Note: This is the drash (commentary) I gave at my synagogue on January 13 about the Torah portion of the week—Va’era, or Exodus 6:2 to 9:35.
Today's parsha, Va'era, is one that many of us know very well. It covers the first seven of the ten plagues visited upon Egypt and as such, it's a central part of our Passover seder every year.
The section opens with God instructing Moses to approach Pharoah and tell him to let the Israelites depart from Egypt. At the same time, God lays out what Pharoah's response will be: "I will harden Pharoah's heart, that I may multiply my signs and marvels in the land of Egypt."
God's description of what will happen does come to pass. We have a series of plagues —blood, frogs, lice, swarms of insects or beasts, cattle disease, boils, and hail—and after each one Pharoah remains intransigent. Occasionally he seems to relent but then his heart hardens.
In some verses, the writers of the Torah describe Pharoah hardening his own heart and choosing to be merciless. In other verses they say that God hardened Pharoah’s heart. In either case, the outcome was the same: Pharoah's heart hardened and he refused to let the Israelites go.
Today I want to focus on this idea of hardening the heart.
The writers of the Torah use three different verbs to describe what happened with Pharoah's heart —CHAZAK, KAVAD, and KASHEH. CHAZAK is used the most frequently, and means to strengthen. KAVAD means to become heavy. KASHEH means to become hard, as in hard labor or a hard-cooked egg.
I think when you put them all together, "hardening the heart" is a reasonable translation. And it's something that we all intuitively understand. Not the modern scientific image of hardening the arteries—Pharoah's problem wasn't eating too much saturated fat—but the emotional idea of hardening one's heart.
"Hardening one's heart" has a lot of facets. Cutting off empathy for others. Ignoring their pleas for help. Refusing to look, to understand, to love. Shutting down natural human feelings of compassion and sympathy and connection.
There are times when we have to harden our hearts for our own or others' survival. With a loved one in the grip of substance abuse, we may reach a point where we have to say no to pleas for money that will just be used to feed their addiction. Or we may be in an abusive relationship where—despite feelings of love for our partner—we need to harden our hearts and start a new life.
Those are extreme scenarios. There are also more mundane moments where hardening our hearts allows us to carry out necessary, beneficial tasks—when we have to discipline an errant teenager or shove an outraged cat into its carrying box and listen to it yowl as if it's being tortured all the way to the vet.
More often, though, hardening our hearts diminishes us rather than helps us.
Imagine for a moment that you're six years old, and it's 1960 or 1970 or 1980, and you live in a clean, quiet, boring suburb. You go to the supermarket with your parents one day and there, in front of the Safeway, you see a person lying passed out on the sidewalk, in ragged clothing, possibly surrounded by vomit or urine.
You'd be shocked, right? You'd pull on your parent's sleeve and say, "Why is that man sleeping in the street, mommy? Should we call the doctor?" You'd want to "make him better." The image might stay with you all through the shopping trip. You'd stare at the person on your way out of the store. You might have trouble sleeping that night; you might have bad dreams.
And today, what happens when we see people lying like that in the street everywhere? In front of our theatres, in our parks, at our BART stations. Maybe we give them a dollar; maybe we feel irritated at failed policies or unresponsive politicians; some of us may volunteer in a food bank; but most of us, most of the time, I suspect, look away. “There are so many. It's been happening for so long. It doesn't seem like there are any good answers.” So we harden our hearts, and in the process we kill a little bit of our best human self. We kill that empathetic, open-hearted six-year-old.
When I was a teenager, I stumbled across writings by Julian Beck, a secular Jewish pacifist and anarchist who was a founder of the radical Living Theatre troupe. This was in the early 70s, the tail end of the Vietnam War, when daily atrocities were happening on the other side of the world fueled by our tax dollars and yet most Americans went about their lives with "business as usual." I hadn't looked at his book, The Life of the Theatre, in 50 years but I never needed to because the words seared themselves into my idealistic teenage brain. This week I pulled it off my shelf (yes, I still own it) to make sure I was remembering those words correctly.
We are a feelingless people. If we could really feel, the pain would be so great that we would stop all the suffering. If we could feel that one person every six seconds dies of starvation (and as this is happening, this writing, this reading, someone is dying of starvation) we would stop it. If we could really feel it in the bowels, the groin, in the throat, in the breast, we would go into the streets and stop the war, stop slavery, stop the prisons, stop the killings, stop destruction. Ah, I might learn what love is.
Today we Jews face yet another challenge of hardened hearts, one that is more difficult for us to discuss than the Vietnam War or the homeless people in the park. I'm talking, of course, about the Hamas attack of October 7th and Israel's ensuing bombing campaign in Gaza.
As Jews—and I'm just talking about us as Jews today, since the topic of hardened hearts and the rest of the world could be a whole other drash—the October 7th attack brought us heart break, not heart hardening. Our hearts have felt too raw rather than too closed. Each new article about sexual assaults or family members held hostage rips us open—makes us feel appalled, enraged, isolated, vulnerable.
