Morality Is a Shared Responsibility

Morality Is a Shared Responsibility                                            

by: Sara Lamm

On Shabbat, at my Synagogue, after prayer services, it is customary for someone from the community to give a short dvar Torah, a Torah thought, to everyone present. The Rabbi carries the congregation throughout the week, and during certain times over the course of Shabbat, but this moment is different by design. It belongs to the people.

Ordinary members of the community stand up and share something that struck them in their learning or in their lives. Torah, in that moment, is not hierarchical. It is shared.

This Shabbat, one such dvar Torah stayed with me. A friend spoke to our community about Yitro, Jethro, Moses’ father-in-law, and the moment he tells Moses that what he is doing is not good. I want to return to this topic and look at what it teaches about moral responsibility.

In Exodus 18, Moses is doing everything. He receives instruction from God. He teaches the people. And he judges every dispute that arises. The people line up from morning until night, bringing every conflict to one man. Yitro watches this and delivers a blunt assessment:

“The thing you are doing is not good. You will surely wear yourself out, you and this people who are with you, for the matter is too heavy for you; you cannot do it alone.” (Exodus 18:17–18)

The Torah’s language here is deliberate. Yitro uses the phrase ‘lo tov’, “not good.” This is the same language the Torah uses earlier when God says lo tov heyot ha’adam levado, “it is not good for man to be alone.” The problem is not only exhaustion or inability to delegate. It is isolation. Moral responsibility concentrated in one person weakens everyone else.

Yitro’s solution is not philosophical. It is structural. He tells Moses to appoint judges over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. These are not distant officials or symbolic titles. They are people embedded within the community, close enough to see behavior clearly, recognize patterns, and respond when something is wrong. Responsibility is no longer abstract. It is shared.

And then, immediately after this system is put in place, the Torah is given at Sinai.

This sequence matters. There are 613 mitzvot, commandments, in the Torah. Many of them regulate ethical behaviour. Many of them shape how human beings treat one another. And yet, only ten are spoken publicly, directly, to the entire nation in such a dramatic fashion.

Why these ten? Because these mitzvot (instructions/commandments) do not require specialized knowledge or institutional enforcement to recognize. They are moral boundaries a society is expected to defend instinctively.

“Do not murder.”“Do not steal.”“Do not bear false witness.”

These are not technical laws. They are social fault lines. When they are crossed, the damage is immediate and visible. They do not live primarily in the courtroom or the Temple. They live in the street, the marketplace, the home.

The Ten Commandments assume a society where people are paying attention to one another. They assume wrongdoing will not be ignored simply because it is uncomfortable to address. They assume moral responsibility is distributed rather than outsourced.

This same assumption appears in the liturgy of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, when we publicly confess our sins before God. In one of the central confessional prayers, we recite an alphabetical list of failures beginning with the words Ashamnu and Bagadnu, “we have sinned” and “we have betrayed.”

The language is deliberately plural. Even when a particular failure does not apply to any one person, we still say it all, out loud. The prayer does not allow moral distancing. If dishonesty, cruelty, or corruption exists among us, then it is something we answer for together. That is not poetic language. It is a claim about how morality works.

This is why the Ten Commandments are given only after Yitro’s intervention.

Had God chosen commandments about sacrifices, ritual purity, or agricultural law for this moment, their observance would have depended on hierarchy and expertise. Instead, He chooses commandments whose violation corrodes society itself and whose neglect cannot be blamed on ignorance.

The message is clear. These are lines the community is expected to hold together.

This is where Yitro’s teaching becomes uncomfortable. When morality is centralized, everyone else disengages. People begin to assume that correction belongs to someone else, leaders, courts, institutions. Accountability thins out. Wrongdoing becomes easier to excuse. Moral failure fades into the background.

We see this dynamic today whenever moral clarity is replaced by performance. Loud declarations. Public outrage. Displays of self-righteousness that demand attention but not responsibility. When Morality becomes trendy rather than an inherent value, we lose a sense of personal accountability.

Yitro is not calling for spectacle. He is building a system in which people are expected to say, plainly, “This is not right,” and to take responsibility for fixing it. Moral accountability, in the Torah’s vision, is not loud. It is demanding. It requires honesty without theatrics and correction without humiliation.

The Ten Commandments do not descend into a vacuum. They descend into a society prepared to carry them together. That is not incidental. It is the condition that makes morality possible at all.

And that, ultimately, is Yitro’s challenge. If we want moral clarity, we cannot outsource it. If we want ethical societies, responsibility cannot live in one place. The Torah is unambiguous about this. Morality is communal work.