Yitro, Mount Sinai and the birth of freedom.

The Revelation of Mount Sinai, the central episode not only of Pasha Ditra, but of Judaism as a whole, was unique in the religious history of mankind.

Other faiths, Christianity and Islam have claimed to be religions of revelation, but in both cases the revelation of which they spoke

was to an individual, the son of God, the prophet of God. Only in Judaism was God's self-disclosure,

not to an individual or a group like the elders, but to an entire nation, young and old, men and

women and children, the righteous and the not yet righteous alike.

From the very outset, the people of Israel knew that something unprecedented had happened at

Sinai. Moses had no doubt that it was an event without parallel. He says, ask now about the former

days, long before all your time from the day God created man on earth.

Ask from one end of the heaven to the other.

Has anything so great as this ever happened?

Or has anything like it ever been heard of?

Has any other people heard the voice of God speaking out of fire as you have and lived?

For the great Jewish thinkers of the Middle Ages, its significance was

primarily epistemological, that is, it created certainty and removed doubt. The authenticity

of a revelation experienced by one person could be questioned, but one witnessed by millions couldn't.

God disclosed his presence in public

to remove any possible suspicion that the presence felt and the voice heard were not genuine.

But if you look at the history of mankind since those days, it's clear there was another significance also,

one that has to do not with religious certainty, but with politics.

At Sinai, a new kind of nation was born, a new kind of society, one that would be the

antithesis of Egypt, in which the few had power and the many were enslaved. It would be,

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