A version of this sermon was delivered at Temple B’nai Torah – A Reform Congregation in Wantagh, NY on Shabbat Va’era 5780/2020
There are certain perennial questions we have as Jews. At Passover we ask five of them. The four in the Hagaddah and then "When do we eat!?" That question by the way is also the question asked every Yom Kippur! So, each year when we get to the Torah portions
that describe the famous story of the plagues, the Passover, and the Exodus, a
series of questions always seem to come up. Each year, we ask why it is that we read about Passover well before the Holiday falls. That has to do with the Torah cycle and the holiday cycle. And that's where we are in the Torah right now. Another question that arises as we reach this week’s portion, Parshat
Va’era, is the question of why it is that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. After all, if God wanted to change Pharaoh’s
mind, why prevent it from happening? It
seems counter-intuitive that God would prevent the Pharaoh from being moved to
change or act in response to Moses’s pleas and God’s signs and wonders.
Toward the beginning of the portion, we read
that God sends Moses to speak to the people Israel, to announce that the God of
their ancestors will redeem them. Even
though Moses follows God’s instructions about how to introduce himself to the
people, they don’t believe him. The
Torah tells us why: “their spirits [are] crushed by hard labor.” (Ex. 6:9) They are so despondent in their situation
that they cannot imagine that redemption is possible. They don’t have the capacity or vocabulary to
understand God, and sadly, we know, the slave generation will never fully
commit to God, with but a few exceptions.
When the Israelites don’t listen, God then
sends Moses to speak with Pharaoh. Moses
responds to God: If the people won’t listen to me, then how is it that you
think Pharaoh is going to listen to me?
We read: “The Eternal replied to Moses, ‘See, I
place you in the role of God to Pharaoh, with your brother Aaron as your
prophet. You shall repeat all that I command you, and your brother Aaron shall
speak to Pharaoh to let the Israelites depart from his land. But I will harden
Pharaoh’s heart, that I may multiply My signs and marvels in the land of Egypt.’”
(Ex. 7:1-3)
Now, there is an interesting parallel in the
Hebrew. The people’s spirits are crushed
by what the Torah calls avodah kashah, hard labor. God says that God will “ekasheh et lev
Paroh” harden the heart of Pharaoh.
Already we see that God’s response to Pharaoh will be to turn the tables
on him, to dole out to Pharaoh what Pharaoh has done to the Israelites. God will show that God’s power supersedes
that of Pharaoh, or that of any of the gods of Egypt. “You made the people’s labor kasheh,” God
is saying, “So, I will make your heart kasheh, and you will pay for it.”
The plagues are meant as much for the Israelites
as the Egyptians. The Israelites’ hearts
and spirits are hardened beneath their labors. Their hearts will need to soften in order to finally
be a free people. But the Egyptians, up
until this point, don’t think they’ve done anything wrong, at least we don’t
have any indication that they think the way they’re treating the Israelites is
wrong. We don’t hear from anyone but the
Pharaoh. And we know that it is his own obstinacy
in the face of overwhelming evidence that ultimately leads to his downfall. That Pharaoh’s heart hardens after each of
the first five plagues is his own doing.
The Torah tells us after the plague of blood in the Nile: “when the
Egyptian magicians did the same with their spells, Pharaoh’s heart stiffened
and he did not heed [Moses and Aaron]. (Ex. 7:22) We read similar indications after each of the
first five plagues.
As each of the first five plagues strike Egypt,
the evidence mounts before Pharaoh, that God is not pleased and that he ought
to pay attention.
After the frogs, his heart hardens when the
relief comes. After the lice, the
Egyptian magicians can no longer recreate the plagues, and they say to Pharaoh,
this is the finger of the God! Yet, his heart hardens. After the insects, we read: “But Pharaoh
became stubborn this time also, gam bapa’am hazeh.”(Ex. 8:28) The inclusion of “this time also” shows that
even the Torah narrative seems to be confounded by Pharaoh’s stubbornness and
inability to learn.
