Breaking a Hardened Heart: Parshat Va'era

The second week's reading from the book of Exodus says repeatedly that when Moses and Aaron came to Pharaoh and gave him God's message "Let my people go," Pharaoh "hardened his heart, and did not listen."  That makes it seem as if the Egyptian ruler simply and freely decided he wanted to keep on enslaving the Israelites no matter what. 

Yet the text also says that Pharaoh did not listen to them "as God had said." That addition makes it seem as if Pharaoh's free will was in fact quite limited, since his choice was predictable.  Exodus also describes Pharaoh's reaction to God's message in a third way: "God hardened Pharaoh's heart."  And that makes it seem as if Pharaoh had no choice in the matter at all. 

How can we make sense of these apparently different readings, and what can we learn from them?

Traditional Jewish sources have come up with more than one way to understand the hardening of Pharaoh's heart.  One interpretation says free will and an all-knowing God can indeed coexist.  "The Bible is clear that God has a role in determining human affairs, and equally clear that, in most cases, human beings have the ability to choose between right and wrong," as correctly summarized at myjewishlearning.com.   "Everything is foreseen; yet free will is given" (Rabbi Akiva, Pirkei Avoth 3:15).  On this view, God can know that Pharaoh may possibly harden his own heart--or that he will choose to--or God may even intervene to make it more likely--and yet the choice is ultimately up to Pharaoh. 

Other interpretations are equally possible.  We could read "God hardened Pharaoh's heart" as an idiomatic expression.  Why in the world would Pharaoh react so harshly and continue so obstinately?  It defies normal human behavior.  It is unexplainable in human terms.  Things that are unexplainable are attributed to God.  (Insurance companies do the same thing today when they call certain natural disasters "acts of God" and refuse to insure against them!) 

Or, we could say that Pharaoh begins by hardening his own heart against the suffering of the enslaved Israelites and their hope of redemption, and that hardness becomes a habit.  By the end of this week's reading, refusal has become a part of him: it is his character.  He desires to become unchangeable in a way that no human being can be.  He desires to become God.  And the desire to become God hardens Pharaoh's heart. 

Avivah Zornberg, in The Particulars of Rapture, argues for that last interpretation.  She points out that in Egypt, rulers did claim to be gods.  They postulated that they had created the Nile, when the Nile had created Egyptian civilization and given the Pharaohs their power.  They believed that the well-being of the land depended on them, when of course it was the reverse. 

To admit human frailty (using my political terms here, rather than Zornberg's psychoanalytic terms) would be to de-legitimize their own rule.  So the Pharaoh of the Exodus story heroically refuses to admit that he is anything less than God, over and over...until the death of his firstborn son finally makes him face his own humanity and mortality.

What can we learn from this story?  I think, actually, it is a question of how we can learn.  Will we try to make ourselves impermeable to persuasion, like Pharaoh?  Then we risk being taught a heartbreaking lesson. 

Can we open ourselves to the voice of the weak, the oppressed, the unexpected, or the amazing?  Then we invite the possibility of learning something new, like Moses standing before a burning bush and hearing the voice that commands freedom.

Read It Again

Joan Wickersham's column today in the Boston Globe perfectly expresses my feelings about the joy of re-reading.  I would add that the traditional Jewish practice of re-reading the Torah every year is the best example.

• When I was a child, I looked to the Torah for heroes and villains and models of how to behave.  
• As a grown man, I read it for deeper insights into how reality works, and what we are called to do in this world. (See my book Political Discourse in Exile for some of those insights.)
• As a man growing older, I continue to read (or as the idiom goes, to learn) Torah.  But I re-read it these days with more appreciation for other points of view and for psychological insights that my exclusively political readings would have left out.  

 My series of blog entries on Avivah Zornberg's The Particulars of Rapture shows that appreciation.  (And I also appreciate those of you who are following along with me!)

Exodus through the Looking Glass: Parshat Sh'mot

I wrote last week about an interpretation of Exodus that compares slavery in Egypt to living under a totalitarian regime:

...Zornberg shows me a) that it is well grounded in traditional rabbinic texts,  b) that it lets us honor Jewish women as agents of redemption and c) that we can appreciate sensuality as a realm of freedom even--perhaps especially--in times that try our souls.

How is it grounded in rabbinic texts?  Intricately, and with too much care, attention, and detail for me to summarize here.  The idea that Zornberg returns to again and again is that there is a real question whether the Jews are worthy to be redeemed, and whether they can see themselves as worthy--a play on the double meaning of the Hebrew word ra'uy.  

How are women agents of redemption in Exodus?  By making men see themselves as worthy: that is, desirable!  She cites a midrash to the effect that after Pharoah decreed that the Israelite men should work in the fields, and not sleep at home with their wives:

Said Rabbi Shimeon bar Chalafta, What did the daughters of Israel do?  They would [buy wine] and go to the fields and feed their husbands....And when they had eaten and drunk, the women would take the mirrors and look into them with their husbands, and she would say "I am more comely than you," and he would say "I am more comely than you."  And as a result, they would accustom themselves to desire, and they were fruitful and multiplied.... (p. 57)

Mirrors are not mere vanity: they make us look at ourselves and find each other delightful.  Sensuality is not a sin: it is an affirmation of me and you, life, and the possibility of a future.  How can we imagine that God desires us if we do not desire each other?  And if we can see what is "comely" in ourselves despite toil, separation, subjugation, and contempt, we can hold out hope that the oppressors have it wrong, and that we will yet be free.

