January
16-17, 2015 / 26 Tevet 5775
Shabbat
Va’eira
Torah - Exodus 6:2 - 9:35 Haftarah - Ezekiel
28:25 - 29:21
“Worth
Fighting For”
Dear Friends,
In this
week’s Torah portion, God appeared to Moses to tell him that God would deliver
the Children of Israel from Egypt. But
the Israelites, broken in spirit, paid no attention to Moses. Moses then asked
God how Pharaoh could be persuaded to let the Israelites go. God replied that Pharaoh's heart would be
hardened, but after a sequence of "signs and wonders" the king would
set the people free.
The
obvious question to be raised is why God needed to harden Pharaoh’s heart
before letting Israel go free. With God
so closely involved in this situation, couldn’t God simply create a miracle
that would have ended the Egyptian slavery immediately? The answer lies not with Pharaoh but with the
Children of Israel. They were so lost in
the pain of slavery that they could not even envision a day when they would be
free. They had no belief in themselves
as a people of dignity and liberty.
Frankly, if Pharaoh had suddenly decreed that all Israelites were free,
I doubt they would have understood nor been ready to leave.
Hardening
Pharaoh’s heart created a series of breakthroughs and hope followed by setback
and disappointment. Nine times, through
the first nine plagues, the Children of Israel gradually woke up and began to
understand their potential and their future.
Thus, by the time of the tenth plague, Israel was not only awake, they
were packed and ready to run - with bread or without!
The same holds true for
us. While we often would like results to
come easily and without effort, if they did, we would not understand nor
appreciate the blessings. Only with hard
work, hope, setback, advances, disappointments and more hard work do we come to
recognize the value and meaning of a true breakthrough. Pharaoh’s heart was hardened to remind us
that great results are worth fighting for.
Shabbat Shalom,
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