Yitro: Between Tradition and Reason
Ibn Paquda and the Spiritual Path
And they judged the people at all times: the difficult matters they would bring to Moses, and all the minor matters they would decide themselves. (Exodus 18:26)
If a case is too baffling for you to decide, be it a controversy over homicide, civil law, or assault—matters of dispute in your courts—you shall promptly repair to the place that your God the Lord will have chosen, and appear before the levitical priests, or the magistrate in charge at the time, and present your problem. When they have announced to you the verdict in the case, you shall carry out the verdict that is announced to you from that place that the Lord chose, observing scrupulously all their instructions to you. (Deuteronomy 17:8-10)
“Have you not known? Have you not heard, that the everlasting God” (Isaiah 40:28). It says “known” which implies knowledge from rational proofs, and afterwards “heard” which implies from the Tradition. And likewise, “Have you not known? Have you not heard? Has it not been told you from the beginning?” (Isaiah 40:21). The prophet preceded mentioning knowledge from rational proof to knowledge which is from received tradition. (Duties of the Heart)
Some cases are too difficult to decide on our own. According to the Torah those cases should be escalated. In Exodus, the judges are said to escalate their hard cases to Moses, the prophet; in Deuteronomy, Moses’s farewell address, we are told that, going forward, we should escalate our difficult cases to the priests. This week we read in Yitro about procedural justice (the setting up of courts) before the giving of the Law (Sinai). According to rabbinic tradition the two segments are not in chronological order. Yitro’s advice comes chronologically after the giving of the Law. Yet it is placed first because the Law will be ineffective without a proper system for administering and interpreting it. Just as the remedy is made before the disease, so, as it were, Oral Torah (the discourse of adjudication) is placed before Written Torah (Sola Scriptura).
What are the hard cases that make their way to Moses and the priests? Ibn Paquda suggests these are cases exclusive to the application of tradition and are typically, edge cases. They are few and far between. Ideally, most cases should not even make their way to the judges. If you are going to the judge you’re already lost. In Paquda’s interpretation the courts represent the ministering of “tradition,” but we each have a personal obligation to relate to God and to our existence on the basis of reason rather than hearsay.
In Paquda’s interpretation, every time we see the word “heard” we can infer a reference to tradition, whereas every time we see the word “shown” or “seen” we can infer a reference to direct experience and understanding, i.e., reason. Yitro begins “Yitro heard.” Yitro’s hearing contrasts with the people’s experience at Sinai: “The entire people saw the voices…” (Exodus 20:16) In Paquda’s interpretation we hear first and then come to know, but we can’t stop with hearing—we have to find a way to know the tradition ourselves. The placement of hearing before seeing, and of courts before Sinai, suggests that our spiritual development begins from tradition, mediation, outsourcing. Yet we cannot be complete unless we stand at Sinai and see the voices — that is, see for ourselves what the voices of others tell us.
Paquda doesn’t say that we should depart from tradition, only that tradition itself is not a firm foundation for a spiritual life. Tradition is a practical path. We can’t always be rational and in such cases we need something to fall back on. Also, without tradition we are at risk of mistaking our own biases for reason. For many people in many situations tradition offers a decent option, a form of common sense. But we have an obligation to make the tradition our own, to love and know God and the commandments from the inside, not just from the outside, and here tradition can only point the way, never substitute. “Yitro heard” gets us to the religion of courts and outsourced judgments, but “The entire people saw” gets us to the religion of self-perfection and intuitive clarity.
In Paquda’s reading, the emphasis is not on the authority of Moses and the priests—the Schmittian sovereigns who decide on the states of exception and invoke emergency powers—but on my personal spiritual obligation to do everything in my power to become learned from first principles so that the courts become peripheral. In the introduction to Duties of the Heart, Paquda criticizes his contemporaries for over-focus on edge cases and hypotheticals. Such intellectualizing misses the point of study, namely, to become a better, more enlightened person. They put themselves in the position of Moses hearing the hard case without realizing that 99% of Jewish life isn’t that intellectually hard—it’s just spiritually hard. They overcomplicate things so as to flatter their own intelligence instead of focusing on the higher objective of their learning.
We live in two worlds: the world of Yitro’s hierarchical courts and the world of Sinai/direct experience and understanding. Without one, we might fail to apply the law in a practical way. We might fail at building a good society. But without the other we would have empty traditionalism, disassociated obedience. A common (and false) Pauline critique of Judaism is that it prioritizes the dead letter of the law over the living spirit of the law. Paquda offers a rejoinder: the goal is to unite spirit and letter, to cultivate a rational and personal understanding of tradition. But it’s also Ok to start with tradition, with the letter, and work your way up (or in). Moreover, there are times when we have to defer to tradition or to the authority of leaders, cases that are simply too complex for us to have confidence in our own faculties to decide. That’s OK. For the most part we don’t have to choose between duties of the heart and duties of the limbs, between rationality and traditionalism; we can pursue both. But in a small number of situations we don’t betray our hearts by deferring to tradition. Rather, Yitro’s practical conservatism frees us up so that we can spend our hearts and minds on the right things rather than wasting them on decisions where they might be redundant.
The spiritual task is to align our hearing with our knowing, our tradition with our reason, our civic life with the rumble of Sinai. But just like Moses didn’t have to adjudicate every case, not every aspect of our lives needs to reach the higher courts. Save the exceptions for when they count.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins
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