kol yisrael Bio-Testimony-7

My Life's Testimony
to
my Life's Learning

1982

2003

2011

Closure:
3. The solidarity of the Holy-one-blessed-be-he

"Now Moshe was shepherding the flock
of Yitro his father-in-law, priest of Midyan,
He led the flock behind the wildlerness-
and he came to the mountain of God, to Horev.
And YHWH's messenger was seen by him
in the flame of a fire out of the midst of a bush.
He saw:
here, the bush is burning with fire,
and the bush is not consumed!
Moshe said:
Now let me turn aside
that I may see this great sight-
why the bush does not burn up!
When YHWH saw that he had turned aside to see,
God called to him out of the midst of the bush,
he said:
Moshe! Moshe!
He said;
Here I am.
He said:
Do not come near to here,
put off your sandals from your feet,
for the place on which you stand -
it is holy ground!"
Exodus 3:5 [quoted also in the translation below p.330]

It's in post-biblical times,
that the question was asked:
"Why did God choose to appear in a low bush,
and not in a lofty tree?"

"Why did
the Holy-one-blessed-be-he reveal himself from the highest heaven,
(but) talked to Moses from a bush?"
This was nothing but a sign and confirmation of his promise to Ya'acov:
"when Israel went-down to Egypt,
Shekhinah went-down with them,
as is said;
"I myself will go-down with you"
(Genesis 46, 4)

"Just like this bush is lower
than all the trees in the world,
thus Israel went-down
to the lowest level,
and the Holy-One
went-down with them. "

Also: In that hour of revelation
God said to Moses:
"Don't you feel, that I am suffering,
like Israel are suffering?"
Am I not speaking to you
"out of thorns"?
meaning,
that I share their suffering"!

"I wrote in the Torah:
"With him I am in distress"
[Psalm 91,15]
They are in slavery,
and I too am in a bush,
in a tight, narrow place.
Therefore [he talked] "from a bush,
since it's all spines!"

The caper bush with its "vicious" spines on "my hill"
has a relative specific to Sinai, where I enjoyed it.

p.94

............................

..............

p.112

..................

.......

After YHWH-from-the-bush, or really Moses' inner voice,
had forced on him the mission of freeing those slaves,
a mission which no ONE has ever taken upon himself
till Abraham Lincoln, exactly 3000 years later,
Moses returns to this mysterious "father-in-law",
sometimes called Re'uel and sometimes Yitro
[and in the oldest biblical book - Judges - "Keni", 1,16 or "Hovav", 4, 11]

Moshe went and returned to Yitro his father-in-law
and said to him:
Pray let me go and return to my brothers that are in Egypt,
that I may see whether they are still alive.
Yitro said to Moshe;
Go in Peace!
[Here the interweaving of 2 sources of the present text can clearly be traced:]
Now YHWH said to Moshe in Midyan:
Go, return to Egypt,
for all the men who sought (to take) your life have died.
So Moshe took his wife and his sons
and mounted them upon a donkey,
to return to the land of Egypt,
and Moshe took the staff of God in his hand.
[Exodus 4,18-20]

"Prince of Egypt"
strayed in 3 points:

Of the 3 episodes,
which demonstrate
Moses' essence,
his solidarity
with the oppressed,
the middle one
was left out.

Miryam in the Bible
is much less
of a partner
for her brother
than in the movie,

and Moses and Tzippora
went down to Egypt
not on a kingly camel
but
on a servant donkey.

Chapter 18 in "Exodus": The angel on the abyss

Yitro Moshe's father-in-law,
took Tzippora, Moshe's wife
- after she had been sent home-
and her two sons,
of whom the first-one's name was Gershom/Sojourner There,
or he had said: I have become a sojourner in a foreign land,
and the name of the other was Eliezer/God's-Help, for:
the God of my father is my help, he rescued me from Pharaoh's sword;

Yitro, Moshe's father-in-law, came with his sons and his wife to Moshe,
to the wilderness, where he was encamped,
at the mountain of God.
He said to Moshe:
I, your father-in-law Yitro, am coming to you,
and your wife and her two sons with her.
Moshe went out to meet his father-in-law,
he bowed and kissed him, and each-man asked after the other's welfare;
then they came into the tent.

Moshe related to his father-in-law
all that YHWH had done to Pharaoh and to Egypt on Israel's Account
all the hardships that had befallen them on the journey,
and how YHWH had rescued them.
And Yitro was jubilant because of all the good that
YHWH had done for Israel, that he had rescued him from the land of Egypt.
Yitro said:
Blessed by YHWH,
who has rescued you from the land of Egypt
and from the hand of Pharaoh,
who has rescued the people from under the hand of Egypt!

(So) now I know:
yes, YHWH is greater than all gods-
yes, in just that matter in which they were presumptuous against them!
Yitro, Moshe's father-in-law,
took an offering-up and slaughter-animals for God,
and Aharon and all the elders of Israel came to eat bread
with Moshe's father-in-law, before the presence of God.