The heart-hardening, I fear, comes with what has happened since October 7th. What has been happening in Gaza.
The death toll as reported by the Gaza health ministry is currently over 23,000 people. Even if we look at that number critically—if we take into account that all wars breed exaggeration and some of those dead are combatants—we're still talking about over 10,000 dead civilians, including thousands of children.
Proportionally, if an enemy levied this kind of damage on the US, with our much larger population, we'd be looking at 2 to 3 million dead. That's the equivalent of one thousand World Trade Centers. It's one out of every 100 people.
It's painful to see such suffering and know that we—our people, Israel, the world's only Jewish state—are responsible. And so it's tempting to harden our hearts. There are many ways to do this.
One is to avoid looking. I plead guilty to this. Many days, I see the latest newspaper headline about a destroyed hospital or a family with 35 dead relatives and I can't bear to read about it. I skip to another section of the paper.
Another way is to blame the victims. "There are no innocents in Gaza," we may say; "they chose the path of war and terror by electing Hamas back in 2006. They brought this on themselves."
Another way is to have blind faith in the Netanyahu government. "They must have good reasons for such widespread bombing," we may tell ourselves. "They have security information that I don't have. They're doing no more than is necessary to secure Israel's borders."
Yet another way is to throw up our hands in despair. "There's no realistic solution," we may say. "There's no path to peace. I'm giving up on things ever getting any better."
All of those are false paths. Here's why.
Looking away may make us feel temporarily better, but it doesn't stop the death and suffering.
Blaming the victims is not tenable when so many of the dead are children.
I have no faith in the decisions of the Netanyahu government, with a prime minister who has dedicated his career to undermining a two-state peace process and a cabinet that includes right-wing extremists who talk openly about dropping nuclear bombs on Gaza, forcing its residents into exile in Egypt, and re-establishing Jewish settlements there.
And despair is a dead end. Where there is life, there is always hope. Our experience as a people—surviving the destruction of two temples, as well as Inquisitions, expulsions, pogroms, and the Holocaust—should teach us that.
Too many people view this war as an either-or—a binary choice. You're either FOR Israel or you're FOR Palestine. That reduces everything to a football game, with our side and the other side. For one to win, the other has to lose. But our tradition teaches us that we can hold multiple ideas in our heads at once, that it need not be an exclusive either-or:
If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
We can hold Israelis in our hearts AND we can hold Palestinians in our hearts. And if we are truly holding them both in our hearts—if we choose not to harden our hearts like Pharoah—we need to do more than sigh and sorrow and pray.
I won't presume to tell you what to do or think politically. We are a diverse congregation with many different backgrounds and opinions. But speaking for myself, I support calls for an immediate bilateral ceasefire. Immediate return of all the Israeli hostages. Re-starting a peace process that meets the needs of both Israelis and Palestinians... because a mutually-negotiated peace, in my view, is the only thing that will prevent this cycle of violence from repeating ad infinitum.
Last weekend, I went to a peace vigil calling for an immediate bilateral ceasefire, organized by an informal group of Bay Area Israeli peace activists. One of the ground rules for the vigil was no flags -- they didn't want this to turn into another of those "Team Palestine" versus "Team Israel" events. There were about 200 people, nearly all Jewish, although I believe the organizers' long-term hope is to draw in others, including Palestinians and their supporters. I had wanted for some weeks to express my support for a ceasefire, but this was the first action that felt comfortable for me—where I could stand up for Palestinian lives without being surrounded by people devaluing Israeli lives. The mood was somber and reflective, as you'd expect—but also surprisingly uplifting, from being around so many other people who refuse to let fear, anger, or despair harden their hearts.
I offer this up not as a prescription for everyone—not everybody likes to go to rallies, and not everyone would choose to go to that particular vigil—but as an example of how action, especially action in community with other people, can be an antidote to hopelessness and despair.
What we all CAN do—regardless of our politics—is use this week's Torah portion as a spur to look into our own private hearts.
What have we lost since October 7th when it comes to empathy, openness, and hope?
In what ways have fear and anger eaten away at our humanity?
Are we still the people we aspire to be—the people we try to teach our children to be?
If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
What is it we can do to bring the hard, heavy places within us back to life?
Shabbat shalom.
(Postscript on January 30: The group that organized the peace vigil I attended doesn’t have a web site, but they announce their events through a What’s App chat group. Since I wrote this post, they’ve also sponsored a vigil in San Francisco and several informational webinars with news/analysis relating to Israel and the war. You can sign up for their What’s App announcements at https://chat.whatsapp.com/EcjGlQHaFdWFt4juJdkY0W.)
Clearly and beautifully expressed. You speak for me. How to influence those in power to make a ceasefire happen I don't know. But I thank you for the words. AMEN!
Ilana,
This is a wonderful drash ! I love the way you express your ideas and I feel you are able to put to words many of my sentiments. Thank you!