Sinai, Day One. Yitro (Exodus 18:1 - 20:23)

At Sinai, God introduces Himself. That is Day One – the point where History really begins.

So God takes the Israelites out of Egypt, and towards the Promised Land.

As we saw in the previous reading, God has them take the long way through the desert. The way’s about to get a whole lot longer than even that… and right as the Israelites might think they’re finally on their way, there’s an unannounced stop, at a place called Sinai.

As it were, Sinai is a burning bush wrought large: an otherwise unremarkable mountain, but one suddenly host to some major pyrotechnics, complete with fire and smoke and the booming voice of God. Only Moses, who once approached the smaller revelation of the burning bush, will be able to approach close enough to receive the whole of this larger Revelation. Still, all of Israel will hear that God is making a Covenant with them, here and now; they will learn that they have a mission, now and forever; they will assert their acceptance, explicitly and repeatedly; and they will hear its core, known to us as the Ten Commandments. “You have seen what I did to Egypt. I carried you on eagles’ wings, and brought you to Me. And now, if you heed My voice attentively, and keep My Covenant, you will be for Me a treasure from all nations, for the entire world is Mine. You will be for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” (19:4-6)

Commandment #1 reads: “I am The LORD, your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the house of slaves”. (20:2) (Note: I use the Hebrew parsing of the Commandments; for Christians, what Jews call #1 is part of the preamble, and Christians’ Commandments 1 and 2 are both contained in the Jewish version’s Second Commandment).

This is not a mere formulaic opening, standard Divine boilerplate, as it were. See how God ‘introduces’ Himself: with the ineffable Name, the four-letter (tetragrammaton) Y-H-V-H (literally ineffable, seeing as no one knows for sure how to pronounce it anymore… definitely not ‘Jehovah’, and probably not any of the other reconstructions current in Biblical Criticism circles). That’s the name of the Eternal, the One, and the Creator… but wait, God doesn’t mention any of these here. He doesn’t say, “Who Created the Universe”, or even “the Alpha and Omega”. He does follow that with “Your God”, but not with “God of Israel”, “God of your tribe(s)”, “God of your fathers”, or even “God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob” – He simply adds, “your God”, singular in the Hebrew, addressing every Israelite individually, or the House of Israel collectively?… most probably both… But either way, the effect is immediacy, and intimacy. God is talking to you, now. Yes, you.

And then God does something truly unique – instead of touting His great power over all other tribal gods (as would have been expected), He ‘reminds’ the Israelites of something they probably remember well enough, seeing as it happened a proverbial 5 minutes ago: this is the God who freed them from Egyptian slavery. More than ‘just’ a Creator, this God is a Liberator. We may be wholly jaded to that now… but that’s an astonishing revelation in a world of universal slavery. And this is a God who cares – another rarity in the ancient world, to say the least. No unmoved mover is this, but a God who loves His creations, definitely not indifferent to how they treat one another. God loves freedom – and after all, there can be no morality without freedom. The Torah’s entire moral-ethical enterprise rests on the assumption of free will. Not by chance is freedom the first ‘unalienable right’, the first ‘self-evident truth’ – and the reason that truth was ‘self-evident’ in the first place, is this one statement, roughly 3000 years prior, that shaped our culture in ways so deep, we can’t even see them anymore… at our very great peril.

The verse even redoubles itself, for emphasis (and is also repeated verbatim at Deuteronomy 5:6): “out of Egypt” and “out of slavery”. Do not forget, says God, where you came from; that you were slaves. Do not let the talk of ‘chosen people’, ‘kingdom of priests’, or ‘holy nation’ go to your heads. And, do not idealize Egypt and its fleshpots, or its ‘glorious civilization’ (and of course yes, we did, and will, do all that... but then again, there have been Jews pining for the glories of German culture, or praising Berlin and Rome’s fascist architecture… so… nothing new under the sun?).

The First Commandment is not, as often misunderstood, a command to believe in God, as if that made any sense. Belief is assumed. (And, after all, that is God speaking…) This verse instead establishes just Who God is – God’s character, as it were. It underlies all of the moral-ethical demands that follow, starting with the rest of the Ten.

Clearly and undeniably, the revelations at Sinai are meant for all history and all mankind, forever: There’s a new Sheriff in town, and the world will never be the same. Or more precisely, an essential truth about the world has now been revealed again. It will take time for that truth to permeate. There will be ups and downs, and we’re far from done even today. But once, the ancients believed that the world was eternal, without beginning and without end; that the gods were capricious, selfish, uncaring beings who were certainly very powerful, and maybe immortal, but very much part of the world, and remarkably human in their character (if not necessarily representing humanity’s best sides); and that history, like the world, had no beginning or end, just a forever sameness, or at best was endlessly cyclical – that things were pretty much as they ever were, and would ever be… That at best, Fate rules all, choice is an illusion, and struggle pointless; or, at worst, that all is but meaningless chaos. If that sounds familiar, it may be because we’ve been circling back to strikingly similar views, via a reductionist-materialist view that ends with us being automatons irremediably conditioned by our circumstances… or randomly occurring assemblies of soulless, meaningless matter.

With this one verse, nine Hebrew words, God shatters all that, then and today. The world had a beginning. Its Creator stands above and outside of Nature. And God, the Liberator, cares very deeply about His children, and about how they behave in His world; He sets standards and makes demands, first and foremost moral ones (see Commandments 2-10: not a sacrifice or ritual purity law in the bunch); He despises slavery, oppression, and falsehood; and with God at the helm, history has a trajectory. A purpose. A telos. With these words, God starts shaping that trajectory – pointing the way.

In many ways, Sinai is Day One – the point where History really begins.

God help us all.