"THE" LORD:

Friend Jim Siegel delivered the following Torah commentary at a meeting this Monday at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, where he's a member:

Exodus 10-13:16 -- "Bo" (note: Torah portions are named after the first Hebrew word of the portion.) (Jim Siegel, 1/26/04, Central Synagogue in Manhattan

This week’s Torah portion – Bo from the book of Exodus -- is a very familiar one. In it he Lord punishes Pharoah and the Egyptians with the final three plagues -- swarms of locusts strip the land of all vegetation, three days of darkness blanket the land so that no Egyptian can see another, and God slays all the Egyptian first-born – that of “Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of the cattle.”

With the last plague, of course, Pharoah finally relents; he lets the Israelites go.

This Torah portion and the previous one Va’era cite a number of times language that intrigues me – it says that the Lord stiffened or hardened the heart of Pharaoh.

Now, we know that Pharaoh was an evil and stubborn man. What bemuses me is the repeated statement that God causes him to act this way. Because this contradicts what I believe to be a fundamental human trait -- that we have free will.

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin and Dennis Prager write in their book The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism that “Judaism posits that people have freedom of choice.” And, “(each person) makes his or her moral choice to sin or not to sin.”

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps, says in his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of his human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

So with this in mind, you may ask – did Pharaoh exert free will and free choice and harden his own heart? Or was he a puppet and a pawn to serve God’s will?

I think the answer is both. Pharaoh chose to say no to God’s command to free the Jews, because Pharaoh thought that he Pharaoh was a god. And who was this unseen Lord of these slaves to defy him!

But God does tell Moses why He has used Pharaoh in this way: “I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display My signs among them, and that you may recount in the hearing of your sons and your sons’ sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them – in order that you may know that I am the LORD.”

So God did all this to convince the people of Israel, a beaten down people who understandably were skeptical after being enslaved for hundreds of years. He gave them yet another sign when they stood terrified before the Red Sea as Pharaoh had changed his mind once more, and had sent his horsemen, warriors and chariots rushing after the Jews. The Israelites cried out to Moses, “What have you done to us, taking us out of Egypt?…It is better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the wilderness.”

The Torah says, “Thus the LORD delivered Israel that day from the Egyptians. Israel saw the Egyptian dead on the shore of the sea. And when Israel saw the wondrous power which the LORD has wielded against the Egyptians, the people feared the LORD; they had faith in the LORD and in His servant Moses.”

God’s revelations to our ancestors have meaning for us today.

Every time Jews worship we recite in Hebrew the words of the Sh'ma prayer – “Hear, O Israel: the Eternal One is our God, the Eternal God alone!” We say the words, but do we truly feel them as faith? We’re human. We forget easily. We have a lot to do and a lot on our minds. Maybe one thing we take for granted is our faith in God. Maybe we need to refresh that faith. Because today we are not reminded of the wondrous and unfathomable power of God with plagues that persuade us, nor in crashes of thunder that convince us, nor with balls of fire that singe us. God’s power lies in the quiet miracles and quiet blessings of everyday life. We know it’s so easy to take these for granted.

I suggest that we remind ourselves that God has given us a purpose in life. Rabbi David Wolpe summarizes it so well :

“The Jewish people came out of Egypt bearing a message and a mission. The message was the highest truth – of one God, a God who cares for human beings and is passionately concerned about what we do. The mission was to bring the world to recognize that highest truth. Judaism is a system for realizing that truth in the world. God is not something we can know. But a relationship with God is something we can develop, and godly action, something we can achieve. We reach God in spiritual search and in moral behavior. Judaism teaches both. That is its mission and its message.”

No matter what religion we have chosen or beliefs we hold -- may each of us in all that we do choose to act, to learn, and to grow as God wants us to.

Amen.

MORE:
Bo knows God: Do you?: God is in complete control. Did you know that? (Dr. Elliot I. Berlin, January 27, 2004, Jewsweek)