Parashat Yitro: The ties that bind

This week’s parasha describes the dramatic moment when the People of Israel signed the Covenant with God at Sinai, a mutual agreement between People and God, encapsulated in the Ten Commandments (more accurately: “Ten Precepts”) that form the backbone of the Written Law.

The receiving of the Torah marks the official incorporation of Am Yisrael — the final step in the transition from disparate individuals with a common kinship and history into a people, bound to each other by irrevocable decree. And yet, there is some question as to whether the Covenant was a voluntary agreement. The people are promised peoplehood in exchange for obedience:

At first glance, the people seem to be offered a choice to accept the Covenant or to say “No thank you” and go about their business. Instead, they enthusiastically agreed to the conditions: “All that the Eternal has spoken we shall do!”

Is a coerced contract binding?

But what follows is a scene of such awesome power and terror that the people retreat from the mountain and ask that Moshe go forward alone: “You speak with us, and we will hear, but let God not speak with us lest we die.”  Moshe is depicted as going into הָֽעֲרָפֶ֔ל — the “opaque darkness where God was”

Judaism runs far deeper than the cerebellum. It is not a “set of ideas” nor an ideology; it is a culture, a commonality of shared destiny, a family… It is built on those things that touch us on a visceral level, far below the conscious, thinking, rationalizing mind. It is a thing of the heart and soul, not the mind. And as such, belief alone cannot define who is in and who is out. Judaism is not a religion! It is not a worldview or a set of beliefs about the world or about God, or even about the place of human beings in the world. Although all of those things are part of Judaism, they do not define its essence, nor do they set the boundaries for inclusion or exclusion.

In accepting the Torah we agreed, as a nation, to partner with something outside of ourselves, and to be molded by that force, for better or worse. This is a very different form of partnership to that of the Social Contract, whereby individuals voluntarily surrender certain rights in exchange for security. In our case, we agreed to surrender, not rights, but national volition, and we did so blindly, trusting that the other half of the partnership knows what He’s doing. This may be one reason we place so great an emphasis on free will on the individual level — because at the societal level, we have surrendered it almost entirely, having agreed to play by rules that we accepted on blind faith.

And so we find that the stipulation “If you obey My commandments… you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is the sense that we are all in the hands of the same transcendent destiny: something imposed from outside of us, rather than a self-imposed goal. We Jews are a bit like a party of people who find themselves at sea in the same boat, tossed about by the same storm winds. We’re all seeking shelter from the same God, and we all take comfort in the same God.