Parshat Yitro: Carrying Each Other Halfway

This D’var Torah was originally composed for and delivered at the Wexner Alumni Institute, February 3, 2026. It has been lightly adapted for our Tzibur Harlem community.

I’m eleven years old. 

My family is wrapping up a visit in the small log cabin of my parents’ friend, Patrick McMurray, outside Arlee, Montana. It’s 10pm. There are maybe two or three homes within ten acres. We step outside into an all-encompassing darkness—just us, the dirt path, and a canopy of planets and constellations.

Our own cabin is a five-minute walk away. As we prepare to head out, Patrick nods to my parents and says casually, “Let me put on my shoes so I can join you. As they say in Liberia — we carry our strangers halfway.”

At the time, I don’t think about how unusual it is that an Irish-American man in rural Montana is quoting West African custom. This is our family tradition. It’s not as much about hospitality as it is about chevra. Of course you don’t let your people disappear into the dark alone.

Fast forward fifteen years.

I’m twenty-six, fording a river with my family in a carved wooden canoe in coastal Liberia. We’re headed to Grand Cess, a village where no one knows we’re coming and no one is expecting us. The last time my mother lived here, more than thirty-five years ago, there were no cell phones. There has been no advance notice. We are hoping that someone might remember her from her Peace Corps service decades earlier.

We step onto shore: clay huts, thatched roofs. My parents ask the first people we see—in Liberian dialect—whether my mom’s host mother is still alive.

She is.

So is her daughter, who was a child when my mom lived there and now has children of her own.

What follows is one of the most memorable days of my life. We sit under shade trees my mother planted as saplings. We drink fresh coconut water split open by machetes on the beach. And we are escorted—everywhere—by the family my mom lived with all those years ago. Not as hosts performing hospitality, but as companions rekindling a relationship.

We protest, politely. “Please, just show us the way. You must have other plans.”

And they wave us off. “You already know this place,” our host says. “Here, we carry our strangers halfway.”

One year later, I’m in Jerusalem for Shabbat, an unlikely guest in a Haredi neighborhood with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, Dimitry.

We’re at the table of Yanky Singer, a yeshiva instructor who clearly believes he has struck kiruv gold. It’s after 1am when he finally lets us leave. We are facing a ninety-minute walk from Sanhedriya in the north to Talpiot in the south. Yanky puts on his streimel. He insists on walking with us, at our pace. “At least halfway,” he says.

And thank God he feels that way, because that night I am introduced, unexpectedly, to my first Hasidic tish. Yanky pulls us into shtiebel after shtiebel in Me’ah Shearim. I’m ushered into women’s balconies, peering through slatted blinds at elderly Rebbes pounding tables and singing wordless melodies deep into the night.

As we finally part around 3am, I laugh to our host: “You know, Rabbi Singer — you walking us this far—that’s actually a Liberian custom. In Liberia they say, we carry our strangers halfway.”

He cracks a grin. “Maybe so,” he says, “But this idea is also from the Torah.” 

Three continents. Three very distinct cultures. But one, shared instinct: when a relationship matters, you don’t just welcome someone — you walk with them.

In the middle of this week's Parsha, Yitro, we see the idea of ‘carrying one’s strangers’ in a moment so quiet we almost miss it. It comes after Yitro, Moses’ father-in-law, gives Moshe his now-famous leadership advice:  delegate and share the burden, so you don’t burn yourself out. And it comes before the fire, thunder, and synesthesia of the revelation of the 10 Commandments at Mount Sinai, just a few verses later.

It’s this: Yitro leaves.

No drama. No big speech. Just one verse:

“Vay’shalach Moshe et chotno, vayelech lo el artzo.”
Moses sent his father-in-law off, and he went his way to his own land.

The sages of our tradition, of course, ask why. Why would Yitro leave after witnessing miracles happen to the Jewish people in the wilderness? Before revelation itself? They offer all manner of explanations.

Maybe he needs to go home and convert all of his family to join the Jewish people.

Maybe this part of the story is actually out of order! Maybe Yitro doesn’t leave until after the Ten Commandments are given after all, because how could he miss that?!

But Ha’amek Davar (Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin), writing from the Volozhin Yeshiva in the mid-1800s, shifts the question. Not why does Yitro depart — but how.

He argues that Moshe didn’t dismiss Yitro. He escorted him. He accompanied him home.

Not out of a sense of obligation to his wife. Not because Yitro had been useful to him. But because chevra does not expire when the visit ends.

Our tradition goes out of its way to tell us this matters. In the Middle Ages, Maimondes describes in Hilchot Avel that—even though welcoming guests is greater than welcoming the Divine Presence—escorting a guest after a visit is even greater. And the Zohar (the foundational work of Kabbalistic literature) teaches that escorting another person causes the Shechinah to accompany and protect them. 

So what does that look like in practice?

The Talmud in Tractate Sotah answers with a startling degree of specificity. If escorting were only about protection, we’d accomplish that by walking a mere dalet amot — about seven feet.

Seven feet.

But the Gemara goes on to legislate that if you are escorting a friend, you walk two thousand amot. We need more time with our friends. Perhaps the Gemara anticipates that—when it comes to those with whom we share deep social connections—we need time to talk. To be in each other’s presence. To be in each other’s rhythm.  

To physically walk alongside someone is to be in step with them. To go shoulder to shoulder. To match their pace. Escorting someone is companionship in motion.

It’s “where you go, I’ll go a bit too.” 

This is what Moshe models with Yitro when he walks him home before Sinai. Not obligation. Not utility. But chevra.

Chevra is about knowing how to walk together — not only when commanded, not only when needed, but simply because no one should have to take the next stretch alone. 

As they say in Liberia, “We carry our strangers halfway.”

In a community like this one, it’s often not expertise that shifts us — it’s others’ presence. A neighbor’s question at the kiddush table. A quiet “I’ve been there too.” A look across the room that says, I see you. Sometimes it’s a conversation on the front steps, or a walk home after Shabbat dinner, that suddenly turns something we’ve been carrying alone into something we can hold differently. What felt like a stuck place softens. What felt like a wall begins to look like a turn.

And still — no one here is responsible for fixing another person’s life. No one can remove the obstacles someone else is facing. We each return, at the end of the night, to our own kitchens, our own worries, our own mornings.

But for a moment—for one meal, one walk, one shared hour—we can bring each other halfway. We can choose to be present to one another as we are. We can carry each other not by leading or rescuing, but by walking alongside.

So the invitation for us, here, in this community, is not to be helpers. Not to be problem-solvers. Not even to be leaders—those roles await us everywhere else in our lives.

The invitation is simpler, and maybe harder: to be chevra. To notice whose pace we can match. To walk with one another—just a little farther—on the road we’re already on.