In the parashah This week's reading, Yitro (named after Moses' father-in-law), focuses primarily on the Giving of the Torah. This event was not merely another occurrence in the history of humanity in general and the Jewish people in particular, but rather the moment when heaven and earth, the spiritual and the material, met, forever changing the paradigm of humanity.
Until the Giving of the Torah, the concept of humanity (as opposed to animality) was rational. Human beings established laws that allowed them to lead a healthy life in society. While animals also have rules governing the functioning of a group, these rules are implicit, ingrained in the animal's genetic code. In contrast, human beings are born with a conscience that tells them that some things are right and some things are wrong, but what those things are is not ingrained in our minds and hearts.
The Giving of the Torah shifted the paradigm from rational, intellectual laws to irrational, faith-based one, fueled by the event of the Giving itself—God revealing Himself on Mount Sinai and transmitting the laws. This led to the laws contained in the Torah, the wisdom of God, being eternal and immutable, independent of time, life circumstances, and applicable only to a specific place.
Everything surrounding a person is variable: the physical space where they live, their country, even the language they speak can change. But their essence is eternal because it is directly linked to God through the event of the Giving of the Torah. For this transition from the purely rational to the irrational to occur, there had to be a "touch" from God that provided the strength to achieve it. It should be clarified that irrationality alone is not enough; each concept must then be understood by the intellect. Judaism posits that a person must first accept and then understand, as the Jewish people themselves said, "We will do and we will listen." In other words, there is also a stage of rationality, but it comes later and is based on irrationality.
Our sages say that God chose the Jewish people at the Giving of the Torah. This choice, which arose from the very essence of God, is what eternally connected the Jewish people to that irrational humanity.
Now, wasn't being a rational human enough? The answer is: no. And the proof: during World War II, the Nazis had a very structured logic for carrying out the massacre they committed. It wasn't because they were insane. They were great thinkers and philosophers, whose intellects led them to decide that they had to "cleanse" the world of inferior races... Obviously, they were wrong, but from a logical and rational point of view, it made sense...
The question each of us must ask ourselves is: What kind of human being am I? Purely rational, or do I allow my irrational essence to express itself in my life? When I perform an act of kindness, do I do it for a particular reason, or simply because God says it's the right thing to do?