Portion of the Week; Bo 5-1, Rabbi Levine

[silence] [silence] [singing in Hebrew] [singing in Hebrew] [singing in Hebrew] [Host] Portion of the Week, the Bible as read in the synagogue with Rabbinic commentary. Here is Rabbi Joseph H. Levine, assistant spiritual leader of the reform congregation Central Synagogue of Nassau County, Rockville Centre, New York. [Rabbi Levine] My understanding of this series of broadcasts is to provide an opportunity for Rabbis to share thoughts on some of the underlying themes in our Bible. The way in which we will proceed is to interpret some of the great ideas in the weekly portion of scripture readings assigned by our tradition to be read in the synagogue on Friday evening and Saturday morning

of this present week. Our weekly selection begins with the tenth chapter of the Book of Exodus. It deals with the important career of Moses and important phases in the career of the Jewish people. It treats of the events leading up to the exodus from Egypt and the freedom from slavery, the emergence of the Jewish people to become a priest people in a kingdom of God. The tenth chapter of the Book of Exodus begins with this verse: "and God said to Moses 'go to the Pharaoh for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants in order to fix these signs of my authority in his mind.'" Now the Rabbis interpreted this verse as they did each and every verse of the Bible. They were very much concerned by the question of God's

hardening Pharaoh's heart. Why would it be that God would make it more difficult for Pharaoh to relent and indirectly bring more hardship on the Jewish people? There's the whole question of God's need to exercise his authority. There are two interpretations given by the Rabbis to this somewhat puzzling verse. One is that actually a certain psychological process started at work in Pharaoh himself. As Pharaoh became more afraid of the events taking place around him, he became more resistant to the idea of allowing the Jewish people to become free and therefore this set in effect the whole chain of events, the ten plagues that we read about and the tragedies and the sorrows that befell Pharaoh and the people of Egypt. The second suggested interpretation of the Rabbis

is that God had to manifest his glory and his power in order to humble Pharaoh. The thought here is that a person may become in leadership so mighty and so impressed with his own power that he needs to be humbled by life before his spirit and personality becomes refined so that he has the compassionate qualities that are the hallmarks of a true leader. What I'd like to do is to explore with you in these few moments each of these thoughts, the suggested interpretations of our Rabbis on this week's Torah portion. First this problem of Pharaoh's fear and his defensiveness. I believe that the Rabbis struck upon a very important truth when they related in Pharaoh's personality the fear, the growing fear that his power and his authority was slipping from him and his defensiveness, his resistance to allowing the people of

Israel to have their own freedom and their own independence. His authority certainly was built upon a very weak foundation and it began to crumble. He began to realize within himself that his was the problem of idols that have feet of clay. That the people around him were beginning to question his authority, were beginning to rebel and to resist. And so his way of meeting the problem was to clamp down further, to manipulate his authority, to exercise more brute power and unrelenting terror. This is not at all unparalleled to the pattern that many dictators today follow. We find this in the example of communist Russia and Fidel Castro's regime of Cuba. We find this in the personality structure of totalitarian leaders who build their authority and their power on relying on something in people that will make them subjugate their

own freedom. And this begins to go on and as it further develops in the career of leadership, eventually the tyrant or the dictator begins to feel afraid. He begins to feel afraid of himself and of other people, of finding out the truth about himself. Then the other interpretation that Pharaoh, as not only all leaders but perhaps all people, need to be sometimes humbled by life before we can stand in positions of authority. This too is a very important thought and a very salient one. Certainly Pharaoh resisted God because he felt that he was a law unto himself. This also is a favorite theme of great dictators and of monarchs who throughout history have tried to humble others rather than adopting a certain humility inwardly in themselves. Throughout history we

come across examples of kings and sovereigns who relied on what has come to be known as the divine right of kings, who wielded their own authority without concern for others. It is striking to me as a student of Jewish history and Jewish philosophy to study the personality type of the great leader in Judaism which formed something of a contrast to the authoritarian personality of the dictator. Take for example that episode in Jewish history with which I'm sure you're familiar. After the Temple was destroyed and there came a time of the restoration of the second commonwealth, Ezra and Nehemiah, who have books of their own in the Bible, came back to Palestine. Cyrus the King of Persia in a certain moment of permissiveness allowed them to return with the remnant of the exiles and to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem. And Ezra faced a very weak and destitute people, a people

