As we continue to read the story of the Exodus again, I'm enjoying looking at Pharaoh in a new way. Before the Torah service this past Shabbat, Jeff spoke briefly about how we read the story and what it can teach us. The story of the Exodus as told in Torah, he noted, isn't necessarily meant as a history; it's meant to tell us something about who and how we are in the moment of reading it. Pharaoh, in that sense, represents not only a particular historical ruler of Egypt. We can also read him as symbolic of something within ourselves, the part of ourselves which is resistant to change.

Pharaoh can't handle the notion of changing the status quo. Only when remarkable outside events impinge on his worldview (the Nile turning to blood, e.g., or the plague of fiery hail we read about last week) is he capable of extending himself in a new direction...and when the external stimulus goes away, so too do his changes. He reverts immediately to the place where he's comfortable, the place of familiar power. Who among us can't identify with that, even a little? Change is scary.

After the Torah reading, I led us in discussing Pharaoh's heart-hardening and the question of free will (drawing on many of these ideas). At the end of the conversation, I linked the portion with my favorite Heschel quote, "Prayer is useless unless it is subversive, unless it shatters pyramids and loosens the calluses on the heart." The bit about pyramids is obviously an Egypt reference, and I think the latter half of the line is, too. When we act wrongly, and when we allow fears of change to hold us immobile, our hearts calcify, as Pharaoh's did. In prayer, we enact our intent to be unlike Pharaoh. We soften the calluses that form on our hearts, and make ourselves vulnerable before each other and before God.

This week’s Torah portion continues the narrative we’ve been reading these last few weeks. When you read parashat Bo, you may note that before the tenth plague, God pauses to instruct Moses on how to celebrate Passover. Moses repeats the instruction to the Israelites, saying

"You shall observe this as an institution for all time, for you and for your descendants.  And when you enter the land that the Lord will give you, as He has promised, you shall observe this rite.  And when your children ask you, 'What do you mean by this rite?'  you shall say, 'It is the passover sacrifice to the Lord, because He passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when He smote the Egyptians, but saved our houses.'" (Exodus 12:24-27, JPS translation)

What's fascinating about that is that these instructions are handed down before the tenth plague and the departure from Egypt. The instruction to commemorate happens before the thing-which-will-be-commemorated. Wouldn't it make sense to give those directions one year after the Exodus? For Moses to say to the Israelites, "Hey, remember that thing God did for us a year ago? Every year on this anniversary, we're commanded to sanctify ourselves by remembering that liberation, and here's how we do it." But that's not how the story goes; the Torah tells us that these instructions came down before the thing which they describe.

This, Jeff noted yesterday, can be read as a sign that Judaism is not about what is past, but about what is to come. Judaism is interested not in who we were, but in who we have yet to become. To me, there's something beautifully impermanent about that. We celebrate not what is, but what we hope will be, what we ourselves hope to take part in shaping. Like our own liberation from our many and varied narrow places.