[Previous sermon: "Shabbat Shemot - January 12, 2007"] [Next sermon: "Shabbat Zachor - Tetzave, 3/2/07"]
January 19, 2007 - Va'era
If God was going to harden Pharaoh's heart, as it says early on this week's portion (Ex. 7:3), then where was his freedom to choose to let our people go? Either he had the freedom to bestow freedom to the Israelites but didn't, thereby deserving the plagues and punishments he got, or God was controlling him and we are left with a philosophical conundrum. Punishing Pharaoh and the entire Egyptian nation for something he could not help doing seems a bit unjust.
And it follows, as Rambam extends this thought, that if human beings have no freewill, no freedom to choose whether or not to observe and keep our traditions and values, then what would be the point of giving and holding us accountable for all the teachings of the Torah? "By what right or justice might God punish the wicked or reward the righteous?" (Maimonides' Laws of Repentance 5:6) The answer to this most wonderful and perplexing of questions is embedded in the wording and sequence of the plague narrative itself. If you look carefully at the text, you notice that for the first 5 plagues- the blood, the frogs, the lice and so on- the Torah reports that Pharaoh hardens his own heart. It is only from the sixth plague onward that the Egyptian dictator's stubbornness is attributed to God. Boils erupt on the skin of the entire Egyptian nation. What happens?
"Adonai hardened Pharaoh's heart and he would not listen to Moses and to Aaron, just as Adonai had said to Moses." (Ex 9:12) And in next week's portion, after each subsequent plague, Adonai is the one hardening Pharaoh's heart. Some of the commentators attempt to circumvent the problem we have identified, about Pharaoh's freewill. Rashi asserted that God's stiffening of Pharaoh's heart for the last 5 plagues was punishment for his obstinacy during the first five. Plausible, but unsatisfying, at least to me. Maimonides argued that it wasn't Pharaoh's freewill that God removed, only his ability to repent. With all due respect to a great Jewish thinker, I am not sure there is enough of a distinction between our ability to make choices and our emotional state which drives us to make the choices we do. Still other commentators offer the opposite thought to Maimonides'.
They learned that God hardened Pharaoh's heart in order to make him more able to choose to let the people go without being coerced by his and his people's suffering. In other words, as the difficulty of the plagues increased, God gave Pharaoh an extra stiff upper lip to bear the punishments better, and in order to allow him a to make the freer choice of releasing the Israelites from their bondage. And he fails to do even that, which condemns him further. For me this explanation comes closer to my understanding of the text. And yet, a much simpler, profound lesson seems to ring truer. It derives from what Rav Assi meant in the Talmud when he said, "At first, the evil impulse is as thin as a spider's gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart-rope." (Sukkah 52a) Or, to use Star Wars terminology, it is the first steps down the path to the dark side that are the hardest. Why?
Because we have the most freedom to choose not to be a perpetrator of a crime before we have committed it. But after we have, in essence, gotten away with the crime, we tend to rationalize it away. Israel Salanter once said, if we commit a sin once, we call it a sin. If we commit it twice, we say it is permitted. Three times, and it becomes a mitzvah! Evil effects the life of perpetrators as it does the victims. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks has written, "Evil traps the evildoer it its mesh. Slowly but surely he or she loses freedom and becomes not evil's master but its slave." In our story, the Egyptians got it. Early in next week's portion, Pharaoh's own courtiers tell him to just let the people go. But their ruler is so trapped in what has become an obsession, he cannot see the ruin of the empire they see so clearly.
There is moral truth in this narrative which not only explains what happens when a Hitler, a Sadaam, or a Bin Laden, makes a dramatic descent into madness but also the more subtle downward spirals into destructive patterns we sometimes take in our lives. This, yet another reminder of how Torah is so relevant to our lives. The truth is that there are degrees of freedom. It can be won or it can be lost. And unless our moral will is constantly exercised, it atrophies and we become slaves to our circumstances, to our habits, to our instincts. For many of us, it takes a slap in the face - a cancer diagnosis, a car accident from which we walk away, to teach us that we are free, free to say "no" when we want to say "no," free to exercise our conscience instead of our basest instincts free to resist the pressure of keeping up with our friends. Yesterday, Art Buchwald, syndicated columnist and humorist, died at the age of 81. Thirteen months ago, he faced what one would think was a terrifying decision- to begin undergoing kidney dialysis, or go peacefully into the night. Buchwald already had a leg amputated and after 10 or dialysis treatments, he couldn't face spending what was left of his life hooked up to a machine. So he made his decision, gracefully and peacefully, put his affairs in order, moved into a hospice facility and waited the 2 or 3 weeks his doctors told him he would have.
He planned his funeral, he planned his memorial service, and he planned on everyone coming to say goodbye to him. What he didn't plan was having more than a year of life to fill before he actually died. It was a rare gift, a gift of freedom. Because Buchwald spent that year no longer possessed by his work, free to establish the relationships with his adult children he always desired, and free to spend his time the way he wished, with whom he wished. We can all live that free, starting now, if not already. The truth that Pharaoh in our Torah reveals to all of us, is that the ruler of the ancient world's mightiest empire born into freedom was able to rule everyone except himself. He turned himself into a slave.
And Moses, our forefather, a man born into slavery was the one able to teach a nation of slaves how to be free. We may not know, like Buchwald how imminent our death is. But we know our time is limited. That freedom, to live honestly, to do what is most meaningful to us, to act on that which is most important to us, to be with who is most precious to us, and never become enslaved by ourselves is the promise God holds out to us today and everyday but must be cultivated in ourselves in every moment of life we have.
With great thanks to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks and Rabbi Deborah Wechsler.
Rabbi Batsheva Meiri
