It’s not easy to take advice from other people. There are many reasons why we resist and many ways to resist. Sometimes we doubt the motivation of the person giving the advice. Sometimes we question whether the advice is sound altogether.
The Torah describes a moment where one person gives advice to another. Not just any two people, but Yitro, Midianite priest and Moshe, leader of the Israelites and Yitro’s son-in-law.
You are overwhelming yourself and others by judging all of the people directly, Yitro tells his Moshe. You need to delegate.
Moshe follows the advice. He delegates. He handles the difficult cases and he appoints others to handle the simpler ones.
The Torah records no vocal response on Moshe's part and doesn't externalize his thought process.
However, in keeping with our people’s long-standing interpretive impulse, I’m going to ask a few questions of my own about that which the Torah does not explicitly state.
First, how might Moshe have felt about receiving advice altogether and specifically from his father-in-law? It’s tempting when we hear advice to be defensive. We may wonder why we need the advice at all. We may doubt the motivation of the person offering the advice. A father-in-law has less history with us than a father and that can cut both ways. On the one hand, it may make us less defensive; on the other, we may think, who is he to be offering me advice?
There’s no way to know, but perhaps Moshe imagined that part of his father-in-law’s motivation stemmed from a desire to free Moshe’s time so that he could, say, be more attentive to his wife and children?
Often our reactions to advice come from doubts that are not entirely rational. What if we were to suspend doubt in two ways: to open ourselves up to the possibility that we might benefit from the advice, or at least from considering it, and to open ourselves up to giving the person advising us the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps his or her motivation is ultimately positive?
Suppose Yitro was indeed motivated at least in part by a desire to help his daughter and grandchildren, giving them the benefit of relating to a less stress-laden husband and father? Would that have been such a bad thing?
If we can transcend our natural defenses against receiving advice, we might find the advice helpful to us and to others.
The second question I ask regarding this episode is, Why didn’t Moshe himself recognize the downside of his “work situation”? Didn’t he feel the stress? Didn’t he realize the downside of arrogating all of the work to himself? Why did he require his father-in-law to step in?
Here I would invoke a long-standing rabbinic tradition that we are not capable of healing ourselves, physically or spiritually. Sure, we can take care of ourselves and we can benefit from self-reflection. And at the end of the day, we must take responsibility for our own direction.
But generally speaking we cannot objectively sense when we are acting unwisely. Maimonides identified that one of the hallmarks of friendship is telling our friend when he or she is going astray. Naturally this is likely to be fraught, with multiple possible pitfalls.
But a friend or family member can often see things in us that we cannot. If we are able to get past our defenses we might be receptive to the vision that others have of us which, in some cases, is sharper than our own.
My last question pertains to the content of the advice that Yitro gave Moshe. What do we feel about the concept of delegating altogether?
In my experience and observation, we tend to resist it. It’s one thing to delegate responsibility but it’s harder to delegate authority, and generally they go hand in hand.
If I ask someone to help me prepare a meal or to bring a dish, I need to be open to the possibility that this person will not do things exactly as I would.
If I am overseeing a medical or legal or educational staff, I have to reconcile myself to the fact that I cannot micromanage every action that the members of the staff will take. And even if I could, that probably would not yield the most fruitful outcomes.
Moshe was asked to give up responsibility as well as authority. Even if the tough cases came to him, he was still relinquishing control by appointing subordinate judges altogether.
Yitro’s advice requires us to give up control. When we invite or appoint others to step in, we are giving them license to use their own discretion, at least within certain parameters.
If we don’t delegate, if we don’t agree to give up responsibility and control, then we will likely find ourselves beaten down by the sheer weight of having to do everything ourselves. And we won’t be the only ones suffering. Yitro was wise when he said, נבל תבל גם אתה גם את העם הזה “You will wear yourself out and these people as well.” (Exodus 18:18)
There are multiple factors that prevent us from being open to good advice. We think we know better. We question the motivation of the advisors.
And yet, our innate defensiveness demonstrates the need for the advice. We can’t diagnose ourselves. We can’t begin the process of curing ourselves. We need the concerned perspective of another who is looking at us in ways that we can’t look at ourselves.
Finally, it helps if we can give up some responsibility, even if it means giving up some control. To allow someone to bear some of the work, knowing that he or she will do that work differently than we might. It all starts with considering someone’s advice, even if it means reconsidering our own approach, our own assumptions.
Who knows what Moshe thought when initially confronting the advice of his father-in-law? To his credit, he chose to consider it and ultimately to follow it. In taking the advice altogether, in “giving up” some responsibility, some authority and some control, he made life easier and better for everyone.
Perhaps the same can be true of us.
Perhaps the same can be true of us.
Originally shared with the Temple Israel of Great Neck community on February 18, 2017, Parashat Yitro.
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