Now it was on the morrow:
Moshe sat to judge the people,
and the people stood before Moshe from daybreak until sunset.
When Moshe's saw all that he had to do for the people,
he said:
What kind of matter is this that you do for the people-
why do you sit alone, while the entire people stations itself around you
from daybreak until sunset?
Moshe said to his father-in-law:
When the people come to me to inquire of God,
- when it has some legal-matter, it comes to me -
I judge between a man and his fellow
and make known God's laws and his instructions.
Then Moshes father-in-law said to him:
Not good is this matter, as you do it!
You will become worn out, yes, worn out,
so you, so this people that are with you,
for this matter is too heavy for you,
you cannot do it alone.
So now, hearken to my voice,
I will advise you, so that God may be-there with you:
be-there, yourself, for the people in relation to God.
You yourself should have the matters come to God;
You should make clear to them the laws and the instructions,
you should make known to them the way they should go,
and the deeds that they should do;
but you - you are to have the vision
(to select) from all the people men of caliber, holding God in awe,
men of truth, hating gain,
you should set (them) over them
as chiefs of thousands, chiefs of hundreds,
chiefs of fifties, and chiefs of tens,
so that they may judge the people at all times.
So shall it be:
every great matter they shall bring before you,
but every small matter they shall judge by themselves.
Make (it) light upon you, and let them bear (it) with you.
If you do (thus in) this matter
when God commands you (further), you will be able to stand,
and also this people will come to its place in peace.
Moshe hearkened to the voice of his father-in-law,
he did it all as he had said:
....
Moshe sent his father-in-law off,
and he went home to his land.

2012-03-11- See how I again came across Yitro, Moses' Father-in-Law

This is an example of how I work, if I open my eyes to something in the Bible, as I did yesterday [2003_06_09] .
In this case I'll leave my researching as a draft and not complete it.

Phillip Ratner

Numbers 10, 29-33

Now Moshe said to Hovav son of Re'uel the Midyanite, Moshe's father-in-law;

We are marching to the place about which YHWH promised:

that-one I will give to you;

go with us and we will do-good for you,

for YHWH has promised good-things for Israel.

He said to him:

I will not go,

but rather to my land and to my kindred I will go.

He said:

Pray do not leave us,

for after all, you, now our (best place to) encamp in the wilderness,

you shall be for us as eyes!

So it will be, if you go with us,

so it will be:

(from) that goodness with which YHWH will do-good for us, we will do-good for you!

They marched from the mountain of YHWH a journey of three days....

to scout out for them a resting-place

The word "khotên", father-in-law, appears 20 times in the Bible,
and among these 17 times for Moses' father-in-law,
also the "priest of Midyan"
and especially in Exodus chapt. 18,
which is dedicated wholly to these two men,
- in such exaggerated reiteration - that one must ask:
why this emphasis?
The fact, that 4 different names are attached to this "father-in-law",
and two different nomadic tribes: the Midianites and the Kenites,
proves, that it is not a specific historical person here.
I've always deeply esteemed this encounter
between the Prince of Egypt and the Priest of Midyan,
and how the former would have been lost without the latter.
Reu'el - literally: "shepherd-god", shepherd as a verb in vocative -
is the real angel in the story,
and his advice so much more valuable than God's advice
in that other story about Moses' "alone, I am alone" [Numbers 11, 11-15] .

Now Re'u'el could have been any Bedouin Sheikh,
why did it have to be Moses' father-in-law?
Why did it have to be the father of his wife Tzipporah?

Either it has the meaning of
the mother-in-law~~~~daughter-in-law relationship in "Rut",
i.e. a chosen dependency as a model for the shaping of a relationship,
or it is hinting at the woman behind the father-in-law, i.e. Tzipporah.

Why and when was Tzipporah "sent back" ?
And how come, that Re'uel's son Hovav - or he himself -
after the demonstration of his interior and exterior independence,
does agree to be "the eyes" for the not yet truly free slaves
and Moses' their tormented leader?
Or maybe he didn't agree after all?

I have changed through working on this sculpture.
I set out with Moses'/my song: "I can't carry all this people alone."
He was not alone. And if he was, it was his own making, as Yitro pointed out.
"You cannot and must not do this alone!"
The question is, where did Moses search for partners?
Whom did he expect to be peers? Freelance friends?

They were those, whom he had "chosen" (before this lifetime) as his family.
For only those between whom there is a destiny dependency,
will work through all the difficulties of making a partnership work.

He was, in fact, tied into all three basic dependencies:
strong: husband-wife;
stronger: siblings;
strongest: parents-children, in this case father - son-in-law.
In the movie, more than in the Bible, he realizes this.

The movie ends with the illusion of a happy end.
And this is good so.
Too much hardship, suffering and death had to be told.
Let us dance with the cymbal playing women
and rejoice with the two men and the two women,
with Moses and his wife, with his sister and his brother.
And there is a tiny triptych interwoven,
each scene not more than a few seconds:
When they all leave that night after the firstborns' death,
an old woman looks after them, mournfully: "too old!"
But a little girl looks up to her, simply taking her hand.
Then, after the crossing of the split sea,
when the Pharao's chariots appear on the horizon,
the little girl is scared and looks for the old woman,
and the woman smiles and takes her hand assuringly.
And when they all had finally made it,
everyone ran to a loved-one for an exstatic embrace.
It's when the give-and-take between old and young
became a mutual looking outward together into freedom.

My bed in my converted army bus was above a water tank and underneath a row of book-closets.
In my desert years this painting (Domenico Fetti, before 1614) was fastened to the bottom of one of them,
so I could always draw comfort and courage from it when lying down or waking up.
It's not a great hero - the sandal holding Moses
with his idiot-like open mouth trying to grasp what can't be grasped.
And I cherished the sheep next to his other leg, exactly parallel to it,
for this is my name - Rachel, mother-sheep.