Well, and it seems that if I don’t actually write about the parshah, then it doesn’t get written about. Strange.
Last week was parshah Yit’roh (Exodus 18:1-20:23), which begins with the titular Jethro coming to visit his son-in-law, who is now the leader of half-a-million wanderers. Jethro is very interesting, by the way, and is the only non-Jew who gets a parshah named after him, and it’s worth noting that the Ten Commandments parshah is not named after the ten commandments, but after a fellow who came to visit about that time.
Anyway, we talked about the issue of the boundaries around the mount, starting with 19:12, when the Lord tells Moses to “set bounds unto the people round about, saying, Take heed to yourselves, [that ye] go [not] up into the mount, or touch the border of it...”. Then, after they’ve done that, Moses goes up, and the first thing the Lord tells him is to go back down and check on the boundaries: “Go down, charge the people, lest they break through unto the LORD to gaze, and many of them perish.” (19:21) Moses tells the Lord not to worry, that it’s taken care of: “The people cannot come up to mount Sinai: for thou chargedst us, saying, Set bounds about the mount, and sanctify it.” (19:23) The Lord is not convinced: “Away, get thee down ... let not the priests and the people break through to come up unto the LORD”. (19:24). Only then does the Lord tell the people the Ten Commandments.
Remember that the buildup to all this is immense. Everybody has been preparing for three days, and there’s a light show, and all kinds of things, and of course they’ve built these boundaries, and then, when the Lord speaks to Moses ... he asks him to double-check the boundaries. What’s up with that? And, here’s my what-if question, if one of the Israelites had given in to his ’satiable curtiosity and climbed over the barrier, would the Lord really have struck him down? I mean, talk about ruining the moment...
The discussion was really good and, as usual, wide-ranging, and dealt with people’s natural tendency to transgress, their fears, the long-range plans for the golden calf, the heightening of natural phenomena to the level of miracles, and other stuff besides. I think the most interesting thing that I came to, by the end of the discussion, was the sense that by making the boundary and then coming down and speaking to the Israelites on the outside of it, the Lord was making the point that these laws are not only for the priests, and not only for the sacred spaces, but for everybody everywhere.
That is, if you rope off all the sacred space, and then separate out the sacred people, then there, in the space that’s left, that’s where the law is given. The law is for this world, not just the next. It’s for the follower, not just the leader. By going back to the boundary three times, rather than emphasizing the mountaintop, the Lord emphasizes the foot of the mountain. Which is where we are.
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.