Each of these plagues is evidence of the
Egyptians’ wrongdoing. Rabbi Tali Adler
of Machon Hadar makes this point explicit about the first two plagues as she
teaches:
Both of the first two plagues begin in the Nile
where Jewish boys were drowned. The first, blood, makes it clear that the Nile,
the source of life for the Egyptian people—the place where even Bat Paroah, the
woman who saved Moshe bathed—is actually a site of mass murder. All of Egypt,
suddenly, is forced to confront the truth that what is life-giving and
sustaining for them has been the locus of unbearable suffering for the people
they oppress.
The second plague, the frogs, exposes the
horror even more explicitly. The frogs, we are told, emerge from the Nile
itself—still, presumably, filled with blood. In picturing the image of the
frogs—small, slimy creatures crawling out of the river used as a mass infant
grave—it is easy to imagine that as the frogs started to emerge, people thought
that they were seeing thousands of ghosts emerge from their watery graves.
It’s not until after the 6th plague,
the skin inflammation, that we read that the Eternal stiffened the heart of
Pharaoh. Why does God take over
here? Rashi (to Ex. 7:3) says it’s as
punishment. Since Pharaoh’s heart
hardened 5 times on its own, and he didn’t heed God, now God will show Pharaoh
what it means not to heed God. The
evidence is mounting. The proof of the Egyptians’
crimes is public and known, and still, Pharaoh will not let the people go.
But… we just learned that for plagues 6-10, it
is God that hardens Pharaoh’s heart. So,
is the Pharaoh even to blame? Rabbi
Jonathan Sacks says yes, pulling from a Renaissance Italian commentary by Rabbi
Ovadia Sforno:
“God hardened Pharaoh's heart precisely to
restore his free will. After the succession of plagues that had devastated the
land, Pharaoh was under overwhelming pressure to let the Israelites go. Had he
done so, it would not have been out of free choice, but rather under force
majeure. God therefore strengthened Pharaoh's heart so that even after the
first five plagues he was genuinely free to say Yes or No.” [1]
This makes sense especially when we recognize
that the Hebrew word for what happens to Pharaoh’s heart changes. It moves from kasheh, meaning harden
as we heard earlier, to chazak, meaning stiffen or strengthen. In this interpretation, God makes Pharaoh’s heart
stronger, so that he can make up his own mind in the face of the evidence
before him. But will he be convinced by
evidence, or is the verdict already decided in his head?
God
wants Pharaoh to make his decision based not on pressure from others or based
on something out of his control, but rather based on a true recognition that
what he had been doing, how he had enslaved the Israelites was indeed not ok,
that his rule, and the kingdom of Egypt had become corrupt, cruel, chaotic, and
focused on an Egyptian supremacist attitude.
The
end of this week’s portion leaves no question as to the corrupt nature of the
Egyptian government: “when Pharaoh saw
that the rain and the hail and the thunder had ceased, he became stubborn and
reverted to his guilty ways, as did his courtiers. So Pharaoh’s heart stiffened and he would not
let the Israelites go, just as the Eternal had foretold through Moses” (Ex.
9:34-35). After every plague, the
Pharaoh reverts to his default position, that he and Egypt can outlast God’s
punishments. Next week’s portion will
dissuade him of that.
Ultimately, we know that Pharaoh never truly
heeds the lesson that God is trying to teach him. He will let the people go, but then he will
change his mind and chase after them.
Not listening to the evidence presented to him over and over again
destroys Egypt. According to the Torah
narrative, the crops and herds are destroyed by locust and disease, the Nile is
putrid, the people who are still alive are inflicted with lice and disease, and
his army is ultimately drowned at the Sea of Reeds. All that his nation had been crumbles around
him. He leads his nation to destruction because his heart is hardened, and he
can’t find a way to soften it enough to heed the warning and listen to the
evidence of what has been laid out before him.
When evidence mounts before us, will it be
heeded? When God sends a message, will it
be heard? Let us strive to live our
lives as the antithesis to Pharaoh, with our hearts pliable, open to change, to
compassion, to loving the other as ourselves.
Let our hearts be light, not weighed down by the heaviness of sin,
indifference, or lust for power. Let our
hearts be loose, willing to accept the evidence we see before us, so that we
may always make a choice for the good.
Shabbat Shalom
