Today I bring you the words of Danielle Natelson, the one who intercepted me in college and helped me find my deep love of Torah. Danielle leads, learns, and sings with the voice of an angel. I am honored she was willing to share some thoughts on this weeks parasha – a section of Torah with which she is especially familiar. Danielle, thank you.
And thank all of YOU for continuing to support this newsletter.
Love, Meg
This week’s parasha is one of those “fan favorites”–the kind of episode you love to rewatch in your favorite TV series, the title track on the album that gets the most plays on the radio. It features the “granddaddy of them all”–no, not the Rose Bowl–the famed Ten Commandments (literally utterances, but that deserves a whole other blog post). It’s so famous and beloved that it’s one of the handful of sections of Torah that gets read more than once in a year because of its content (being read again on Shavuot) in addition to getting a remixed version later in the bible in Deuteronomy.
Here they are in case you need a refresher on the 10 commandments:
Exodus 20:1-17 (Tree of Life Version)
Then God spoke all these words saying,
“I am Adonai your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.
“You shall have no other gods before Me. Do not make for yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above or on the earth below or in the water under the earth. Do not bow down to them, do not let anyone make you serve them. For I, Adonai your God, am a jealous God, bringing the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing lovingkindness to the thousands of generations of those who love Me and keep My mitzvot.
“You must not take the Name of Adonai your God in vain, for Adonai will not hold him guiltless that takes His Name in vain.
“Remember Yom Shabbat, to keep it holy. You are to work six days, and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Shabbat to Adonai your God. In it you shall not do any work—not you, nor your son, your daughter, your male servant, your female servant, your cattle, nor the outsider that is within your gates. For in six days Adonai made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Thus Adonai blessed Yom Shabbat, and made it holy.
“Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be long upon the land which Adonai your God is giving you.
“Do not murder.
“Do not commit adultery.
“Do not steal.
“Do not bear false witness against your neighbor.
“Do not covet your neighbor’s house, your neighbor’s wife, his manservant, his maidservant, his ox, his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”
For the Hebrew please visit Sefaria
And for many of us, its content is so familiar it is almost rote. For me for sure–given that it was my bat mitzvah parasha and I take great pride in reading these verses every chance I get–both the Hebrew and the general English translation are almost a part of me at this point. Which makes coming back to them year in and year out more than once hard to continuously find something new and inspiring. But therein lies the heart of the challenge–to find new meaning each time we revisit each other.
I’ve always thought of this parasha as having two slightly disconnected sections. The first section features one of the best (albeit over-quoted) lessons in leadership development, where Yitro (Jethro), Moses’ father-in-law for whom the parasha is named, schools Moses into understanding the importance of delegation and sharing the work (both for his own sanity and for the sake of the people). The second stars the Ten Commandments and the famous moment of revelation at Sinai. But this year, I finally saw a connection between the two.
Given the Shmita year we’re in, and the alignment of it falling amidst an ongoing pandemic that continues to challenge our endurance and resilience, I was immediately drawn to the commandment around the Sabbath. This versions’ wording leads with a charge to remember the sabbath, and cites God’s creation of the world as the motivation and explanation for its significance. “If God can rest after creating the world, so too can you, Israelites” God seems to suggest. And it comes at a pretty important time in the narrative of this people. Having literally just been freed from slavery and a never-ending grind, these people wouldn’t know rest if it hit them in the face. They have to be taught, commanded even, to develop that skillset. Since burnout is their default, they are charged to rise above that innate inclination to constantly create and produce, and instead find power in rest. A pretty revolutionary and countercultural way to live.
And so is the idea of communal leadership. The concept of delegation and sharing the work was so foreign to Moses and totally disrupted the model of leadership he had in his mind having grown up in the palace. Pharoah seemingly led alone–despite some advisors, he was very clearly “in charge”–the leader, the one to carry the work. So while ultimately welcomed as a suggestion from his father-in-law, the idea of Moses sharing the work and resisting the notion of inevitable burnout was also deeply counter-cultural.
And here we find ourselves in 2022 in deep need of both of these reminders. We can’t and shouldn’t do any of our most important work alone. That’s not what it means to lead with excellence. And we can’t and shouldn’t glorify the grind. There is nothing we’re working on or creating that is so holy or important that it too doesn’t deserve and require some rest and distance from it. In fact, the distance from it may be where we find the holy.
In an era where time seems to just blur together, burnout threatens to become the norm, and isolation continues to entice us to believe we can go at it alone, our tradition offers us multiple reminders to embrace and embody the countercultural. Share the work. Count on others. Ask for help. That’s what real freedom demands.