Unscrolled: A Rabbinical Student’s Take on Parashat Yitro

In cultures steeped in the spiritual influence of Taoism, a master work of art is one which expresses impermanence and emptiness. Its prized forms are simple and naturalistic — the uncarved block (pu) and the swath of unbleached silk (su). In the words of scholar Alan Watts, the Taoist aesthetic reminds us that “everything is change, and nothing at all can be held onto or possessed.”

If we can borrow this set of principles and transpose it across geography and time, we find it perhaps fitting to describe the aesthetic and spiritual ethic of the Israelites’ sojourn in the Sinai wilderness, a place of shifting sands and stark natural beauty.

In Parashat Yitro, the Israelites are transient wanderers in the liminal space of the desert. As they ready themselves to receive the Torah, God instructs Moses to make a firm boundary around the base of Mount Sinai, which the Israelites are not to cross. “Whoever touches the mountain,” God warns, “shall be put to death.”

It is a firm prohibition, repeated twice for emphasis, but it is nonetheless provisional, in force only within a limited window of time. “When the ram’s horn sounds a long blast, then they may go up on the mountain.”

This sunset clause is a curious elaboration, marking the holiness of the mountain as a fleeting condition of becoming rather than an eternal state of being. Lifted momentarily into a holy relationship with God and the people of Israel, Mount Sinai is destined to revert to an unmarked feature of the vast wilderness.

This is a stark contrast to the treatment of the Jewish people’s other sacred mountain: Mount Moriah in Jerusalem, where the Holy Temple once stood. Unlike Sinai, the holiness of Mount Moriah has no expiration date. As such, the prohibition against ascending to the site of the former Temple remains intact to this day.

But such deification of place and trust in eternity would be unbecoming in the wilderness, where the lives of an entire generation of wanderers will soon pass into death like sand through an hourglass.

When the people are gathered about the base of the mountain, God speaks His ten utterances. “You shall not make for yourself a sculpted image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens above, or on earth below… you shall not make any gods of silver, nor shall you make for yourselves any gods of gold.”

In forbidding sculpted images, God articulates a vision of the divine that cannot be bound up and kept but must rather be apprehended like music — lived like life itself.

In forbidding sculpted images, God articulates a vision of the divine that cannot be bound up and kept.

In hearing these commandments, we can begin to understand why God has refrained from dedicating Sinai as an eternal monument. To do otherwise would have been to plasticize the revelatory event — to make it into an idol.

After the ten utterances are spoken, the parasha comes to a close with the image of a humble earth altar: “If you make for Me an altar,” God commands, “do not build it of hewn stones; for by wielding your tool upon them you have profaned them.”

At first listen, this commandment seems to be a rebuke of violence. As Rashi writes, “The altar makes peace between Israel and their Father in Heaven, and therefore there should not come upon it anything that cuts and destroys.” But we can also hear in this commandment a critique of the Temple that God’s children will someday build for Him on that other sacred mountain in Jerusalem, which will be a place of hewn stone and pounded gold. It would seem from Parashat Yitro that God prefers the uncarved block of Taoism.

Indeed, Mount Sinai is itself an uncarved block – beautiful in its imperfection, holy in its ephemerality. It is a temporary abode but no less sacred for being so. That its location has been lost to time only serves to remind us the important truth that “nothing at all can be held onto or possessed.”

Matthew Schultz is the author of the essay collection “What Came Before” (2020). He is a rabbinical student at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.