who might have followed him no matter what pattern he would establish. Yet it is very significant that Ezra, in that year of 485, did not ask the people assembled before him to bow and to swear fealty or allegiance to him upon his sword, to crowd him king. But rather he read them the Sefer Torah, the Bible, and asked them to swear their allegiance to a set of ideals, of lofty civilizing influences and to make these ideals the basis of their future life. And the example of Ezra is not uncommon. The great prophets and leaders of our people were all humble men. It is a salient characteristic of the great classical prophets of Israel that are part of both of our great traditions that all of them pleaded with God that they were inadequate to the task. They felt an inward sense of humility, of compassion. They felt timid to accept the responsibility of power

over other people and this exerted a refining influence on their personalities. The Rabbis who interpret the problem of Pharaoh's cruelty, of Pharaoh's authority, suggest and hold before us two images of leadership. The image presented by Pharaoh, the totalitarian reliance upon power, and that of the true leader of our people, someone such as Moses. As the career of Moses unfolds in these portions we read these weeks in the Bible, we find that he presents a diametrically opposite image of leadership. The Midrash, the great exposition of the Rabbis, tells us of a touching story in the life of Moses. That when he was yet a lad and watching the sheep of Jethro his father-in-law, that a lamb happened to run away and he ran after this lamb and gently cuddled it in his arms and said to it "had I known

that you were afraid I would not have let you run away." And it was at that moment, the Rabbis tell us, that God felt more certain that Moses would be qualified for leadership. Shakespeare in his great tragedies draws upon this problem and develops his theme of the authoritarian leader. We have the image of a Macbeth, of a Claudius, the king in Hamlet. Both of these men pride and fear were intermingled as they were in Pharaoh in the Bible and their own inner-weakness their outer craving for authority eventually led to their downfall. It is interesting that Macbeth, a line is given to Macbeth which summarizes Shakespeare's concern with this problem which is also the Rabbinic concern. In that very well-known closing scene of the first act of Macbeth, while murderous thoughts surge through his mind, Macbeth asks

"art thou not fatal vision as sensible to feeling as to sight?" Great men of history who have enacted their visions of compassion and leadership have been those who have been able to merge feeling, feeling for other people, with vision. In contrast there are other great leaders who had vision but without compassion. Napoleon had his vision of liberty and equality and fraternity. Karl Marx visualized the brotherhood of man, yet these men were not sufficiently imbued with the compassionate feeling of a Moses or an Isaiah in order to lead their people to genuine freedom. This particular portion of the week that we read begins with an important verse: "going unto Pharaoh for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his people." It is an important verse because it involved in it is a very personal message and one that is very timely to us.

We live in an age in which we see that fear does terrible things to people, people in everyday life and to people in high positions of authority. Sometimes we need to feel that leaders need to be humbled as Pharaoh needed to be humbled by evidence of a greater power than themselves. In this sense perhaps there is a grain of truth in the theory that religion needs to be based on fear. There are things that men need to stand in awe of, but religion as Judaism teaches it goes far beyond the emotion of fear. The great emotion that Judaism teaches is the feeling of what Schweitzer called the reverence for life, the feeling of compassion. This is exemplified in the career of Moses as it unfolds, we will see it develop as we continue this series of sermons on the Torah portion of this week. [Host] You have been

listening to Portion of the Week, the Bible as read in the synagogue with Rabbinic commentary, this evening by Rabbi Joseph H. Levine, assistant spiritual leader of the Central Synagogue of Nassau County in Rockville Centre, New York. The cantor for Portion of the Week is Eliezer Krumbein of the congregation Beth Shalom of Kings Bay, Brooklyn, New York. [singing in Hebrew] [singing] [singing] [singing] [singing] [singing] [singing]

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