This week’s Torah portion is the one that I least like to teach. We see the beginning of the plagues, and again and again, God says to Moses, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.”

I’ve taught this portion from many different angles, but no matter what I do, it comes back to the same question. Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart? Didn’t God know that we’re supposed to have free will?

We make light of it at our seders, struggling to say the acronym for the names of the plagues. And as we spill the drops of wine, we joke about who’s going to get wine on the table cloth. The whole seder, it seems, is designed to steer us away from this difficult question, ” Why did God harden Pharaoh’s heart?”

Maimonides tries to give an explanation. He notices that over the course of the Torah portion, the Hebrew grammar changes. At first, the Torah says that Pharaoh’s heart “was hardened.” It’s only later that God says, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart.”

For Maimonides, this is a lesson about teshuvah and about the nature of the human heart. We are all born with free will, Maimonides says, and we can all do teshuvah. We can all recognize our negative qualities, and we can all work to improve ourselves. But it we continue in our ways and we ignore the opportunity to change, then teshuvah becomes harder. And eventually, it becomes impossible. This, says Maimonides, is what happened to Pharaoh.

It’s a wonderful teaching, but I’ve never found anyone who accepts it. The plagues caused so much pain. And taking away Pharaoh’s free will was so horrible. How could God have done that?

But this year, I’m looking at it from a new perspective. What if it had all been different? What if Moses had gone to Pharaoh for the first time and Pharaoh has said, “OK. Your God wants you to leave. Leave!” There would be no signs and wonders, no miracles for the world to see.

And what about the Jewish children this year, facing antisemitism for the first time, knowing that their parents can’t do anything to stop it? How would they know that better times will come, that hatred and bigotry will end?

In their naive, simple way, many of these children are holding on to the story of the Exodus. “No matter how bad things get,” they’re thinking, “I will survive and my family will survive, because God took us out of Egypt.”

A lifetime ago, I was one of those children, living in a cruel dysfunctional family, and I needed to know that someday God would take me out. That simple story, that simple theology kept me alive.

And I’m not the only one. We all have times in our lives when we need that kind of faith, that pure simple faith that God will bring us out. And it doesn’t have to be God in a literal sense, in the sense of the puppet master in heaven. It can be faith that our communities will help us, that someone will be there for us, that we don’t have to go through life alone.

The Exodus is our story of great, powerful miracles – our story of hope, our story of knowing that help will come in time. And without that kind of story, we would never be able to find peace.

We live in a time when few of us believe in miracles, when few of us have that kind of faith. And so our only choice is to become the kind of miracle that our ancestors once hoped for – to become the kind of people who are there for others, to become the people who lift up the fallen, and visit the sick, and free the captive.

This week’s Torah portion teaches us that tyrants are real. Suffering is real. But God has given us the power to redeem each other. Each of us can be God’s hand, lifting up the fallen. And each of us can be God’s arms, hugging and comforting those who are in pain,

Or each of us can be like Pharaoh, thinking about ourselves and refusing to change until we lose our power to act. The choice is up to you.

Shabbat Shalom,
Art