The Key To Redemption

The Key To Redemption
D’var Torah for Parashat Va-eira
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
January 20, 2012


In this week’s Torah portion, Va-eira (Ex. 6:2—9:35), the Egyptians are inflicted with the first seven of the Ten Plagues.

Told in advance that God will “harden Pharaoh’s heart… but that Pharaoh will not heed you” (Ex. 7:3-4), Moses knows—as do we all—that God is set to go the whole nine (ten?) yards, without fail.

Hardening one’s heart is the Hebrew idiom for making someone stubborn and obdurate, unable to change his feelings. In effect, what God is doing to Pharaoh is take away his freedom of choice.

Even with the understanding that God is unfathomable (God, after all is so enormous, and our brains, along with all our powers of imagination, allow for no more than a minimal understanding of the working of God’s mind); and even with the foregone conclusion that God is the ultimate power, with no one to tell God what to do or not to do, we may still be allowed to ask why God takes away Pharaoh’s freedom of choice. Wasn’t that, after all, God’s gift to all humanity? Isn’t the power to do t’shuva—return, repentance—given us to the last moment?

So how to answer this baffling question?

Of course, one can always claim that the structure of the story demands ten plagues, and ten plagues it is, not seven, eight or nine. Ten as in a minyan; ten as in a minimal quantity that yet constitutes a single unit (and as such, of course, the basis of the decimal system).

God’s and the Torah’s answer is that through this multitude of plagues God’s might will become known and apparent throughout the world, even to the toughest doubter and skeptic.

The philosophy of fatalism (submission to fate or God’s will) is a large part of any religion. Even in Judaism, with its emphasis on free will and the ability to argue with God, there is a strong thread of this philosophy. The tension between the two—submitting to God’s will and the right to question it—leaves us all in a perpetual spiritual struggle.

So, yes, God’s will is strong in this section of the Torah, and even if one were to plead for mercy, there is no turning back on God’s determination to prove His superior strength.

And yet, as we read the passage carefully, we see that Pharaoh is given several chances to repent. After the second and fourth plagues (frogs and vermin), Pharaoh promises to set the Israelites free but then changes his mind. So close….

Then, right before the seventh plague—hail—Moses warns Pharaoh that this affliction will be most severe. Mixed with fire, this hail will be the most brutal ever witnessed in Egypt, since the very first days of the kingdom; it will kill any living being left outdoors, plant tree or vegetable, animal and human. Moses warns Pharaoh and all the Egyptians that they must protect and gather into their homes everything that is alive so that it is not killed by the large hailstones.

It is to Pharaoh’s compassion that God and Moses appeal. Yet Pharaoh refuses. It was his last chance to repent. After this one will come the last and most severe of all the plagues, with no further chance of forgiveness or redemption. Yet Pharaoh fails.

Was it God who “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” so that the last doorway to forgiveness was shut? Or was it Pharaoh’s own pride and cruelty?

Tyranny has a way of turning upon itself, of inflicting the tyrant with his or her own kind of terror. Paranoia turns the tyrant not only against strangers, but also against his own people, even his own family. It’s a madness that poisons and destroys the very mind, soul and body—and even the house—of the person it possesses.

Tyranny stems from the failure to acknowledge that there is a power higher than oneself, a power which one day will demand an accounting of one’s actions and choices. To one who has put himself so much higher than any morality, the world becomes a set of traps, with spies and enemies lurking behind every twist and turn.

Such a person can show no compassion, because that would be seen as a sign of weakness.

Moses appeals to Pharaoh this one last time, but by this point Pharaoh has gone too far. Redemption is not possible for him. Yes, the story would have it this way; yes, the philosophy of fatalism allows no question. Yet the Torah does offer this last chance, even as we know that it is beyond Pharaoh’s—or any human—ability and power to change matters.

Compassion is the key to the human heart.

With this key, we can open our hearts to one another. We can “hear” another’s pain, feel their suffering, relieve them of some of their burden of anguish. Without it, our hearts close, and the beat of life ceases.

It was ultimately Pharaoh, not God, who turned the key on his own heart and threw it into the Nile. It was Pharaoh who, by his own choice, established the inevitability of his own fall—and, tragically, the consequent suffering of all his people, innocent and guilty alike.

Rejecting the call of compassion was his own human choice, and he chose wrong.


© 2012 by Boaz D. Heilman



\