Rabbi Yoshiyahu Pinto’s talks are known throughout the Jewish world. They combine chassidic teachings and philosophy, along with tips for a better life. We have collected pearls from his teachings that are relevant to our daily lives. This week he comments on the Torah section of Yitro.
“And Jethro, a priest from Midian, Moses' father-in-law, heard.” (18:1)
On the opening verse of the Torah section "And Jethro heard," Rashi writes, "What did he hear that caused him to come? The splitting of the Reed Sea and the war with Amalek." The Torah then relates Moses’s meeting with Jethro, and how Moses told Jethro everything that happened to the Israelites during the Exodus from Egypt and what that happened with them since. Then "Jethro got goose pimples" - he felt apprehension.
We have to understand why Moses recounted all these things to Jethro? After all, the Torah says "and Jethro heard" which means he already heard about the Reed Sea splitting and the war with Amalek. In fact, the whole world heard about the splitting of the Red Sea and the Amalekite war. So why did Moses need to add more details that only worried Jethro?
We might also ask another simple question: before he was a priest of Midian, Jethro was one of Pharaoh's advisers. He knew very well what was happening in Egypt, so why did Moses have to tell him all that transpired to them in Egypt?
The answer will teach us an important principle in life. When a person is successful at something, he is happy and sees it as one time accomplishment. And if he has a failure, he sees the failure as a one time mistake. People don't consider that success and failure are actually intertwined. Similarly, if a person has a good time, he sees the good time as a one-time pleasure, and if he has a hard time, he sees it as a one-time misery. People don't mix good times and hard times together but tend to view them as separate things.
The Torah has a different view. A person who wants to see life the way God views it, must see life as one long continuum in which success and failure are both important parts. A person who feels he has failed at something, is actually on the road to success. It is a “descent” for the purpose of an “ascent”.
While the Israelites were in Egypt, anyone looking at what was happening in Egypt couldn’t deny that the Israelites were going through a very difficult time. The Egyptians enslaved and tortured them, and did terrible things to them. That person when viewing them after they had been redeemed and came out of Egypt, would say that they finally had a good life. This is the view of a person who is not God-fearing, a person who sees the good and the bad in his life as two separate realities. In contrast, a God-fearing person sees everything as one reality.
When Jethro heard about the splitting of the Reed Sea and the Amalekite war, he thought of them as separate from the suffering that the Israelites underwent in Egypt. Moses came and changed Jethro's perception. Even before Jethro became a part of the Israelite nation, and became so important that a Torah section is named after him and his advice to Moses to appoint judges was recorded in the Torah, Moses taught Jethro a great principle in life: to see the times of success and happiness and the times of failure and misery as two sides of the same coin. One is building himself up during the failure and hard times.
A person grows from the difficult times he goes through. The hard times expedite his growth. As the Holy Zohar says: any seed that is sown in the ground, does not begin to grow until it rots. The rotting is a necessary stage to allow the seed’s growth. Similarly, a person will not get his salvation unless he first goes through a hard time. Only after that is he ready to get the good time.
Before there is light there is darkness. Before the good times there are the hard times.
In Jethro's understanding, the period of slavery in Egypt was unconnected to the period of the Exodus. Moses connected the two times and explained to him, "We suffered difficult times in Egypt when Pharaoh enslaved the Israelites in slave labor and killed the children. But this was all part of our eventual salvation and success. It helped build what followed - the time of our redemption and a far more exalted existence." That's why "and Jethro had goose pimples" - he felt apprehension that he did not understand this until Moshe explained this divine insight that failure and success are part of one process.
This as an essential principle of life: the hard times are the beginning of the good times. When a person experiences good times, he should remember that these good times actually began during the hard times which helped him grow in wisdom. The beginning of his salvation and success took place during the difficult period when he was strengthening his faith in God.
This article was written in cooperation with Shuva Israel