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Beshalah

Exodus 13:17-17:16

Judges 4:4-5:31

"The heart discerns, hears, speaks, grieves, envies, breaks, strives, desires, confesses, comforts, repents, hardens…It is melted, torn…It deceives…It hates and rejoices."

The author of the biblical commentary Ecclesiastes Rabbah recognized the multiplicity of roles assigned to the heart in the Hebrew Scriptures. No fewer than 850 attestations of the Hebrew words for heart, lev and levav, can be found written there.

While the Bible portrays the heart as a physical part of the body, the equivalent of the personality, the center of emotion, intellect and the point of contact with God, it also places special emphasis on the heart's role as the focus of volition and moral life.

Beshalah, this week's Torah portion, provides an illustration of this relationship between the heart and moral action when it refers to a change in Pharaoh's attitude toward the fleeing Israelites: "Then I will harden Pharaoh's heart and he will pursue them" (Exodus 13:4). This is just one of 10 occasions when God hardened Pharaoh's heart. However, there are 10 additional instances when Pharaoh is reported to have hardened his own heart. In all of these, the hardened heart symbolized moral failure, an obstinacy in the face of human suffering and a predisposition to cruelty.

Biblical scholar Nahum M. Sarna expands a reader's understanding of the use of the hardened heart to portray a character's moral fiber. Sarna suggests that the hardening of the heart "connotes the willful suppression of the capacity for reflection, for self-examination, for unbiased judgments about good and evil. In short, the `hardening of the heart' becomes synonymous with the numbing of the soul, a condition of moral atrophy."

Thus, it should come as no surprise that in biblical language, when God judges an individual, He "probes the heart" (I Samuel 16:7). In contrast to Pharaoh, who hardened his heart when viewing the plight of the Israelites, Solomon prayed for a lev shomayah — a discerning heart: "Grant, then, Your servant a discerning heart to judge Your people, to distinguish between good and bad" (I Kings 3:9).

The notion that the heart is the center of moral behavior is not exclusively an Israelite concept. Egyptian tomb paintings, for example, picture the weighing of the heart after death. In these paintings, a feather, the hieroglyph for truth, is depicted being weighed against the heart of the dead man. His heart must be empty of evil in order to balance the feather against it.

Thoth, the ibis-headed scribe-god, is portrayed writing down the verdict while nearby, a demon called the "Eater of Hearts" waits expectantly for the heart to be thrown to it when a verdict is rendered against the defendant.

In the many instances in which Pharaoh's heart is hardened and therefore not weightless, the biblical author understood that he depicted the Egyptian ruler as condemned to miss the opportunity for eternal life. Thus, Pharaoh had to have understood that he sealed his own fate by taking responsibility for his villainous acts, which he freely and knowingly perpetrated.

This motif carries over into other sections of the Bible and serves as a goal for our own moral proclivity. Ezekiel 36:26-27 states this concept eloquently:

"I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit into you: I will remove the heart of stone from your body and give you a heart of flesh; and I will put My spirit into you. Thus I will cause you to follow My laws and faithfully to observe My rules."

The psalmist articulates the wish to behave in an upright, moral fashion with these simple words: "Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and steadfast spirit within me" (Psalm 51:10). This immutable prayer affords the listener an opportunity to reflect upon accountability.

Ultimately, we must all take responsibility because our tradition teaches that all people will be called by God to account for their deeds. Thus, each time we make a moral judgment, may we do so with our hearts as well as with our minds.