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Exodus 10:1-13:16
Jeremiah 46:13-46:28
Often when we think of ourselves as humans, we separate our reactions to the world — there is the intellectual, the spiritual, the emotional, the part of us that goes to the gym or relaxes in the waves by the seashore.
This week’s parshah has an unusual juxtaposition of head, hands and heart: the spiritual, the physical and the emotional.
It begins with the heart, but the heart is not ours — it belongs to Pharaoh. It is hardened, stiffened, turned away from love and mercy, away from lenience and freedom, hard in its response to the pleas of Moses and Aaron, hard in the face of the growing catastrophe that is life in Egypt with plagues striking in waves of ever increasing discomfort and fear.
Here is Exodus 10:1-2: “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display these My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your sons and of your sons’ sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them — in order that you may know that I am the Lord.’”
Many people’s initial reaction to this small text (even when it is re-encountered year by year) is that we do not like the Power that has to make Itself known to us through the discomfort (and even death) of others.
While I experience this discomfort myself, I wonder at God’s need to so repeatedly both say and act to harden that heart. Perhaps Pharaoh’s heart was too open? Too willing to accept the possibility of change, the loss of the people? Maybe he was done with his buildings and really wanted to stop being a slave driver?
With a softer heart, what would our story look like? No heroism, just a people sent out into the desert with their belongings on their backs and no training for how they might create a holy society. It might have been a non-event, and our focus as the descendants of the former slaves could be on Sinai, on the discovery of the Divine law and will. I wonder what sort of society that would have created.
Indeed, most of us, when confronted with someone who tells us that we are oppressing them, tend towards compassion. For the oppressed, raising the courage to say “please stop” is enormous. For the oppressor, hearing of their misdoing can be deeply painful. Such encounters are designed to be redemptive.
In stiffening Pharaoh’s heart, God shifts the emotional stakes to the relationship with the people: For you were slaves and I took you out. This becomes the basis for the love, for the nuptial agreement at Sinai. There is no possibility of gratitude to Pharaoh, for his resistance is necessary for the people to work themselves ready for freedom. We weigh more heavily toward an item for which we pay over something given freely. Our freedom was bought at a high price: the changing of the heart, the torment of the Egyptians, the death of many, both Israelite and Egyptian.
In a way, the end of our parshah is the redemption of this horror, a way of reincorporating the rest of the self into the mixture, not just the emotional hardening and suffering. For we are asked to “consecrate to Me every first-born.” There is a recognition of the hardships suffered by all parties, and a sacralization of new life.
If the old had to die in slavery and plague in order to create an atmosphere of dedication to God, then at least God can then ask that no longer do we pass on the horror.
In choosing to dedicate our first-born to God, we are moving past the hurt, relegating it to memory, to myth. We set it in front of us as our tefillin: the binding of ourselves to God, to God’s principles of truth and justice, and we harness our hands to do that work in the world.
With this precept, God helps us to gentle our emotions, to move beyond the hurt and into the truth that all life is holy, and we stand dedicated to creating a world of goodness and love.
Rabbi Elisheva Salamo is the spiritual leader of Keddem Congregation in Palo Alto.