point about Yitro and praising him, but was simultaneously trying to send a message to all of us: to hear Torah - interpreted broadly - the Torah that we each need to hear - sometimes we must undergo a similar process. Sometimes we have to remove ourselves from certain comforts or norms, sometimes we have to put ourselves in new situations where we will see something differently. Our comforts blind us to the Torah that could actually change our lives, that could change us.
Like Yitro, sometimes to become transformed, we have to leave behind what we know and we have to throw ourselves into the vastness of the wilderness. There is something remarkable about the deliberate choice that he makes, to leave behind the comforts of his home for the possibility of knowing more than he can in the place where he is. As we read Revelation each year, as we remind ourselves that somehow in some universe our souls were all at that moment experiencing Torah, I think that is actually our charge, and I think that’s what it means to engage in the project of Torah study. We put ourselves into something new. We step outside of what we know for something scary, something unknown, something that doesn’t have rigid contours or prescribed outcomes. But it does offer us possibility. It offers us the opportunity to find ourselves in a new place, a beautiful place, a place that we could never find without the vastness of the wilderness.