Reading Exodus in a New Way

The Exodus is about to begin again.  On January 5, to be precise.

Jews read the five books of Moses, or Torah, every week, in a yearly cycle.  It so happens that on the first Saturday of 2013, we read the very first portion of the book of Exodus.

It takes a mental leap to put ourselves in a place no one is yet calling Egypt, with an enslaved group of people, no one is yet calling Jews, over three thousand years ago.  Often, people in the U.S. try to imagine it by using as a guide the experience of the enslaved people closest to us, whose history we know the best: Africans captured and brought to the United States.  We know the songs,"Go Down Moses" and all the songs that say "Look Over Jordan," that explicitly connect the Negro slaves with the Israelites.  We know the speeches of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. in which he refers to the Exodus and the Promised Land (too many to count).

But Avivah Zornberg, in The Particulars of Rapture, takes us to a different time and place: Eastern Europe under Communist Party rule.  Instead of King and gospel, she invokes Vaclav Havel, and Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being.  Putting ourselves in the place of the enslaved Africans let us feel the pain of the lash and the load on our shoulders.  Putting ourselves in the place of the citizens of a totalitarian state, we focus instead on what it takes to maintain inner freedom: to know that we are not just slaves, not simply parts of a whole.

For me, this is a new approach.   I welcome it all the more because Zornberg shows me a) that it is well grounded in traditional rabbinic texts,  b) that it lets us honor Jewish women as agents of redemption and c) that we can appreciate sensuality as a realm of freedom even--perhaps especially--in times that try our souls.  More on this to come: stay tuned.

The Particulars of Rapture

I'm only fifty pages in, but already I can tell that The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus is going to be one of those books that stays with me for life.  Let's just start with the title.

Two things of opposite natures seem to depend

On one another, as a man depends

On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real.  This is the origin of change.

Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace

And forth the particulars of rapture come. 

(Wallace Stevens)

So Avivah Zornberg calls our attention to the ways the Exodus text works deeply in our minds. It has hidden elements on which the meaning of the whole depends: for instance, the deeply important role of women in a narrative that on its surface is about Moses, Aaron, Pharaoh, and a masculine God.  Our job as readers (and as Jews) is to pay attention to both, the revealed and the hidden, to make meaning come forth like new life in the growing season.

I could quibble about the metaphysics of this.  Instead, let me appreciate the poetics.  "Embrace" is just what I have done with Torah over the year, and "rapture" (which is always particular) is just what I have felt when I have felt that, for the moment, I understood.  The passion of these words is true to life.  As Arthur Waskow has written, reading Torah is wrestling with the text, and with God's own self, and "wrestling feels a lot like making love."

For my friends who ask why I would spend so much time with an ancient text, here's an answer.  It's erotic.  It's the life force of the universe breaking out in words.  Why wouldn't I embrace it?

And When It Is Too Hard, Cry Out!

Suffering in silence is not a Jewish virtue.

When our ancestors were slaves in Egypt, according to the book of Exodus:

The Israelites were groaning under the bondage and cried: their shriek for help from the bondage rose up to God.  God heard their moaning, and God remembered His covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.  God looked upon the Israelites, and God knew. (2:23-25)

Avivah Zornberg, in The Particulars of Rapture, points out that there are four synonyms for crying out here, in the short space of two sentences.  And God responds in four ways.  God hears, remembers, sees, and knows.    Our silence is what had allowed God to "hide God's face"--a terrifying expression the Rabbis use for "the human experience of being abandoned by God"--up to that moment.  Our crying out is what evokes God's response: a response of empathy and compassion. 

"And God knew."  What did God know that God, in God's omniscience, had supposedly not known before? At the Burning Bush, God tells Moses this: "For I knew their pain" (Exodus 3:7).  In Christian  thought, it takes divinity being incarnated in human form for God to know human pain.  For Jews, all it takes is an anguished cry by us, frail human beings.

All it takes?  What am I saying?  How easy is it to speak of our deepest pain, to recognize how far we are from freedom?  Far easier to dull one's pain, but far more dangerous as well.  Zornberg writes (paraphrasing the commentary Sefath Emeth):

The basic requirement of freedom ("redemption") is the awareness of "exile," the groan of conscious alienation.  To be in exile and not feel it--this needs a "great salvation."

Some biblical commentators trust that God will give us the capacity to feel our oppression and to cry out against it.  I grew up with the saying that God helps those who help themselves.  Suffering in silence is not a Jewish virtue.  Crying out against injustice is, and always has been, since the days of Pharaoh.  There is plenty of injustice today.  Let us not be silent!