I listened to an Orthodox Jewish Podcaster in Israel this week who said, “Now that there are no more hostages in Gaza, the political left in Israel is once again growing louder, calling for ‘moving on’ and showing compassion without confronting the reality of what happened on October 7th. In essence, he said, we are being asked to forget the nature of the evil that attacked us, and enable it to invade us again in the future.” He played a video showing people from Gaza of all ages, including an elderly man almost running, with a cane, breaking across the barrier into Israel that day to help Hamas with the kidnapping, torture and murder of men, women and children. It reminded me of those who collaborated with the Germans during the last war and who were, in many cases, far more vicious.
Evil is not new. When Amalek attacked the most vulnerable of those escaping from Egypt, the fullness of evil was displayed. God told Moses: ‘Write this for a memorial in the book, and rehearse it in the ears of Joshua: for I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven.’ Parashat Bo ended with, “… the Almighty will wage war with Amalek from generation to generation.” God’s promise to blot out Amalek has yet to be fulfilled.
But this issue is a double-sided coin, with evil on one side and good on the other. GOD created good and evil. In Deut.30:19, He said: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you, life and death, blessing and curse; therefore, choose life that you and your offspring may live…” Then He gave us the formula for how to choose life in verse 20: “…love the LORD your God, hear His voice, and cling to Him; for that is your life and your length of days so that you may dwell in the land that GOD swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.”
What would have happened if Israel’s first King – Saul – had obeyed the prophet Samuel, who told him to completely destroy the Amalekites – men, women, children and even the animals, but Saul, like most people, (especially those on the left) believed that he knew better than God. Even if he had wiped out the physical Amalek, wouldn’t evil have arisen from another place? The battle between good and evil is not physical; it’s spiritual, and if God created evil, He had a reason.
Why and when did Amalek appear? In Shemot 17:7 we read, “the name of the place was Massah (striving) and Meribah (testing) because of the striving of the children of Israel, and because they tested GOD, saying: ‘Is GOD among us, or not?” What immediately follows are four powerful words – “and then came Amalek. When terrible things happen to us, we always cry out, “Where was God?” It is in our nature to blame God or someone else for whatever happens to us; we’ve been doing this since Adam and Eve.
Did the Greeks just suddenly appear to wake up the Maccabees? Did Hitler just suddenly appear to wake up the world and allow the nation of Israel to be reborn?
It seems like the rise of evil always precedes the impetus that arouses the good and calls people back to their Creator.
His promise to utterly destroy Amalek still stands. Humanity is in the midst of another holy war with Islamic fanaticism against Judaism, Christianity and just about everyone else including those within its own ranks…the gods of the world are at war with the God of Israel, who has raised up an unlikely hero, President Donald J. Trump, to stand in the gap as he raised Darius, King of Persia, who provided Nehemiah with whatever he needed to rebuild the wall around Jerusalem.
With that in mind, after God said that He would be at war with Amalek throughout the ages, suddenly, Yitro,Moses’ father-in-law, appears. Shemot 18:8-9 says “Moses told Yitro, his father-in-law, all that GOD had done to Pharaoh and the Egyptians for Israel’s sake…and Yitro rejoiced for all the goodness that GOD had done for Israel…” Yitro prayed…” Blessed be YHVH, the GOD who has delivered you…Now I know that YHVH is greater than all the gods. I see President Trump as a man who has opened the way for all those non-native-born Israelites, like Yitro, to rejoice in all the good done for Israel. He is not a perfect man, but he is the first president to keep his word about moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognizing it as Israel’s capital. President Trump’s formula for peace, however, is not God’s formula.
It’s interesting that God chose to introduce His formula for peace, the Ten Words or Ten Sentences, in this Parashah Yitro, rather than in Leviticus when he forms the Hebrew Priesthood. Yitro was a Midianite Cohen, a Gentile, pagan Priest. This speaks volumes to me. It’s telling us Jews: Don’t put “Being Jewish” on a pedestal, or tout “Proud to be a Jew” as having more value than trusting in the GOD of the Jews.
The Torah teaches us that God separated Israel from all the other nations for the purpose of being ohr lagoyim, and in this parashah, the elders of Israel said to Moses…”All that you say we will do.” We made an oath which doesn’t have an expiry date. We are responsible for being the example Yitro spoke of when he told Moses to choose “…men who fear God, men of truth, who hate unjust gain” who would rule over the people with him. It would be our mandate to introduce our GOD to the rest of the nations and hear them say what Yitro said, “ עַתָּ֣ה יָדַ֔עְתִּי כִּֽי־גָד֥וֹל יְהֹוָ֖ה מִכׇּל־הָאֱלֹהִ֑ים Now I know that YHVH is greater than all the other gods.”
