Hardened Hearts
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This tension takes on a new form in the next chapter with the introduction of Moses. Raised in a house of privilege, Moses goes out one day and encounters an Egyptian beating one of his Israelite kinsmen. Moses looks this way and that, the text relates, and seeing no man, he strikes down the Egyptian. Subsequent commentators explain that it was not the fact that Moses didn’t see any man that prompted him to take action; after all, in the very next verse it becomes clear that a whole lot of people saw exactly what he did. What Moses witnessed (with apologies for the gendered language), was that nobody was “manning up.” Perhaps out of fear of Pharaoh, perhaps because in Pharaoh’s Egypt evil had been normalized to the point that one could just shrug one’s shoulders and turn away, every Israelite and every Egyptian had been rendered a bystander. The incident is significant because it is Moses’s origin story. But its significance, like that of Shifra and Puah, like that of Moses driving off the offending shepherds in the scene to come, is that it highlights a core aspect of the human condition, namely, that one always has a choice of how to behave. The ability to differentiate between right and wrong and our willingness to make choices accordingly, that is what makes us human.
From our initial introduction to Moses and into this week’s Torah reading, it is this question that drives the narrative. Even though Moses has distinguished himself as a man of action, he still resists the call to leadership. Not once, not twice, but no fewer than five times, Moses balks, demurs, and refuses God’s charge to lead. “Who am I to lead them?” “Who shall I say sent me?” “I am slow to speak.” “What if they don’t listen to me?” The excuses are as varied as they are numerous, and they all point to the same question: Will Moses do the right thing? Will he step up for his brethren on a national scale as he did for his single Israelite brother? This is why God’s response to Moses is so important: “Who gives man speech? Who makes him dumb or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, the Lord?” (Exodus 4:11) It is almost as if – if not exactly as if – God is telling Moses: “Don’t tell me what human beings are or are not capable of! I created you; I endowed you and all of humanity with those capabilities! The question is not whether or not you are capable of self-actualizing – you are. You are created in the divine image. The only question is whether you will or won’t choose to take that step!
It is this wrestling match that takes place within Moses’s soul that is the challenge within the soul of the Israelite nation. Yes, Moses sought to free Israel from servitude, but it was not just physical bondage from which they needed to be liberated. The added value that Moses brought to the Israelites was that he convinced them that their present reality was a far cry from their God-given potential. It was Moses who instructed the Israelites: “Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but you yourselves can free your mind.” The central drama of this week’s parashah and next week’s is not at what point Pharaoh will let Israel go. The central drama is the question of at what point Israel will believe in God and themselves to the point that they know that it is time to go, that they know that they were not put on this earth to serve Pharaoh but to serve God, that they know that the mark of our humanity is our ability to exercise our free will, to make choices, and to live with the responsibility and blessings that come with that capability.
Which is where, I believe, the matter of God hardening Pharaoh’s heart comes into play. Unlike those interpreters who choose to soften the contradiction by offering an elegant “out,” I am inclined to believe that God is doing exactly what God says God is doing. This showdown is not just about the physical shackles of slavery. This showdown is between a Pharaoh who would deprive human beings of their right to exercise their free will, and a God who has created humanity for the very purpose of exercising their free will. If I were to diagram this story on a graph, it would have two lines – one for Pharaoh and one for Israel – curving in opposite directions. With every successive chapter, the Israelites increase in their ability to exercise free will. With every successive chapter, Pharaoh’s ability to exercise free will is diminished. I believe God is making a very direct and very punitive judgement upon Pharaoh regarding his ability to do what he wants to do. “You, Pharaoh, who would make yourself a God by making the Israelites less than human, I will show you who is God by making you less than human.” The Nile, the locusts, the death of the Egyptian first-born – God knew how to hit Pharaoh where it hurt. Hardening Pharaoh’s heart was the coup de grace, the ultimate divine assertion, by making Pharaoh unable to assert anything – until of course, it was too late.
Just a few days ago, many members of Park Avenue Synagogue visited Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial museum. The first thing you encounter, even before entering the exhibit itself, is the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations – trees planted in honor of non-Jews who helped save Jews during the horrors of the Shoah. I never fully understood why Yad Vashem would give such prominence to what was, relatively speaking, a de minimis number of lives saved by righteous gentiles. Is it a shout-out to non-Jewish museum visitors? Or perhaps a way to provide a Hollywood silver lining for an otherwise horrific story? I don’t know, but this year it struck me that the Garden of Righteous Gentiles teaches the same message as the first chapters of Exodus, namely, that one always has a choice. One walks through the Garden of the Righteous on the way to the museum as a preemptive correction to the falsehood that the perpetrators of the Shoah, or anyone for that matter, lacked the ability to make moral distinctions and to make choices based on those distinctions. Like the famous picture of that single dock worker in a sea of raised arms who refused to salute the Nazi regime, like the midwives who performed acts of civil disobedience at their own peril, like Moses who finally found the wherewithal to act on behalf of his people, we always, even in the darkest hours, have the choice of how to behave.
Friends, our lives, gratefully, are not playing out against the backdrop of Egyptian servitude or the Shoah. For the most part, the choices we make are more modest; the stakes, thank God, are not life and death. And yet, no different than any generation before, we are all faced with daily choices as individuals, as families, and as citizens. And like every generation that has come before, we do not lack for moral alibis, all the reasons why we cannot, should not, or will not do the right thing. Our hearts can be hardened no different than that of Pharaoh. Like Moses at the burning bush, we too must answer whether we are willing to differentiate right from wrong, call out injustice when we see it, muster the requisite courage to stand up for what is right, and demonstrate the resolve to see our choices through even if, and especially if, the going gets tough. As the rabbis taught so long ago: “In a place where there are no decent people, endeavor to be one.” (Pirkei Avot 2:6). Our ability to exercise our own free will is not just the measure of our humanity; it is the very thing that makes life worth living.