Delivered at Sukkot Shalom on 15 Feb 2025/17 Shevat 5785
My name often gets misspelt or misunderstood – my gender is confused in email replies and the amount of misspellings of my name still amazes me. These mistakes happen by strangers, or worst of all, from people I have known for quite sometime. I’m sure I’m not alone in feeling a sense of disconnection from someone who gets my name wrong. Because names matter – they say something about who we are, who we want to be and how we want to be seen and heard.
Yitro is the name of this week’s parashah and the name of Moses’ father-in-law. The name ‘Yitro’ means, ‘his abundance’, and certainly in this story we see Yitro’s abundant generosity in counselling Moses and showing up for his son-in-law. For a portion of our Torah to be named after a non-Israelite, a Midianite priest, is remarkable. Just as it is notable that we open our service with the words of a non-Israelite prophet. Likewise it is worth paying attention to those books of the Hebrew Bible named after women – Ruth and Esther. So today I want us to pay attention, closely, to who else is named in this parashah. But before we get to her I want to turn to someone’s work who can help us meet this biblical character who is hidden in our parashah.
Gayatri Chakrovorty Spivak is an Indian scholar, literary theorist and feminist critic and professor at Columbia University. She wrote the foundational and groundbreaking paper, ‘Can the Subaltern speak?’ She argues for a clear and transparent language to represent the subaltern (which we may translated as oppressed or marginalised people). In our modern or post-modern or post-post-modern world we are tasked with reading an ancient text that has much that we can and should protest against – colonialism, extremist views, xenophobia, racism, misogyny and so on. How can we as progressive, liberal Jews stand by our so-called sacred text, process it around our synagogues and kiss it, commit to reading and studying it when there is so much questionable material and ideology within it? When so many are oppressed within the text and because of it – can we let the subaltern speak?
Let’s focus in on one example. At Exodus 1:22 we hear Pharaoh issue the command to throw every Hebrew son into the Nile. Later at Exodus 12:30 after the plague of the firstborn Egyptians we read the words – ‘there was a loud tzaakah/cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead.’ Our liberation story is prefaced and possible, according to this story, due to the death of a generation of Egyptian baby boys. Whilst we organised against the death of Hebrew firstborns we profited from the deaths of the Egyptian boys. At Deuteronomy 7:22 the Israelites are commanded – ‘you shall not intermarry with them [that is the non-Israelites in the land of Canaan]’. As a daughter of a Jew and a non-Jew that verse hurts. Many a time, in the Hebrew Bible, tribal warfare breaks out, commands are issued to destroy another nation’s gods and even calls for a complete extermination of another people, children and all. In our morning prayer we thank God for not making us a stranger.
In our world when there are very real threats to our democracy and diversity and the aspiration of welcoming the stranger is being undone, how to respond to these biblical commands to stay in our ghetto and fear and harm the stranger? We could apologise for the text by consigning it to its historical context but that is too neat of a solution and avoids the violent reality of that rhetoric playing out today.
Instead we could do as our rabbinic ancestors recommend and turn the Torah over and over to see what or, more importantly, who has been missed. Can we, in our protest against this rhetoric of division and hate, let the subaltern speak?
A few verses before the portion we will read today, in chapter 2 of Exodus, we hear of the story of Moses meeting Yitro. Verse 21 reads – ‘and he gave Moses his daughter Zipporah as wife’. Zipporah – a name meaning ‘bird’. On a surface level not a great name for a wife – his bird – but on a deeper level it says something of her free spirit – perhaps a spirit which can move across boundaries. Zipporah is whom we will listen today. She is a daughter of a Midianite priest, Yitro, and marries a man, Moses, brought up as Egyptian royalty and Hebrew redeemer of the Israelites.
The next time we meet Zipporah is a couple of chapters later, in a strange scene, where Moses is taking his wife and two sons back to Egypt to confront Pharaoh.
They camped at night – always a dangerous time and a literary device telling the reader that something significant is going to happen – and the text reads, ‘Adonai encountered him [Moses] and sought to kill him’ (4:24). Zipporah responds in a curious way, to say the least, and picks up a flint and circumcises one of her sons, touches his leg with it and pronounces ‘you are a truly a bridegroom of blood to me.’ It’s a strange passage and not one we can fully unpack now. But here we have Zipporah, a woman, a non-Israelite, performing a usually male, Israelite custom. She saves Moses and in so doing, saves the redeemer of the Israelites and in turn becomes one of our redeemers. Not something we often talk about or recognise.
When we get to our parashah at chapter 18 we will read that Yitro takes Zipporah and her two sons to Moses after, as the opening verse says, ‘Zipporah had been sent home’. A strange statement – why was she sent home? Why didn’t Moses’ family go to Egypt with him? What happened between the circumcision incident when they were on their way to Egypt, and now? There are some later stories that say Moses and Zipporah divorced, that she was so beautiful they had to separate so that Moses could obey the command to stay away from women for the revelation from God at Mount Sinai. Another story, which I quite like, is that Aaron, upon learning Moses was going to take Zipporah to Egypt said something along the lines of, we cannot risk losing more people – protect your family.
In the next couple of verses of our Torah reading we hear the meanings of her sons’ names – Gershom – ‘I have been a stranger in a foreign land’ and Eliezer ‘the God of my father’s house is my help’. Moses recognises that he too is a stranger – it is a key part of his identity. He is, in essence, thanking God for making him and his family strangers.
Yitro then brings Moses’ family to him and at verse 7 – halfway through our reading when the family are reunited the text recounts, ‘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.’ As we focus on Zipporah and seek to hear the voice of the subaltern – we rightly ask – so nu, what about Zipporah and her ‘strange sons’? Does Moses ignore them? Why did he not kiss them? And so ends Zipporah’s story in the Hebrew Bible.
In later rabbinic teachings the rabbis focus in on Zipporah’s beauty and surmise that she was the Cushite woman that Moses’ sister, Miriam, later revolts against. The rabbis mix up the ethnicities (a racist act in and of itself) and note the different skin colour of the Cushites. Zipporah and her otherness is marked and pronounced. One midrash says – ‘”The Cushite woman” tells [us] that everybody concedes about her beauty, in the same way as everyone speaks about the blackness of a Cushite.” Midrash Tanchuma Tzav 13. Racist. Wrong. An outrage to Zipporah and her family.
In centering Zipporah’s story, in the way that we have, there is a chance to protest the racist and xenophobic tropes both biblical, rabbinic and current. Zipporah, free as a bird, whom Moses marries and together finds solace in their shared differences – they name their firstborn as a blessing to their strangeness, their otherness. They model for us a relationship that subverts the biblical commandments to not intermarry. They both ensure the redemption of the Hebrew slaves. They are our redeemers from ancient and current slavery of thought and action. Zipporah and the potential she offers for us cannot be forgotten or ignored. She must be greeted, welcomed and seen as part of our heritage and our future. It is through naming both the harm in our texts and communities that we can also name the potential and those sources and streams of connection and righteousness. May we continue to name all that needs to be named. May we honour Zipporah. Amen.
