Conviction is Boss

The Existential Poverty of Guidance in Beha'alotecha

Moses said to Hobab son of Reuel the Midianite, Moses’ father-in-law, “We are setting out for the place of which the Lord has said, ‘I will give it to you.’ Come with us and we will be generous with you; for the Lord has promised to be generous to Israel.” “I will not go,” he replied to him, “but will return to my native land.” [Moses] said, “Please do not leave us, inasmuch as you know where we should camp in the wilderness and can be our guide [lit. “our eyes”]. So if you come with us, we will extend to you the same bounty that the Lord grants us.” (Numbers 10:29-32)

“A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus)

“There shall be one law for you, whether stranger or citizen of the country.” (Numbers 9:14)

Yitro (called Hobab in this week’s parashah)—Moses’s guide and mentor—does not accompany the people on their journey to the Promised Land. Rashi follows the Midrash in suggesting that Yitro has obligations that prevent him from carrying on. He must return to Midian either for the sake of his people or for the sake of his property. Seforno offers a psychological addition: Yitro worries that he won’t be able to adjust to a new climate. Connecting the two, we find that Yitro’s obligations to his native land, real though they may be, betray an aversion to change—who will he be if he undertakes the journey to Israel? The great guide may not want to go too far outside his comfort zone. His identity is fixed.

Yitro gives good advice, but he is only a pair of “eyes”—he can’t take the action needed to bring the people from point A to point B. His example of returning to his own place contrasts with Abraham who leaves his father’s land, and Moses, who, raised in Pharaoh’s palace, leaves it behind. Yitro also contrasts with Ruth, who follows Naomi willy-nilly. Ruth, the consummate beginner, has nothing to lose by following her mother-in-law; Yitro, an expert of high status, would be giving up much more by clinging to his son-in-law. He’s an old man. Travel would be hard on him.

Some heroes, like Odysseus and Yitro, take the path of return; others, often Israelite prophets, go out to a new place. Yet, the Midrash insists Yitro’s journey does not end in Midian, for his children and students there do join up with the Israelites later on. Moses’s promise “we will extend to you the same bounty” proves expansively true for Yitro’s line, even if Yitro himself cannot receive it.

The forking paths of Yitro and Moses rhyme conceptually with the two Passover offerings mentioned earlier in parashat Beha’alotecha. Those who could not offer the first Passover sacrifice are nonetheless allowed to and even required to bring an alternative one. Different situations call for different practices—yet both are considered to be “one law for you.” The Torah gives us a kind of pluralistic model recognizing that divergent experiences and perspectives require different, but still connected, forms of life. Yitro doesn’t enter the land, but his children do. Yitro can’t offer the first Passover sacrifice, in the metaphoric sense, because it is not his direct experience, but he can nonetheless partake in the second one. You do not need to have left Egypt personally to tell the story or identify with it (as the Haggadah makes clear), and you do not need to literally enter the land of Israel to participate in that story, either. Yitro is one of the first and most powerful examples of someone who does not participate in the literal, physical journey of the people, but plays a key role in their destiny. Connected to Moses through marriage, rather than blood, he serves as a model of the “Jew-adjacent” or “Philosemite” whose story remains distinct from, yet partial to the Israelite story. That adjacency, which combines nearness and distance, enables him to be the “eyes” of the people. Yitro is a kind of Jewish interbeing, to riff on Deleuze and Guattari.

Ironically, Moses wants Yitro to come with the people to be their guide, but fails to see that it is Yitro’s very outsider perspective that enables him to be the guide. By saying “no” to Moses, Yitro widens the scope of what partnership and participation can mean: you can have one law, one Israel, with various models of engagement. Israel becomes less a distinct place, less a distinct group, less a distinct people, and more like an eco-system, more like a rhizome.

Yitro does not come with the people, owing to his circumstantial and psychic limits, but he does accompany the people as a teacher, a spokesperson, an advocate, and a spiritual presence internalized by Moses. We frequently find that our teachers cannot literally travel all the way with us—they don’t share our context or commitment—yet they still accompany us even when we go in different directions. While land and ethnicity have more identifiable boundaries, wisdom is osmotic. Teaching and learning can cross and blur lines that bodies and interests and loyalties cannot.

Another lesson we learn from Yitro’s reversion to his native place is the difference between wisdom and conviction: Yitro has the knowledge of where the people ought to camp, but not the commitment to camp there himself. Knowing the right thing and having the passion to do it are two different things. Insight can be taught or transferred, conviction can’t. Yitro can show Moses how to set up courts, but he can’t show Moses how to be Moses. Thus, while wisdom is sharable, it is not as defining as that which is unsharable, the secret we alone know, and that decides whether we go to Midian or to the Promised Land.

Persuasion and logic operate only at the level of knowledge, but they don’t work without conviction. The difference between Ruth and Yitro, between the convert and the philosemite, is conviction. The difference between Abraham who follows God and Leo Strauss, who merely acknowledges that the Enlightenment can’t disprove God’s existence, is conviction. Illumination of the way is important, but not as important as conviction. Reason guides and guards prophecy, determining its skillful deployment. Only conviction ensures its longevity and significance.

Both the sophists and Rebbe Meir acknowledge that reason is a crude instrument that can be wielded to justify any position. You can prove that a sheretz (creepy crawly thing) is kosher in 250 different ways, but even so, the practical law forbids it. What does the halacha “know” that the legal somersaulter doesn’t? Conviction. Conviction is extra-rational. In Heidegger’s philosophy, the central, determining aspect of human existence—contra Kant—is not reason (Vernunft), but care (Sorge). Yitro’s care takes him back to Midian. Moses’s care take him into deeper wilderness. Reason without care leads nowhere, or perhaps just to itself (the certainty of the thinking ego).

If care defines us in distinctive, non-transferable ways, then it is part and parcel of what makes us dignified, part of what constitutes our having been created in the divine image. We imitate the divine when we express conviction, and acknowledge its singularity. We get several chances to bring a Passover sacrifice, but what matters is that when we bring it, we do so with conviction—the act itself demonstrates our conviction to belong to the story. The act of smearing blood on the doorpost which the sacrifice memorializes was an act not of pure reason, but of conviction.

Conviction about the wrong things, or supported by faulty reason, is a problem. For by itself conviction is simply a vector, whether of good ideas or bad ones. But faced with the stark choice between care and insight, we should ask for care. At the critical juncture it is not the teacher who decides the way, but we ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh