Friday January 27th at 7:30 PM:  Shabbat Service

Saturday January 28th at 10:00 AM:  Shabbat Service

Sunday January 29th at 9:30 AM:  Religious School

                                       at 6:30 PM:  Hebrew High

 

Rabbi David E. Ostrich  

 

Most of the attention in Parshat Bo goes to the plagues that God visits upon the Egyptians.

What started last week with blood, frogs, lice, insect swarms (or wild beasts), cattle disease, boils, and hail, continues this week with locusts, darkness, and the death of the first-born.

 

However, there is an interesting passage tucked into chapter 11 which speaks of Moses’ popularity among the Egyptians: "Moses himself was much esteemed in the land of Egypt, among Pharaoh’s courtiers and among the people." Given this high esteem for Moses, what would have happened if Egypt had listened to Moses’ message of liberty and righteousness and repented—instead of rushing headlong down the road to ruin? Repentance, we are taught, is always God’s best hope.

 

Of course, the Torah explains Pharaoh’s intransigence with the phrase, "And God hardened Pharaoh’s heart." A plague would plague Egypt, and Pharaoh would relent, but, before the Children of Israel could start their departure, God would "harden Pharaoh’s heart" and the freedom would be revoked.

 

There are a number of theories or justifications for this course of Divine action, but one scholar sees this explanation as completely un-explanatory. Rabbi Chanan Brichto, of blessed memory, used to teach that "God hardening Pharaoh’s heart" is just the ancient narrator saying that Pharaoh’s actions made no sense at all. In a time before mental health diagnoses, this phrase was a way of saying, "Pharaoh must have been out of his mind!"

 

Mindsets can be wonderful. They can help us to a vision of the world around us. They can organize our principles and help us to face challenges and dangers. On the other hand, they can blind us to evidence rapidly piling up before us. They can keep us going stalwartly though our path has turned out to be a bad one. They can take us to glory or destruction; it is just a matter of how linked to reality they turn out to be.

 

I think of the Leftists and Socialists of the early and mid-Twentieth Century—good and intelligent people who saw in Communism a messianic beacon of fairness, justice, and prosperity. But, as the evidence filtered out of the Soviet Union of executions and starvation and corruption, many devoted Communists just would not (could not) see that Stalin was not a messianic figure. The 25 million Soviets he murdered were moldering in their graves for many years before many party stalwarts could bring themselves to even consider the possibility that the dream had turned into a nightmare. So strong was their mindset that they supported tyranny, believing it to be good—despite the facts.

 

Could this have been Pharaoh’s sensibility? Could he have been so imbued with his own divinity—with the mindset that everything he did was good for Egypt—that he simply could not see the opportunities for repentance?

I hope that, when you or I are pursuing bad habits (sins or something less dramatic), God will send to us a Moses—a person whom we hold in great esteem and who will draw attention to the error of our ways. And, I hope that we will listen. To do otherwise would be out of our minds.

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