What Jethro Saw That Moses Could Not
At the end of December 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sat down with a room full of Evangelical Christian leaders in Florida and said something remarkable. “You are representatives of the Christian Zionists who made Jewish Zionism possible,” he told them. “It’s hard for me to conceive the emergence of the Jewish state without the support of Christian Zionists.”
For some Jews, that kind of statement is uncomfortable. The idea that Israel — the Jewish state, built on Jewish longing and Jewish blood — needed anyone.
Moses asked the same question — and answered it — in this week’s Torah portion.
Behaalotcha opens at the peak of Israel’s spiritual history. The nation stands at Sinai, Torah in hand, organized in perfect formation, the miraculous cloud of God resting on the Tabernacle. When the cloud lifts, Israel travels. When it rests, Israel camps. They need no map, no compass, no guide. God Himself is leading them every step of the way.
Then Israel prepares to march toward the Land, and Moses does something unexpected. He turns to his father-in-law Hovav — a Midianite, a non-Jew — and pleads with him not to leave:
The phrase ve-hayita lanu le-einayim, which literally means “and you will be our eyes,” but translated here as “and can be our guide,” puzzled the classical commentators. Moses has the cloud. Moses speaks with God face to face. What could a Midianite possibly see that Moses cannot?
Rashi suggests Moses was not speaking about navigation at all. He was making a personal promise: Hovav would be ‘beloved to us like the pupil of our eye.’Hovav, a former pagan priest, an outsider by every measure, might naturally have worried about his place among Israel. Moses answered that worry before it was spoken: you will not merely be tolerated. You will be cherished.
Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch reads the verse more practically. The cloud showed Israel where to go. But Hovav knew the wilderness itself — its terrain, its resources, what could be found and used at each encampment. Divine guidance and human knowledge were not in competition. The Almighty directed their path; a Midianite helped them make the most of where they landed.
But the most penetrating interpretation belongs to the twelfth-century French commentator Rabbi Yosef Bekhor Shor. In his reading, Moses was not speaking about what Hovav could do for Israel. He was speaking about what Hovav’s presence would communicate to the world.
When the surrounding nations saw Hovav — a Midianite priest who had voluntarily left his homeland to walk with Israel — they would ask themselves an unavoidable question: why would he do that? And they would reach an unavoidable answer. As Bekhor Shor writes: “Those who see you with us will say — he did not abandon his land and his birthplace for nothing, unless he saw that God is with them.”
That recognition, once reached, changes everything. A nation that concludes God is with Israel thinks carefully before raising a sword against her.
But Bekhor Shor’s premise points even further than his conclusion. If the fearful response to recognizing God’s presence with Israel is to stand down, the wiseresponse is to step forward — to align with Israel rather than merely avoid her. The same moment of recognition that deters an enemy can inspire a friend. Both responses flow from the same realization: lo l’chinam — this man did not leave his home for nothing. Something real is happening here.
Moses understood this before Israel had marched a single step toward the Land. The nation had the Torah, the Ark, and the cloud. And Moses still looked at a Midianite and said: your presence alongside us changes what the nations see. What you represent — a respected outsider who looked at our story and chose to stay — is something we cannot provide for ourselves.
The answer is not that Israel is weak or incomplete. It is something more ambitious. Israel’s mission was never simply to survive, or even to thrive. It was to be, in the words of Isaiah, a light unto the nations — and a light that shines in an empty room illuminates nothing. The nations are not a concession to Israel’s limitations. They are the audience, the partners, and ultimately the purpose. A Jewish state that exists only for Jews has fulfilled only half its calling. When Hovav walks alongside Israel, he is not filling a gap. He is completing a picture. Moses understood that an Israel marching alone toward its land would be a diminished Israel — not because it lacked military strength or divine favor, but because it had not yet become what it was always meant to be: a nation whose story the world could see, recognize, and be changed by.
This is the vision at the heart of Universal Zionism. Not the conversion of the nations — Hovav remained a Midianite, and Moses asked nothing else of him — but their recognition. When the world sees that righteous gentiles, people with no obligation to do so, freely choose to stand with the Jewish people, it sends a signal more powerful than any diplomatic statement: God is with them. And nations that are paying attention draw their own conclusions from that signal.
Moses closed his plea to Hovav with two things: a promise and a guarantee. The promise: “Whatever good God does for us, we will do for you” (Numbers 10:32). The guarantee came earlier, in Rashi’s reading of the very same verse — that Hovav would be “beloved to us like the pupil of our eye.” Not useful. Not tolerated. Beloved.
That is Israel’s complete offer to its allies across the generations. Not absorption. Not transformation. A shared journey, with distinct roles — and a guarantee that those who recognize what God is doing with Israel, and choose to walk alongside her, will be cherished by the Jewish people in return.
Netanyahu’s words in Florida were not diplomatic courtesy. They were the echo of something ancient. Today, tens of millions of Christians around the world have looked at Israel’s story — the return from exile, the rebuilt cities, the nation that survived what should have destroyed it — and reached the same conclusion Hovav’s presence once announced to the wilderness nations: they didn’t rebuild that land for nothing. God is with them. And to those who recognize that, and choose to walk alongside Israel rather than look away, Moses’s promise still stands. You will not merely be useful to us. You will be beloved to us — like the pupil of our eye.
Shira Schechter
SUBSCRIBE
