When Moses Listens and God Remembers

It is Exodus 18. Moses’s beloved father-in-law and Jethro has come from his native Midian to visit the man who had just partnered with God to execute the first successful slave revolt in history.

Jethro observes that Moses is personally deciding every legal dispute among the entire people. He tells Moses, “The thing that you do is not good” – and advises him to set up a comprehensive system of intermediate judges who will hear most of the cases.

Moses, the text tells us, “listened to the voice of his father-in-law, and did everything he said.” The reader is drawn to ask why the Torah specifically tells us that Moses “listened” to Jethro. Given that Moses “did everything” that Jethro had said immediately after Jethro renders the advice, isn’t it obvious that Moses had listened?

Given that the Torah does not just tell a story, but – with every verse – imparts a highly practical lesson, we are drawn to ask: What are we supposed to learn by being told that “Moses listened to the voice of his father-in-law”?

Let’s go back to Genesis 8. God had decided to destroy the world with a flood, and had saved – among people – only Noah and his family. The water engulfs the earth for five months, after which the text tells us: “God remembered Noah.”

This leads the reader to wonder: Could God have forgotten Noah? Could, in other words, God have said – “Wait – who is that guy in the ark? Oh, yes, it must be Noah?”

Of course not – that’s ridiculous. So what could the text mean by telling us that, “God remembered Noah”?

There is one more Biblical story we will explore, and the answer becomes clear. It is Exodus 2:25, and the brutal Egyptian enslavement of the Jews had been going on for hundreds of years. God, the text tells us, “listened to their moaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, with Isaac, and with Jacob. God saw the Children of Israel, and God knew.”

Listening, remembering and knowing are, in the Torah’s understanding, not cognitive or auditory phenomena. They are preludes to action. When Moses “listens to Jethro,” he immediately institutes his recommendations for intermediate judges. When God “remembers” Noah, he ends the flood. When God listens, remembers and knows about the enslaved Jews, he begins the Exodus process.

The ideology behind this language is, as ever in the Torah, entirely practical. There is no value to – there is not even recognition of – listening, remembering or knowing unless it is immediately followed by action.

The Torah is not done with those examples in teaching us what it means to listen, remember and know. Let’s go to Leviticus 10, which Jews the world over read in synagogue this past Saturday. Aaron’s sons Nadav and Abihu had brought a “strange fire” to the altar – one the text tells us was unauthorized by God – and they are stricken down. Moses tells Aaron’s surviving sons, Eliezar and Ithamar, to take the meal offering to the Altar and eat it. The young men do not do so. Instead, they burn the offering – and Moses is furious.

Aaron steps up to defend his sons. He says, “Now that such things befell me [and them] – were I to eat this day’s sin-offering, would Hashem approve?”

This sounds like a technical dispute about an ancient practice – the eating/burning of the meal offering, and the consequences for getting it wrong. But the Torah is never only about an ancient practice. This is a debate about how one should respond to grief.

Moses, the lawmaker who was centered around responsibility and obligation, had essentially told his brother and nephews: I’m sorry that Nadav and Abihu died. But you are priests, and have a job to do – that continues after their passing. So, eat the offering.”

Aaron, the priest who was centered around compassion and peace, had a different take. He essentially replied: “Moses, I get it. But my sons were just consumed in a fire. There is a time for the suspension of regular practice, and this is it.”

Aaron is not just challenging Moses’s instruction. He is challenging Moses’s philosophy. He is telling Moses that justice needs to be softened with compassion and that rules need to be administered with sensitivity.

How does Moses, the Torah’s lawgiver, respond? “Moses listened and he approved.”

In my forthcoming book, “God Was Right,” I have a chapter covering the Torah and social science of how difficult it is to change someone’s mind – even in the face of determinative facts or a winning argument.

Here, Moses shows us just the kind of person who can accomplish this very hard task. It is one who listens – and, more than that, does so with enough frequency and seriousness to become a listener.

Moses articulates this lesson in his concluding speech. In Deuteronomy 4:39-40, Moses tells us in rapid succession that we shall “know,” “take it to your heart that God is Lord,” and “observe his commandments.” The very concepts of knowing and believing require internalization and commensurate action. According to the Torah’s understanding, therefore, we can only be credited with “knowing” about suffering, injustice or anything else when we ultimately act in response.