Jethro, The Hedgehog

Knowing the Most Important Thing

“The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” (Archilochus, Fragments)

“Moses went out to meet his father-in-law; he bowed low and kissed him; each asked after the other's welfare, and they went into the tent. Moses then recounted to his father-in-law everything that the Lord had done to Pharaoh and to the Egyptians for Israel’s sake, all the hardships that had befallen them on the way, and how the Lord had delivered them. And Jethro rejoiced over all the kindness that the Lord had shown Israel when delivering them from the Egyptians. “Blessed be the Lord,” Jethro said, "who delivered you from the Egyptians and from Pharaoh, and who delivered the people from under the hand of the Egyptians. Now I know that the Lord is greater than all gods, yes, by the result of their very schemes against [the people].” (Exodus 18:7-11)

NOW JETHRO… HEARD. Was Jethro the only one who heard of all that God had done? Does it not say, “Peoples heard, they were afraid” (Ex. 15, 14)? Indeed, the whole world did hear, yet Jethro alone renounced idolatry and accepted the Holy One to worship Him…Pharaoh had as his counsellors three sages: Jethro, Balaam, and Job. Jethro, as already set forth, was the minister of worship, and there was no celestial Chieftain or star of which he did not know the appropriate cult. Balaam was an arch-sorcerer, in word and act. (Zohar, Yitro, 1)

Jethro is an outlier. He’s a non-Israelite who hears the story of the Jewish people and finds it compelling. He finds it so compelling that he offers a blessing and sacrifice to the God of Israel. His example becomes the cornerstone in Jewish law for the obligation to make a blessing upon witnessing a miracle (Berachot 54a). The Zohar emphasizes that lots of people heard about the story, yet Yitro was the only one who changed his mind on the basis of what he heard. Going further, the Zohar suggests Yitro was an advisor to Pharaoh (along with two other non-Israelite prophets, Balaam and Job). Thus his mental turnaround proved exceptionally heroic, requiring him to give up his pride and ideological loyalty so as to see more clearly.

Yitro is, in a way, the first the seder guest, the first “child” in the chain of transmission. His central placement in the parasha in which God gives the Torah to the people teaches us several lessons. One such lesson is that you can be wrong about a lot, but if you’re right about the most important thing, that’s what counts. Josh Waitzkin argues that in every field, top performers are those who know how to focus on “what matters most.” You don’t have to get every detail right; you just have to be directionally right. Greatness depends on the power of abstraction and synthesis, a power shared by both novices and masters, yet often neglected by mid-level experts. Children play a central role in the seder, because they know how to focus on what matters most. Yitro plays a central role in the Jewish story, because he too knows how to focus on what matters most.

Abraham follows God. Ruth follows Naomi. Jethro follows the news. Each, in their own way, grasps what matters most: Abraham, the theologian, understands that there is one God worth following above all else. Ruth, in her declaration “your God shall be my God,” cuts through all the complexity of conversion to grasp the essential truth that joining the Jewish people means joining their destiny. And Yitro, the student of Jewish history, sees through the noise of consensus political opinion to recognize the hand of God in history.

How can it be that this small people has managed to defeat an incumbent civilization against all odds? Yitro sees what skeptics might dismiss as coincidence but what believers recognize as divine providence: the persistent thread of Jewish survival. While other civilizations rise and fall, while empires bloom and wither, the Jewish people endure. As a priest of Midian, Yitro understands power, and he recognizes in Jewish history a power that transcends normal political patterns. He remains a Midianite priest, but he grasps the essential truth of Jewish chosenness not through philosophical argument but through historical observation. The slaves who left Egypt were too close to their own story to see its larger significance. Moses, consumed by daily leadership, cannot see how his own path to burnout threatens the larger mission. But Yitro, whose name echoes yoter (more), adds something crucial to the Jewish story: the perspective of one who chooses to participate in Jewish destiny precisely because he sees its singular importance in human history.

When the Israelites accept the Torah by saying “we will do and then we will understand,” they demonstrate this same ability to grasp what matters most. The details of the Torah are not the headline. The headline is the commitment to the covenant. God doesn’t give the people a prospectus; they do a deal with no implementation plan. They don’t say, “But look at all this operational risk. How are we going to get through the desert?” Those who initially accept the Torah are hedgehogs, not foxes. They know the one big thing: God redeemed them from Egypt and is to be trusted. The rest is commentary.

Yitro is famous for enjoining Moses to set up a court system. Yitro teaches Moses the power of abstraction. This is the power of one who does not know the details of the Torah, but understands the fundamental thesis: God loves the Jewish people. Erik Hoel argues that the mind—no matter how well educated or bright—is unable to remember more than 5 +/- 2 things at any one time. This isn’t just a limitation; it’s a feature that forces wisdom upon us. Differences in knowledge come down to how people “chunk” or organize their knowledge—in other words, how they decide what matters most. In a way, this is exactly what Yitro teaches vis a vis a court system: how to chunk things, how to organize the overwhelming flow of daily disputes into meaningful patterns. Hedgehogs and foxes both know 5 +/- 2 things at any given moment; but hedgehogs know how to chunk what they know more effectively because they organize everything around their one big truth. Delegation isn't just about political bureaucracy, it's about cognition—knowing what mental tasks to hand-off, and which fundamental principles to keep firmly in focus.

A classic fox mistake—the mistake of those who know a lot—is to want to show off how much you know, particularly by focusing on edge cases. Look at all these exceptions! Ibn Paquda thought this was the cultural problem of his time. But wisdom involves knowing that exceptions are exceptional. If you treat every exception as a rule, you’re going to be making decisions from morning until nightfall.

Yitro exemplifies how being a hedgehog—knowing one big thing—can paradoxically make you better at handling many things. His outsider status allowed him to see the forest where Moses was lost among the trees. In teaching Moses to delegate, he wasn’t just solving an administrative problem; he was showing how to transform the many into the one, the fox’s scattered knowledge into the hedgehog’s vision. This is perhaps the deepest wisdom of the Jewish tradition: not that we must choose between knowing many things and knowing one big thing, but that by knowing one big thing—that God loves the Jewish people—we gain the perspective to handle the many things life throws our way.

You don’t need to be right about everything—you just need to know the 5 +/- 2 things that count. Expertise allows one to know the right things. Child-like wonder and the wonder of the naive outsider ensure that we focus on the right things. Expertise is not wisdom. And that is why the Yitros of the world will always have something to offer. Sometimes it takes a Philosemite to show the Jewish people—so expert in their own tradition—what they cannot see themselves.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh