Judaism
Parashah of the week: Va’era
“Yet Pharaoh hardened his heart and he did not heed them, as Hashem had said” Exodus 7:13
January 24, 2025 10:11
“Yet Pharaoh hardened his heart and he did not heed them, as Hashem had said” Exodus 7:13
January 24, 2025 10:11Like the hard-boiled, burnt egg on our seder plate, Pharaoh’s heart grows harder with each of the seven plagues in our parashah. A close reading shows that for the first five plagues “Pharaoh hardened his heart”, refusing to let the people go.
Each hardening brings the next, more horrific plague on Egypt (and the plagues were not cartoon-cute as many Haggadot make out). However for the final five plagues, the language subtly shifts: “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart”.
There are serious challenges with the idea of God hardening Pharoah’s heart. If God hardened Pharoah’s heart, how can Pharaoh be held responsible for the intransigence which kept the Israelites in Egypt? Connected with this is a more concerning problem: what are the theological implications of God punishing the whole of Egypt for that intransigence if it was in fact caused by God?
Are Pharaoh and the Egyptians mere instruments for God to demonstrate power? And underpinning this all, what happened to free will?
The Midrash takes up these questions. Rabbi Simon ben Lakish claims in Exodus Rabbah: “Since God sent [the opportunity for repentance and doing the right thing] five times to him [Pharaoh] and he paid no notice, God then said, ‘You have stiffened your neck and hardened your heart on your own… So it was that the heart of Pharaoh did not receive the words of God.’”
Pharaoh, according to the Midrash and several other rabbinic versions - Ibn Ezra: “The door is opened for one who comes to defile himself” - made his own free decision, time after time, to refuse freedom to the enslaved Israelites. At this point God picks up, “opening the door” and finishing Pharoah’s story the way he started it.
In other words, Pharaoh, representing Egypt, eventually lost the ability to make a truly free choice the more he became set in a rigid way of operating. As Augustine said, “Habit, if not resisted, soon becomes necessity”. Boil it enough, and the egg on your seder plate will be hard, never again to soften.
Rabbi Shai Held of the Hadar Institute, in The Heart of Torah puts it in the positive: “Mindfulness and constant, exquisite attention are necessary for freedom to flourish. Freedom needs to be nurtured and attended to, not taken for granted.”
Our parashah teaches us not to be like Pharaoh, but to keep the “egg” of the heart soft, and open to new perspectives.
Miriam Lorie is rabbinical scholar of Jofa UK