Our podcast struggles with the absence of Moshe Rabbeinu at Yisro’s feast upon becoming a GER.
Was this a piety as our commentators suggest (waiting on their table like Abraham) or does his absence reflect a deep difference in approach to Jewish Law and Revelation. (He fails to mention Yisro once in Devorim when discussing the very same laws). I submit that Yisro’s turn to Judaism was based on his “hearing” the story of all the wondrous deeds by Hashem,And comparing it to all the other religions he had tasted, felt the most compelling. This rational (almost Maimonidean) approach was resisted by Moshe Rabbeinu Who had tasted the ambivalent power of the Divine and the danger of getting too close, “seeing” the fire in the Bush and on the Mountain.
His Judaism was “Visual” ( you have seen what Hashem did…) and the divine fire of Sinai was forever implanted in each person attending the theophany causing a deep shame (busha…Nedarim 20).
The theophany was therefore a traumatic event and, I submit, goes back to the scene of primal trauma , the Akeidah, as described in the poem below.
No wonder they made another fire in Parshas Ki Sissa soon afterwards, and there lost all sense of shame on the orgy of the Golden Calf.
The fires of the Bush, Har Sinai the Egel, and Auschwitz are all connected, and we the people whose history bears this flame understand an choose Moshe’s paradoxical theology Reflected in the conflicted (Mechilta) approach to “maamud har Sinai” as we were thrown backwards 12 mil for every Divine utterance, then ushered back for more.
He teaches us in every generation that the choice we made there would forever bind us to the ambivalent nature of ‘pushing us away with His left hand then retrieving us with His right”.
We choose this non rational theology over the cool rational Jethro approach since it provides a mythic ground to share our genetic PTSD, our toxic shame, and our insisting we are to blame for everything in our history.
Heritage by Haim Goury