Weekly Torah Portion

A few years ago, a widely circulated report found that an ice cream breakfast will make you smarter. Instead of painstakingly studying for exams, we could have just been eating ice cream for breakfast to ace those tests.

A Japanese news site first published this claim, citing a study by Professor Yoshihiko Koga at Tokyo’s Kyorin University. Professor Koga found that people who ate ice cream for breakfast had faster response times and more brainwave activity than a control group. Eventually the news spread to many popular sources, including Newsweek and The Washington Times.

However, after a careful analysis of the study, nutritionists were glad to discover that not all was lost. For one, the control group did not eat anything at all for breakfast. So yes, ice cream’s sugar enhanced a consumer’s ability to respond faster than those hungry with nothing to eat at all. But is that really the relevant benchmark? It then turned out that the research study was conducted in partnership with an unnamed sweets company. Sounds a little sugar-coated to me!

Yisro, Moshe’s father-in-law, enters the desert to join the Jewish people. He is the first Jewish convert in history. Here is a man who left everything behind – his hometown, friends and family, prestige of being a government ruler – to become Jewish. Our Rabbis record that he is referred to by multiple names. One was Putiel, a name which conveyed his earlier practice of fattening animals for idol worship.

Imagine someone who struggled seriously for many years, be it with alcohol, a difficult relationship, a difficult career path, whatever it may have been. When finally able to succeed, to get past that hurdle, he is referred to by a name reflecting his original struggle. Why would the Torah embarrass Yisro like this? It seems humiliating!

One of my teachers, Rabbi Mendel Blachman, explains: Our Sages tell us that Yisro served every form of idol worship before he converted to Judaism. It wasn’t that he jumped from one religion to another. He was searching for the truth and when he thought he found it he was the one who would fatten the animals, signifying worship in the best possible way. He committed himself to that ideology fully, but once he realized that it was wrong he moved on to searching yet again. Yisro is being praised by the Torah for his personality’s relentless pursuit of the truth.

Perhaps Yisro’s conversion is mentioned immediately prior to the passage of our receiving the Torah on Mount Sinai to teach that if we want to engage the mission of passing the Torah’s values from generation to generation, we must first try to emulate Yisro, a seeker of truth par excellence.