Why Do You Act Alone?: Delegation, Rest, and Solidarity in Parashat Yitro
by Tyler Vile
Have you ever felt overwhelmed, unsupported, or unsure of yourself? Imagine that you, a wanderer with a speech disability, are told by the divine presence itself that you are the one who will lead your people out of bondage and oppression. You rally your people, who are skeptical at first, and you take on the authorities. You try and try to diplomatically negotiate your people’s release, but you get nowhere. Ten horrific plagues later, under the cover of night, you lead your people to the edge of the sea. Defying all odds, the sea opens up a narrow path for you and your people to freedom.
Now, all that could be days, weeks, months, or years ago. You’ve almost lost count. Your people, uprooted from the only way of life they’ve ever known by the muddy, bloody miracle of liberation, are pursued by a rival tribe, tired, hungry, thirsty, and confused. As soon as you all settle into camp safely, everybody wants a piece of you. You’re the only one with a direct line to G-d, after all. All day and all night, you tend to these people’s needs. You might be just as traumatized and exhausted as they are, but you can’t show it. This, it seems, is the burden of leadership for Moshe, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Yitro, Moshe’s father in law, was a priest of Midian. He brings Moshe’s wife, Tzipporah, and their two sons, Gershom and Eliezer, to the encampment. Yitro makes a swift conversion to monotheism after catching up with his son in law, and is the first person to flat out ask Moshe if he’s doing okay. “Why do you act alone?”, he asks. “Because the people come to me to ask about G-d. I mediate their disputes with the guidance of Hashem’s teachings,” says Moshe.
Yitro may have just come around to worshipping Hashem, but he has years of pastoral care experience, where Moshe has no choice but to learn on the job. For the first time, Moshe Rabbeinu had a teacher. No one trained Moshe, or even asked him what accommodations he needed to be able to do this job effectively, apart from his brother Aharon helping him with speech. Aharon’s assistance with Moshe’s speech disappears into the background of the narrative after they leave Mitzrayim, so we can’t even assume that he can rely on this support all the time. “What you’re doing isn’t right,” says Yitro, “you’re going to wear yourself out. The task is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone. Find capable and righteous people, and divide the labor among yourselves.”
This was good advice, and Moshe listened. He found capable people and enlisted them to minister to people’s needs, in their tens, hundreds, and thousands. Would you listen to Yitro? I’d like to think that I would, but I’m not immediately caring for weary, traumatized, starving, and understandably impatient people. How easy it could have been for Moshe to say, “No, I’m the only one who can do this! No one else is ever going to understand!”
It’s common for disabled people to grow up isolated from disabled community. At home, at school, at synagogue, we may be the only, or one of the only disabled people we encounter in our day to day lives. We learn to advocate for ourselves because we have no other choice. On the rare occasion that someone asks what can be done to make things more accessible, we may only think of our own access needs, because that’s all we know. That’s why we act alone.
In 2021, I began attending the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies’ daily COVID-19 conference call with my friend and mentor, Sheryl Grossman z’’l. Getting to know emergency workers, disability advocates, and people who worked at various aid agencies reassured me that we were not alone. Sheryl and I worked with the Baltimore City Health Department’s VALUE Baltimore initiative. A small handful of disabled people, most of whom were at high risk of infection, dragged the oldest public health agency in the country kicking and screaming toward accessibility and equity during a mass disabling event. Sheryl worked tireless hours, even as she was dying of cancer. When she died, my team and I were left to complete the work that she had started with us. We were drafting policy, assessing vaccination sites for accessibility, making sure that homebound Baltimoreans got their vaccines at home, and training healthcare workers on how to treat disabled people with dignity. We never would have gotten the opportunity to do all of that if Sheryl hadn’t chosen us from among the community, delegated specific tasks to us, and nurtured our leadership skills as they grew.
Even now, as activists like the Partnership for Inclusive Disaster Strategies work to help disabled people survive in the aftermath of the California wildfires, I’m reminded that there is hope for our people, all people. Though there will be more natural disasters, more pandemics, and more uncertainty in the years to come, we can organize. Moshe and B’nai Yisrael only made it to the base of Mount Sinai, standing like a kiln with its giant plume of smoke, because they organized. They received and chose Hashem’s commandments in the midst of a great storm because the whole community’s hardships didn’t have to fall on just one person. That is Yitro’s legacy; none of us has to act alone.
Tyler Vile is a writer, rabbinical student, and disability advocate from Baltimore, MD. Her novel-in-verse, Never Coming Home was first published in 2015. She is a founding member of Hinenu: The Baltimore Justice Shtiebl, a radically inclusive synagogue. She studies at Hebrew Seminary, and loves wheelchair hiking in Baltimore's lush urban woodlands. Her children's picture book, My Chair, My Rules is forthcoming in 2025. She lives in Baltimore with her cat, Twitch, and two roommates.
