In this week's parsha, Exodus 6:2-9:35 we get to a lot of the major action in the book of Exodus. Having approached Pharaoh last week, and gotten rebuffed immediately, Moses and Aaron prepare to bring down plagues upon the Egyptians. Meanwhile, Pharaoh's heart is hardened one way or another, and we learn several important values.
When people think about the story of the Exodus, they typically think about a portion of the book with the same name, stretching through the first 5 weekly portions. In the first, Moses is born, matures, and comes to know God; in the second, he and his brother bring down the first seven plagues; in the third, the final three plagues occur, as well as the Pascal sacrifice; in the fourth, the Israelites escape the Egyptians at the Red Sea. Finally, in the fifth, they receive the Ten Commandments. The second portion, portrayed in a rather wonderful sequence in Dreamworks' The Prince of Egypt, is a section of non-stop action.
It's also one of the most troubling parts of the Bible. Most of the other problematic parts end up up being explained away in one way or another. The Rebellious Son (Ben Sorer uMoreh), for example, is dealt with by the Rabbis of the Talmud by essentially making the scenario listed impossible. There, the rabbis lay out a ridiculous pattern of misdeeds, as well as a virtually impossible requirement for accusation. The commandment to kill off the nation of Amalek is similarly difficult, but by the time of the Rabbis, it became a message of battling those who would destroy the Jews. But in this section, the difficult action comes directly from God, and explaining it away becomes much more difficult.
Over the course of the first five plagues, Pharaoh continuously promises to let the Israelites go, only to go back on his word whenever the plague disappears. The language is the same each time: the Bible uses the root "כבד" over and over again in association with the word for heart, with the action always being on Pharaoh's part (not the heart's, not anyone else's)- JPS translates this as meaning "Pharaoh became stubborn," but a more literal translation is probably that he made his heart heavy or difficult. With the sixth plague, however, we get a shift in language: instead, the Bible uses the root "חזק," meaning strengthened, and the actor changes as well, being either God or the heart (presumably at God's urging).
This becomes incredibly difficult to reconcile with modern notions of a just God. After all, Pharaoh presumably should get a chance to repent, shouldn't he? When things become so bad, shouldn't Pharaoh be able to say "yes, I let you go" to Moses? One of the Rabbinic interpretations is even more in conflict with the way we think of morality, linking God's statement that He wanted to show his power and wonders to the world this way- so God is punishing an entire people in order to demonstrate that he's powerful? David Plotz, blogging the Bible for Slate.com in 2006, comments:
What kind of insecure and cruel God murders—murders first-born children—so that His followers will obey Him, and will tell stories about Him?
I think, though, that there there's a good lesson to be drawn from this, requiring a somewhat different conception of God. Maimonides, a 12th century Spanish and Egyptian commentator, has a very different view of God's role in the world than do many other thinkers. To Maimonides, while God might act in the world, he does so in general via natural phenomena. I don't mean thunder and lightning and so on, but rather that God created the universe to work in a certain way and with certain consequences. For example, the Rabbis of the Talmud say that the first Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed due to idolatry. Maimonides agrees, but not in the sense that God influenced the Babylonians to come directly (despite biblical suggestions to that effect). Rather, Maimonides says that there was a natural reaction- in spending their time studying idol worship rather than war, the Jews opened themselves up to be conquered. This isn't predestination; it's free will, but understanding that free will works within the world, and that actions have consequences. In that sort of a reading, God is hardening Pharaoh's heart- because Pharaoh has continuously hardened his own heart, to the point where he can't imagine giving in.
Moreover, with the earlier plagues, Moses and Aaron merely requested to be allowed to leave temporarily- they asked, for example, to be allowed to sacrifice outside of Egypt, but Pharaoh refused. That refusal, in turn, prevented him from agreeing to later, more drastic demands- perhaps Pharaoh would have allowed that by the end of the plagues, but having refused permission to worship elsewhere for a few days, he certainly couldn't allow them to leave entirely. The shift in language, noted above, is important- God isn't making Pharaoh's heart heavy or difficult; it already is heavy, five times over. What happens during the last five plagues is a strengthening, where the fear of embarrassment prevents Pharaoh from relenting. We can read that as God directly poking at Pharaoh- or as God's natural consequence, that when we refuse to listen and refuse to listen, sometimes the difficulty in changing multiplies itself to the extent that we cannot listen later on.
The Talmud relates the story of Elazar ben Dordaya, a man who has visited every prostitute available. Upon hearing of a woman who charges an exorbitant amount, he saves his money, and visits her, only for her to pass gas while in the act. She tells him that just as she can never recover that, so too he can never go to the World to Come. This so shakes him that he begins asking everyone and everything to intercede with God on his behalf- the mountains, the valley, the streams, and so on. And each time, he is told that the force in question is scared of the consequences, and will not do so. Finally, he sits down and cries, truly committing himself to change, and dies. And a voice rings out from heaven: "Rabbi Elazar ben Dordaya is destined for life in the World to Come!" The reason why nothing will intervene for him is simple- he needs to commit himself to change. Even when he realizes he needs to do so, it still takes desperation to actually change, rather than continuing to try evading the problem over and over again.
I think that Dreamworks' version of the "text" of Exodus depicts this particularly well- Pharaoh is worried about being seen as weak, to the extent that it's only when he directly suffers that he can soften his heart- and even then, he gives in to his natural anger, rather than trying to master it, resulting in disaster at the Red Sea. God's signs are seen, but they are seen because Pharaoh has already committed himself to a bad path- a path that from which he cannot draw himself back, perhaps because of divine intervention, but also because when we give ourselves over to negative thoughts, when we refuse to listen to the downtrodden and desperate, we continuously make it harder for us to change in the future- until a moment comes, often after tragedy, and we are able to see what we have wrought and how we need to change. We need to be constantly vigilant not only to change when we have been bad many times, but also when we have done (or not done) something even one time- because it's more difficult to change, the deeper in we get. And God doesn't need to directly harden our hearts for that to be true.
Shabbat Shalom