This week’s Torah portion, Vaera, describes the first seven of the 10 plagues that God wrought upon Egypt so that Pharaoh would heed Moses’ pleas to let our people go. After each request from Moses and Aaron, Pharaoh refuses. A plague is brought upon the land wreaking terrible pain and devastation. Pharaoh begs Moses to ask God for relief, promising to allow the Israelites to worship freely. The plague subsides. Pharaoh reneges, and the cycle begins again. After or during each of the first five plagues, the Torah makes a point of telling the reader the Pharaoh hardens his own heart against the pain of the Israelites and the suffering of his own people. But after the sixth plague, the plague of boils, we read: “And God hardened the heart of Pharaoh” (Ex. 9:12) so that he could not hear the cries of his own people.
If God hardened Pharaoh’s heart, can we really hold Pharaoh responsible for the oppression of our Israelite ancestors? In Midrash Rabbah, Rabbi Yochanon poses this same question to his friend and study partner, Rabbi Simeon ben Lakish. Resh Lakish responds to this question, saying: “When God warns a person once, twice, and even a third time, and they still do not repent, then God closes their heart against [the possibility of] repentance …. Since God sent five times to him and he took no notice, God then said: ‘You have stiffened your neck and hardened your heart; well, I will add to [your own doing].’”
Our Sages ultimately conclude that if a person is given multiple opportunities to heed the cries of those who are suffering, but closes her own ears or hardens his own heart, then eventually they are cut off from the possibility of ever being moved to right action by the struggles and pain of others.
As Rabbi Steven Carr Reuben teaches, the Rabbis “believed that all God had to do to ‘harden’ Pharaoh’s heart, was simply allow him to continue making the choices he was already making, taking the path he was already taking and the inevitable result was a cruel heart indifferent to human suffering.”
It is easy for us to read this story and believe that only a person as evil as Pharaoh would allow their hearts to grow so cold that they can no longer respond to the pain of others. But that may not be the case. Over the past few decades, researchers like Professor Paul Slovic of the University of Oregan have shown that all of us are subject to what he terms “compassion fade.”
Slavic conducted experiments where people were shown a photograph of a 7-year-old starving girl from Mali named Rokia. They learned a bit about her story and were then asked to contribute money to help her. The participants were then shown another photograph – this time of a boy named Moussa, who was also starving, and people were asked to help. In each of these scenarios people were willing to donate generous amounts of money to help the children.
However, when the experiment was tweaked and participants were shown a picture of the two children together and asked to help both Rokia and Moussa, the level of donations began to drop. And by the time participants were asked to donate to 21 million hungry people in West Africa, few wanted to contribute at all (see Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed, “Save the Darfur Puppy,” New York Times, May 10, 2007). The more we hear that people are struggling, the less moved we are to help.
Perhaps our Torah portion comes to us this week to warn us against the possibility of hardening our own hearts against the cries and sufferings of those in our communities who right now are in fear for their own safety, liberty and freedoms: women who are still fighting for autonomy over their own bodies; undocumented peoples who are longing for a better life and a legal pathway to citizenship; non-binary and trans individuals who only want to live as they believe God and their consciousness intended them to be.
And perhaps it is not a coincidence that Parashat Vaera comes to us during the same week that we, in the United States, are observing Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. Dr. King taught: “The ultimate measure of a [person] is not where [they] stand in moments of comfort and convenience, but where [they] stand at times of challenge and controversy.”
May our hearts remain open and may we always be inspired to stand for those who are oppressed, as we will read in our Torah in coming weeks, ““You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress them, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Ex. 22:21).
Rabbi Andrea Goldstein serves CongregationShaare Emeth and is a member of the St. Louis Rabbinical and Cantorial Association, which coordinates the d’var Torah for the Jewish Light.
