Sometimes, it's not those who’ve lived with the miraculous all their lives, but rather a newcomer, a convert, who can see it most clearly.
Our story begins with Jethro, the father-in-law of Moses. Now, Jethro wasn't born into the Israelite faith. He was a Midianite priest. But when he heard about everything God had done for the Israelites – the plagues in Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea – something shifted within him. He decided to become a Jew, to embrace the one God.
According to Legends of the Jews, when Jethro learned of the Egyptians' demise, he felt a pang of sadness. After all, as the tradition says, you shouldn't scoff at a non-believer in front of a convert – especially one who isn't a "Jew of ten generations standing"! But despite this, Jethro was overcome with praise for God's deeds.
And here's where it gets really interesting. The text tells us – almost scolding – that it was "a shame upon Moses and the sixty myriads of Jews" that they hadn't thanked God properly for their liberation until Jethro came along! Think about that for a moment. The people who had lived through the Exodus, the parting of the Red Sea, the miracles…they hadn't fully grasped the magnitude of it all until Jethro, the outsider, pointed it out.
Jethro proclaimed: "Praised be God who delivered Moses and Aaron, as well as the whole nation of Israel, from the bondage of Pharaoh, that great dragon, and of the Egyptians. Truly, great is the Lord before all gods..." He recognized God's power and justice in a way that perhaps the Israelites, caught up in their own struggles, had overlooked. He understood that God was greater than all the other gods he had worshipped previously.
He even said, "There is no god whom I had not, at some time in my life, worshipped, but now I must admit that none is like the God of Israel." He wasn't coming to this faith blindly. He had explored other paths and found them wanting. As Ginzberg retells it in Legends of the Jews, Jethro declares, "This God had not been unbeknown to me heretofore, but now I know Him better, for His fame will sound throughout the world, because He visited upon the Egyptians exactly what they had planned to undertake against Israel. They wanted to destroy Israel by water, and by water were they destroyed."
Jethro saw the poetic justice, the middah k'neged middah (measure for measure) in God's actions. The Egyptians had planned to drown the Israelite children in the Nile, and they themselves were drowned in the Red Sea.
What does this tell us? Perhaps it's a reminder that perspective is everything. Sometimes, those closest to a situation can be blinded by their own experiences. It takes an outsider, someone with fresh eyes, to truly appreciate the miracle before them. And maybe, just maybe, we can all learn to see the world with a little more of Jethro's wonder and gratitude.