Last week we talked about puzzles, and New Year’s and figuring out the puzzle of our lives. Making meaning. This week’s portion also has a puzzle. It is one of the most complicated portions in the entire Torah.
So now that we are in the first week of the New Year, how are those New Year’s resolutions going? Not so well? Not surprised. I prefer making New Year’s goals, taking the time to daydream about what I want to do with this clean slate stretching out before me.
And this week’s portion actually will help with that. Here’s the puzzle. G-d gave us, all of us free will or free choice. But then in this week’s portion G-d seems to say that G-d hardened Pharaoh’s heart. How is that possible if G-d gave us free will? Isn’t that taking away the free will?
Let’s look a little more carefully. There are Ten Plagues and ten responses of Pharaoh’s heart.
The Ten Plagues and Pharaoh’s Heart
- Blood: Pharaoh’s heart “became hard” (7:22)
- Frogs: Pharaoh “hardened his own heart” (8:15)
- Gnats: Pharaoh’s heart “was hard” (8:19)
- Flies: “Pharaoh hardened his own heart” (8:32)
- Livestock die: Pharaoh’s heart “was hard” (9:7)
- Boils: “The Lord hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (9:12)
- Hail: Pharaoh “hardened his own heart” (9:34)
- Locusts: God announces that he has “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (10:1,10:20)
- Darkness: God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (10:27)
- Death of the firstborn: God “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” (11:10)
So not until the sixth plague, where we start reading today, does G-d harden Pharaoh’s heart. I have puzzled over this for years. I finally understood it in a Bible discussion group that Simon and I were a part of for years in Boston. A nun explained it. It is about habits. Pharaoh kept making the wrong decision. He hardened his own heart. Over and over again. It became a habit.
The classical Jewish sources tell us something similar. Exodus Rabbah, the midrash, tell us the first time the Torah tells us G-d hardens Pharaoh’s heart is Exodus 9:12. “Since God sent [the opportunity for repentance and doing the right thing] five times to him and he sent 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.’”
Five times before Pharaoh hardens his own heart. Pharaoh turned away from Moses’s call and demand. He didn’t hear the suffering of the Israelites and it would seem he didn’t care. Five times, as Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg says, “he made his own heart less and less supple and soft.” Pharaoh sealed his own fate, for himself and his relationship to G-d.
I am uncomfortable with this. I thought the gates of repentance are always open. I thought the Dutch Reformed Calvinists were the ones who believed in pre-destination, but here it is right in our own sacred text. Right in our own portion of today.
Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, an 18th century Italian commentator said this (remember, this is before Freud!) “Our external actions have an effect on our inner feelings. We have more control over our actions than our emotions, and if we utilize what is in our power, we will eventually acquire what is not as much in our power.” https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/who-really-hardened-pharaohs-heart/
So what does this have to do with New Year’s. Each of us has the potential to impact our own lives. To make incremental decisions that affect our lives, that affect our hearts. Our tradition can help, too.
There are three songs that we sing routinely that deal with hearts. The first, V’tahair Libeinu is what I sing on the elliptical. “Cleanse our hearts that we might serve You in truth.” If I do enough miles on the elliptical, maybe G-d will not harden my arteries. If I keep making the right choices, I will be healthier, mentally, spiritually and physically.
The Cleveland Clinic recommends this steps for heart healthy living:
- Eat healthy fats
- Practice good dental hygiene, especially flossing every day
- Get enough sleep
- Don’t sit for too long
- Avoid second hand smoke. LIKE THE PLAGUE!
https://health.clevelandclinic.org/5-things-to-do-daily-to-keep-your-heart-healthy/
LIKE THE PLAGUE! How appropriate for today. And if you are wondering what you should eat…think about this list from the Mayo Clinic:
- Portion size
- Eat more fruits and vegetables
- Select whole grains
- Limit unhealthy fats
- Choose low-fat protein sources
- Reduce the sodium in your food
- Plan ahead: Create daily menus
- Allow yourself an occasional treat
Again, it is about building healthy habits. Learning to become the opposite of Pharaoh
But there is one more thing you maybe trying to eliminate in the New Year to be more heart healthy. That is stress. Recently I saw a communication from my colleague, Rabbi Shmuly Yankovitch who is a modern Orthodox rabbi in Phoenix with a similar bent towards social justice to my own. He wrote:
“Receiving constant phone calls from the Dept. of Child Services every day (even late at night!) with tragic cases of abused & neglected children that desperately need to be placed in loving homes. Sweet innocent children with nowhere to go.
After each call, I feel sick.
The Zohar, on this week’s parsha, says Moshe was sick. This is why he didn’t have proper speech. He had a voice but no speech. His speech was in exile and unable to articulate freedom. It was an existential problem. Sometimes we can talk about the brutalities we witness but we can’t really explain the depths of our understanding, the depths of the pain associated with seeing suffering and not being able to alleviate it, the paralysis of empathy, silenced by the shock of an open heart. The limitations of human language. Knowing G-d is with you but having no imaginable path toward freedom, toward a promised land. A voice of sweet freedom but speech stuck in brutal exile.”
How horrible for those children. How horrible for Shmuly. How horrible for Moshe. Moshe was sick. Maybe he was experiencing burn-out or compassion fatigue. Maybe it was too much stress. Later Moses, through his father-in-law Jethro will learn to delegate. It doesn’t come easily to him. Or to me or to some of you. Just say no. But here is another list:
- Identify stressors
- Eliminate unnecessary commitments
- Procrastination
- Disorganization
- Late
- Controlling
- Multitasking
- Eliminate energy drains
- Avoid difficult people
- Simplify life
- Unschedule
- Slow down
- Help others
- Relax throughout the day
- Quit work
- Simplify your to-do list
- Exercise
- Eat healthy
- Be grateful
- Zen-like environment
https://zenhabits.net/20-ways-to-eliminate-stress-from-your-life/
May this be a Shabbat, a year where we learn to be heart healthy, yet full of courage and compassion.