Question: In one of the weekly Torah portions, it speaks mainly about Mount Sinai and the commandments, but it is called by the name of the hero “Yitro – Jethro.” Why? It speaks about him only in the beginning and this is not the main thing in it.

Answer: This only seems that way. We don’t know what is important in the Torah and what is not. It reveals everything in a contingent form like this so that only a person who is occupied with the work in order to enter into the spiritual world begins to understand what is actually being said in this instruction book. Therefore, there are four levels of understanding of the Torah: simple, literary, allegorical, and truth.

Jethro is a great system of the spiritual world that essentially connects the characteristic of bestowal and the characteristic of reception, and, specifically owing to that, a person can begin to work with his egoistical desires in the right form.

The characteristic Israel is the characteristic of bestowal abstracted from our world and not connected to the ego. Therefore, they speak about the Jews almost as if they were aliens: They have something unique that makes them stand out from the general masses. There exists such a suspicious look at them from the side of the rest of the nations—and this is truly so.

We see this regarding the relationship of the Jews to the world in regard to life and not in regard to the superficial egoistical relationship that is found on the surface, but rather if we dig deeper into them. In spite of all this, there is some kind of different relationship, different knowledge, different characteristics, different behavior, and caution, not from fear, but rather from an understanding that the world is not so simple, which is to say, from a characteristic of a unique relationship seen in them in regard to the world, in regard to fate, in regard to history, and in regard to some kind of external system.

In our world, this is emanated into all kinds of ordinary characteristics, However, derived from this, in these people from the beginning, there was rooted a spiritual source, a spark that is called the point in the heart, and, therefore, they are dual, and not just egoistical, for, within their ego, the point in the heart is also found.

This point can become prominent and can drag the ego after it, and it also can be the opposite when the ego drags the point in the heart after it. People of the first type embodied that Israel, that nation, which existed 2000 years ago from the days of Babylon until the destruction of the Second Temple. They lived, then, specifically with this point in the heart; it led them forward. They corrected their ego according to the instruction of the Torah.

And, after that, came the exile, a state in which the point in the heart was found within the ego and obeyed it, and, so, the ego dragged it. However, thanks to this point in the heart, the ego profited. Therefore we see that the Jews in our world are more egoistic, more successful, more agile, and so forth, which is to say, they are immersed in the ego more than all the rest of the nations.

Those characteristics that were given to them for the needs of ascent were used in them to go deeper into the ego. They understood how it was possible to use the ego in order to fulfill it, but this was a necessary mixture of the characteristics of reception and bestowal, and Jethro is the system that helps to direct the ego in the right way for gradual work on itself with the help of the point in the heart.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 3/11/13

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