This week’s Torah portion, Yitro, begins with the verse:
“Yitro, the priest of Midian, Moses’s father-in-law, heard all that G-d did for Moses and for Israel His people.” (Exodus 18:1)
Although it says that Yitro heard all that G-d had done, nonetheless, the Talmud (Zevachim 116a) says that there were three specific things that Yitro heard that inspired him to come running across the desert to join the Jewish people:
- The splitting of the Red Sea
- The war against Amalek
- The giving of the Torah
We need to understand why it was specifically these three events that inspired him to come to the camp of Israel.
First came the splitting of the sea, where Yitro saw people who were at the very bottom spiritually suddenly jumping all the way to the top. Then he heard of the war against Amalek, where the Jewish people questioned G-d’s existence, as we find toward the end of last week’s portion, that during the war against Amalek, the Jewish people ask, “Is G-d with us or not?” (Exodus 17:7). At that point, the Jews plunged right back down to being heretics. This was because their process of teshuva moved too fast. Yitro knew that he was also a repentant, and he worried that perhaps he, too, had moved too fast.
It therefore says that he heard of the giving of the Torah, which was a gradual process. First, G-d gave the Ten Commandments, and then, He gave the rest of the laws. He gave the Torah one step at a time, one mitzvah at a time. When he saw this, Yitro said, “I need to learn how to grow at a slow and steady pace, as opposed to taking everything on all at once and causing myself to rebel.”
That is why these three events are singled out. This also helps us understand why the Torah refers to Yitro in the opening verse as “the priest of Midian, Moses’s father-in-law.” This shows that even though he became the father-in-law of the great Moses, Yitro recognized that deep down inside him remained a piece of idolatrous Midian. He already tasted that and needed to make sure that his journey from being a priest of Midian to Moses’s father-in-law was going to be a permanent and meaningful one.
G-d wants us to grow at a pace that is healthy for us, and not to take on too much at once and wind up turning our backs on the entire Torah. That is certainly not the will of G-d. Rather, growth must be done with caution, one step at a time, at a rate that is healthy and productive. That way, we can become all we can possibly be.
RABBI ABBA WAGENSBERG
