Community Torah Corner, Feb. 14, 2025

Parashat Yitro is best known for containing the (first rendition of) the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:2-14. But many commentators have been quick to note that those verses do not actually contain 10 commandments! It is technically incorrect to identify 10 commandments, as we really read nine commandments and one declarative statement. The Hebrew term for this section actually reflects this nuance – aseret hadibrot.

           
Even if we acknowledge that we have 10 utterances, nine of which are commandments, we have to wonder what that first utterance - “I am Hashem your God who brought out of the land of Egypt, from the house of Bondage” - is doing there.  After all, it was just last week’s parashah that witnessed the departure from Egypt, and it was clear then that the Israelites attributed what they were experiencing to the Divine: “And when Israel saw the wondrous power which Hashem had wielded against the Egyptians, the people revered Hashem and they had faith in Hashem” (Exodus 14:31).

Rashi is quick to recognize this potential textual issue, and he reads the first utterance as a claim to authority, that God’s rescue of Israel warrants their submission to him. There is something compelling here, and it is certainly understandable that God would demand our obedience, but it leaves something to be desired for those of us clinging to a more egalitarian sensibility. Bekhor Shor, a medieval commentator a few generations after Rashi, is helpful in this regard, because he points to what God is not saying. Couldn’t God have staked the claim for obedience on the basis of being the Creator? It seems that God wouldn’t need a further justification than this obvious starting point. Bekhor Shor argues that this argument would implicate all of humanity in the commandments that are to follow when they are obviously being given to the Israelites alone. Therefore, God justifies the commandments by referencing a specific goodness performed for Israel.

I would like to cast his clever interpretation slightly differently, in the language of relationship. After hundreds of years of alienation in Egypt, God is desperate for a relationship with Israel. Knowing that this is new for them, God realizes that commandments cannot come out of nowhere, but rather must be introduced with an appeal to a relationship that is already off to a good start. God points out that God has already taken the first step forward toward us in crafting an intimate relationship; by following up with the subsequent nine commandments, we are invited to take our own step forward and meet God in the middle.