Yitro (Exodus 18:1-20:18) is the section of the Bible where Moses receives the Ten Commandments from God. Before that happens though, his father-in-law advises him to get help with the overwhelming daily effort of acting as the judge for all of the disputes among the Israelites in his charge.
Moses father-in-law was named Yitro and he was not a Jew. At a warm family reunion on the way to Sinai, he was also the first outsider to hear Mose's amazing story of the defeat of Pharoah, of the Israelite's preservation in the desert, and of divine intervention against the Amaleks. He is also the first person to explicitly observe that these miracles revealed to him that "...the Lord is greater than all gods."
By expressing this observation through the words of an outsider, the Torah reminds us that God is not just a private God, important only to 'his' people, but a universal God available to people of all kinds. His respect for God shows Yitro to be a friend of the Israelites and highlights both his wisdom and his authority.
Yitro goes on to observe that Moses is overburdened by the responsibility of acting as God's representative for his people. Moses spends his days exhausted, listening to the conflicts and issues of the Israelites. He then offers judgement based on his intuition about what God might have said. Yitro is worried about Moses. He thinks it inappropriate and impractical for one man to shoulder the responsibility for the moral character of a nation.
Yitro advises Moses to teach others how to be judges in the best interest of the people. Moses agrees and creates a hierarchy of officials and set of rules for referral of complaints. This judicial system is, at heart, a mechanism for the communication of moral guidance throughout the society. People are taught to rely on the principles implemented by this judiciary. Submission to the law is no longer a consequence of Moses' personal influence.
In the Torah, the last time a covenant was offered, it was Noah's famous rainbow. For that, Noah built an ark, but only after God's command. This time, the people chosen for a covenant with God have gone beyond mere obedience. Before God said a word about it, Moses and the Israelites already understood the need for guidance and had created an explicit method for encouraging the virtue of all the people. This initiative is made more important by the fact that, as soon as Moses had completed this moral ark of jurisprudence for the whole tribe, God caused it to rain commandments and laws for forty days and, presumably, forty nights as well.
There isn't any doubt that other people have devised moral laws and ideas, but the premise in the Torah seems to be that these things are of little significance until one is prepared to, and then willing to, use them. The Israelites expressed their desire and readiness to become a moral people. God answered their preparation by designating them to be his chosen ones and anointing them with wisdom, with commandments and laws to guide them in the decisions they must make every day.
There seem to be three threads here. First, as good as the Jews try to be, they cannot succeed alone. Just as Moses needed Yitro to help him devise a society that was eventually receptive to moral authority, Jews, and all people, need to understand the limits of their own virtue and be receptive to other ideas.
Second, the specification by God that the Jews are the chosen people is not simply an act of divine authority. First, of course, the Jews make a choice of their own when Moses asks for their loyalty to God, but the Jews also chose to prepare themselves for being chosen by being people who actively sought virtue for themselves and their entire tribe on their own initiative.
Finally, part of the solution to the burden of deciding right and wrong is a willingness to submit to authority on the matter. Moses was willing to do as Yitro instructed. It is not good, says Yitro, to take the entire burden on yourself. 'Right on!' God replies, and then makes a gift of a complete moral and legal code, a staff upon which an entire people can lean. "All that the Lord has spoken we will do," say the Israelites.
Each of us face decisions every day. Some are simple, some are very difficult. It is easy to turn inward in the belief that one will eventually figure out the right answer. Advice that may be offered is often ignored because the advisor hasn't 'walked a mile in my shoes.' If we pay attention to Yitro, we'll hear him tell us to be open to lessons that are offered, no matter the source, that we must actively seek virtue and prepare ourselves to live with it.
Failure to heed the voice of the outsider-outside your tribe, outside your family, outside yourself-limits your ability to learn and grow. We each know what we know and often find it hard to grow unless help comes from the outside. Only when we are prepared to change, to heed an external voice and have faith in its authority-only then can we be prepared to hear the wisdom of God.
TQ White II, 1/28/00