Bo: A Heavy Heart

Plaut p. 406

Source Sheet by Yair Robinson

 The easiest thing in the world is to harden our hearts.

That’s our greatest fear, isn’t it? That we get used to seeing the violence and degradation, the bitterness and poverty of human beings. That we walk past the homeless person without even a twinge of guilt. That we see what is happening in Minneapolis and Maine and even here and we learn to put our head down and decide ‘it’s not my problem’. Not my circus, not my monkeys. Or even worse, especially when we are reflecting on people with whom we may disagree profoundly, and we see them suffer, we might just say, “well, they deserved that”, or even “FOFA: Eff Around And Find Out”. Sometimes it’s a trauma response, a fight-flight-freeze-or fawn response. Sometimes it’s just because we are so tired and we cannot see how our efforts to repair the world matter. So when we read of Pharaoh’s hardened heart, we lurch, because we see ourselves at our worst reflected back, the person who can’t be bothered to make things right—not for Egypt, not for Israel—not even for himself.

So how do we avoid Pharaoh’s fate? How do we prevent our hearts from being hardened in this incredibly challenging moment. Two words, I think, inform our understanding. The first is that work used to command Moses to go, bo. Except it doesn’t mean ‘go’–it means ‘come’. The second is the word used for harden–הִכְבַּ֤דְתִּי–which is more like ‘heavy’, and comes from the root word both for heaviness and honor. The use of these two words make God’s instruction somewhat counterintuitive: by commanding Moses to ‘come’, is God suggesting that the divine presence is actually with Pharaoh? And by using the word kavod, is God suggesting some measure of honor bestowed upon Pharaoh in this moment? That is, can we strive to see, no, allow ourselves to see, the humanity even in our worst enemy?

My colleague David Stern, in his sermon last week, asked the question “what has become of us?” It’s a loaded and painful question to be sure. I think in many ways what’s become of us—as a society, as a nation, and even at times as a people—is that we’ve allowed our hearts to become hardened. So now we must work to soften our hearts, to approach those in need despite our own feelings in this moment, and to honor the humanity in all—really, truly. Later in our portion we read that this shall be the beginning of a new month, a new era, as Israel goes free. Every day can be the beginning of a new era, every day can be the beginning of a softened heart, if only we let it.