Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go to Pharaoh. For I have hardened his heart and the hearts of his courtiers, in order that I may display these My signs among them (Exodus 10:1).”
Rashi: Go to Pharaoh: And warn him.
On the face of it Rashi’s very brief comment answers a simple question: What should Moses say to Pharaoh when he goes to him? Rashi is simply supplying an obviously missing part of the verse. Moses should warn Pharaoh, as he and Aaron had done before previous plagues, and as they in fact do regarding the plague of locusts a few verses later (Exodus 10:3-6).
Further, a number of commentators (such as Elijah Mizrachi, 16th century) understand the words "Go to Pharoah" to explain the beginning of the next clause of the verse, ‘For I have hardened his heart’. Yet the word ‘For’ (ki) sounds like an explanation of what precedes. But how does this clause explain “Go to Pharaoh?” According to Elijah Mizrachi, Rashi’s addition of “And warn him” makes this explanation intelligible. It is as if God says, “Go to Pharaoh and warn him. Don’t think that a warning is not required because Pharaoh already admitted his guilt (“I stand guilty this time. The Lord is in the right, and I and my people are in the wrong” (Exodus 9:27)). Rather, Pharaoh still needs to be warned, for I have hardened his heart, etc.”
However, the word ‘ki’ is open to more than one interpretation. In his work Totsot Chayim (cited in Itturei Torah, 2:79), R. Elijah b. Moses de Vidas (16th century) presents a rather creative interpretation of Rashi’s reading of the verse. Rather than take ‘ki’ to mean ‘for’, R. Elijah de Vidas understands ‘ki’ as ‘that’. In his view we can take Rashi to read the verse as follows: “Go to Pharaoh, and warn him that (ki) I have hardened his heart.”
This understanding of the preposition ki as ‘that’ rather than ‘for’, an understanding of the word that appears in other contexts (though by no means the plain sense of the text), puts the warning, and the verse as a whole, in a completely different light. God is issuing a challenge to Pharaoh: It is I who is making you stubborn. Are you strong enough to defeat me? What God wants Pharaoh to understand is how serious this matter is. Pharaoh will feel that he is struggling with God himself, and yet that is what he must do in order truly to live.
In order to apply this lesson to our own lives, it might be helpful to consider Nachum Sarna’s comment on Exodus 4:21 (“I, however, will stiffen his heart”) in his Exodus Commentary (Jewish Publication Society, p. 23):
In the biblical conception, the psychological faculties are considered to be concentrated in the heart. Regarded as the seat of the intellectual, moral, and spiritual life of the individual, this organ is the determinant of behavior. The “hardening of the heart” thus expresses a state of arrogant moral degeneracy, unresponsive to reason and incapable of compassion. Pharaoh’s personal culpability is beyond question.
If we were to read the comments of R. Elijah de Vidas in this light, we might say that Pharaoh’s obsession with power, and with his own ego and desires, are so deeply embedded in him that they seem to come directly from God. To overcome them would appear to be an impossible task. And yet, God is here telling Pharaoh that he can achieve this goal, if only he sets his mind to it. Through careful attention to one’s thoughts and deeds, it is always possible to overcome deeply entrenched, habitual ego-driven behavior, and to choose the right path. This is the warning that, in R. Elijah de Vidas’s reading of Rashi, God wants Moses to transmit to Pharaoh, and to all of us who struggle to subdue the Pharaoh within us.
Guest posting by
Irving Mandelbaum
Highland Park, NJ
No comments:
Post a Comment