Let us not be so arrogant that we think we can know the mind of God. Let us not put words in His mouth or “cover His face with ours”, as He warned us about in the First Commandment. You know, we read the Ten Commandments aloud during our service every Shabbat, and for the sake of those who are not with us on Shabbat, I’d like to read them to you now. It would be good to memorize them so we can use them as a basis for judging everything we do and knowing right from wrong. They are all we need, and the entire Tanach describes what happens to us when we keep them and when we don’t.
The First Commandment: I am YHVH, your ALMIGHTY GOD, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. You shall not cover My face with the face of any other gods. All religions omit “…who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage”, giving them the right to exchange the one true GOD, YHVH, with theirs.
The Second Commandment: You shall not make for yourselves any image or any likeness of what is in the heavens above or on the earth below or in the waters under the earth; do not bow down to them nor serve them; for I, your ALMIGHTY GOD am a jealous GOD, visiting the guilt of the parents upon the children to the third and fourth generations of those who reject Me but showing kindness to the thousandth generation of those who love Me and keep My commandments. This gives us hope that, after just three to four generations, i.e., a limited period of time, those who turn back to GOD will enjoy His lovingkindness in our families forever.
The Third Commandment: You shall not take the name of your ALMIGHTY GOD in vain, for the ALMIGHTY will not hold him guiltless who takes His name in vain. In other words, do not allow His words to be made null and void by replacing them with our own words. That is a religion, not a relationship! The First three commandments are about our relationship with our GOD.
The Fourth Commandment: Remember the Shabbat day, to keep it holy. Six days shall you labour, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Shabbat of your ALMIGHTY GOD. You shall not do any work on it, not you, nor your son, nor your daughter, nor your male or female servant, nor your cattle, nor the stranger who is within your gates. (Yitro was the stranger among us) For in six days the ALMIGHTY made the heavens and the earth, the sea and all that is in them and rested on the seventh day; that is why the ALMIGHTY blessed the Shabbat day and set it apart. Slaves had to work seven days a week. Now we can rest, and no religion and no individual has the right to re-enslave us. God gave the Shabbat to all humans (includinganimals) for our good.
The Fifth Commandment: Honour your father and your mother that you may live long upon the land that your ALMIGHTY GOD is giving you. Our parents deserve honour simply because they gave us life! The Fourth and Fifth are about loving ourselves.
The Sixth to Tenth Commandments are about how we are to treat our fellow man: You shall not commit premeditated murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbour. You shall not covet your neighbour’s house; you shall not covet your neighbour’s wife, nor his male or female servant, nor his ox nor his donkey, nor anything that is your neighbour’s.
Summed up as the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you!”
Moses listened to the advice of Yitro, who wasn’t afraid to tell him, “What you are doing is not good.” Even the greatest leaders need advisors who tell them the truth and are men of principle. Yitro told Moses in Shemot 18:19, “Listen to my voice; I will give you counsel, and God will be with you. Represent the people before God, and bring the causes to God. You shall teach them the ordinances (the chukkim) and the Torah, and shall show them the way (haderech) in which they must walk (halacha), and the work that they must do.”
Here, a Gentile priest is advising Moses, God’s greatest and most humble servant, on how best to represent God to the people. And Moses listened.
Who are we listening to today? How can we find truth in all the madness that is taking place in our world? The result is chaos, fear, anxiety, anger, mistrust, and every other emotion that follows when we open the door to “anything goes”. We can choose to believe anything other than God’s wisdom, but let’s not complain when we suffer the consequences of our foolishness.
I was born in the late 40s after the last great war. When I went to school in the 50s, we read the Bible, and we learned the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments. Do you know that crime has multiplied exponentially from the 60s to today after the Bible was removed from the public school system? In the private school system, religious traditions were emphasized over God’s Written Torah, leaving the kids who graduated spiritually empty. This has led many of us to seek spirituality in all the wrong places.
I was happy to hear this past week that pillars inscribed with the Ten Commandments have been raised in various locations across the US, in front of courthouses in Texas, Florida, Georgia, and Indiana. Isn’t it time to bring back GOD’s “original” Ten Commandments into our homes, our schools, our courthouses and our lives? No one can change the heart of man except God, but we can do our small part by being a living example of GOD’s Commandments in our own circles of influence, whether they be tens, hundreds, or thousands. That’s the least we can do while God is raising up His army of warriors for the final defeat of the spirit of Amalek.
Shabbat Shalom
Peggy Pardo