Every piece of paper in my house seems to be asking a question of me.

Not metaphorically—literally. A report card. A letter. A photograph. Each one demands a verdict: Keep me. Save me. Pass me on. Or let me go. As I prepare to relocate, I find myself standing in judgment over my own life, item by item, memory by memory. It is exhausting. And it is lonely.

One of the hardest parts of relocation is not the logistics but the reckoning. You do not simply throw the past into the garbage. Each object requires thought: Should I take this with me? Store it? Show it to the kids and let them decide? Or make the decision myself and live with it? And as if my own accumulated history weren’t enough, I am also sorting through my mother’s—her carefully preserved past, sealed in a box for twenty-seven years. A life within a life. A burden within a burden.

This is when I start to think about Moses in this week’s Parshat Yitro.

Moses, too, was overwhelmed. He was surrounded by people demanding answers. He sat alone as magistrate from morning until evening while the people stood before him, waiting. Every dispute came to him. Every question required his judgment. Moses was doing what felt necessary, what felt responsible. After all, someone had to........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)