In God’s Time—and Ours: Va’eira.23

 In God’s Time—and Ours: Va’eira.23

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

January 18, 2023

In this week’s Torah portion, Va’eira (“I appeared,” Exodus 6:2—9:35) God inflicts Pharaoh and the Egyptians with the first seven of the Ten Plagues. Each is preceded by Moses’s warning of what’s to come, with the response invariably being “But God hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” as time and again Pharaoh refuses to let the Israelites go.

There are many questions that come out of this portion. How do these plagues happen? Are they a natural process—each resulting from the previous, or are they God’s way of demonstrating superiority over the Egyptian idols? And why do they affect only the Egyptians, not the Israelites? 

And what is the meaning of the phrase, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart?” Do Pharaoh’s evil decrees reflect his own free choice, or is he being set up by God for the fall that is the inevitable fate of tyrants? 

For me this portion raises yet another question: Why does it take God 400 years to “remember His promise to Abraham” and “take note” of the suffering of his descendants? What does it take to bring God to act? How much suffering is enough?

We don’t know the answer to that one, and sadly we are reminded of this each time we read of another tragedy or disaster that takes the lives of innocent people—men, women and children alike.

In the Torah, 400 years means something like “the fullness of time.” Our human perception of time is based on the sun and the orbit of the earth around it. How does God count? By what set course does God measure Infinity and divide it up into units of days and years?

This unknown factor leads us to only one conclusion: Up until the moment that this unspecified time span has run its course, it’s up to us to fix the wrongs around us. Miracles do happen, but we can’t count on them alone. In Jewish law, miracles cannot serve as precedent. What needs to be fixed now cannot wait for Divine intervention. We can’t just sit there in hope and prayer; it’s up to us to do what needs to be done to rid the world of the evil we see around us.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, whose birthday we just celebrated, whose memory has become enshrined in our calendar as a national holiday, was a righteous man. He was a religious man, a man of faith. But he was also a man of action. He understood the great lesson of Exodus: that human dignity, human freedom, human rights, human life—these cannot wait for God’s intervening hand. The Rev. King took up Moses’s staff, reminding us that it’s up to us to make sure these rights are fully set in law and stone. 

“Fullness of time” is too long to wait when it comes to people suffering. We have seen the consequences of waiting and procrastinating. In ancient days God always appeared just in time, felling tyrants, making miracles happen. Today these miracles are ours to accomplish, step by step, minute by minute, until the “fullness of time” finally arrives, when all the work shall have been accomplished.

© 2023 by Boaz D. Heilman