Month: December 2021

Parashah Ponderings

Overcoming the inner Pharaoh that abandons New Year’s resolutions.

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Parashat Vaera / פרשת וארא
Torah Portion: Exodus 6:2 – 9:35

Happy New Year 2023! As we celebrate Shabbat on this New Year’s Eve, many of us are contemplating resolutions for the new year. Actually going to the gym where you’re a member but having been there since your introductory tour. Cutting back on ice cream. Making more time for family. Tackling those big projects that you’ve been putting off for months or years.

When push comes to shove, some of us will not only begin to address our resolutions, but actually fulfill them. Others of us, maybe not. We might make an attempt, but there’s a good chance we’ll putter out before we even make it to the end of the on ramp. It should come as no surprise that in the long run the “others,” the ones who fail to realize what they had resolved to do, far outnumber the “some,” the ones who actually succeed. The success rate after a year, in fact, is only about 8%, according to a study by the University of Scranton. (See: http://www.statisticbrain.com/new-years-resolution-statistics/. Surprisingly, the success rate after the first two weeks is actually 71%.)

Why such a high rate of failure over time? Here is one explanation, among many:

Timothy Pychyl, a professor of psychology at Carleton University in Canada, says that resolutions are a form of “cultural procrastination,” an effort to reinvent oneself. People make resolutions as a way of motivating themselves, he says. Pychyl argues that people aren’t ready to change their habits, particularly bad habits, and that accounts for the high failure rate. (See: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-new-years-resolutions-fail)

In other words, no matter how much we want to become the people we’ve always wanted to be, unless we’re ready to change the way we do things, it simply isn’t going to happen. Too often, we harden our hearts against the things that we know are in our best interest. In this respect, most of us are like Pharaoh, who probably wanted to be a good guy but his hardened heart wouldn’t let him.

Pharaoh, the one “who knew not Joseph” and enslaved the Israelites, figures prominently in the current series of weekly Torah readings. Pharaoh not only refuses to let Israel go upon Moses’ insistence, but he actually makes their lives increasingly miserable and, consequently, makes his own life and the life of ordinary Egyptians miserable as well. It takes ten plagues from God before Pharaoh agrees to let the Israelites leave Egypt. During four of these plagues he promises Moses that he will let the people go but reneges each time those plagues are lifted. Each time he becomes stubborn, his “heart hardens.”

He isn’t ready to change his habits. Even if throughout the first nine plagues Pharaoh wants to let the people go in order to avoid future calamities, he just can’t shake the hardness from his heart. He can’t become the conciliatory leader he needs to be in the moment. Even mounting pressure from his own courtiers, who have come to fear the God of the Hebrews, is insufficient to convince Pharaoh that change is necessary, that Egypt’s very survival depends on his letting the Hebrews go. That maybe his own survival also depends on it.

That the Pharaoh of Exodus is wicked and evil is without question. But who’s to say that, during some of those later plagues when he says he will let the people go, he doesn’t actually intend to make good on the promise? Isn’t it possible that at least during the plague of darkness Pharaoh is sincere in his desire to let Israel go, but just as he begins to fulfill his resolution, he runs after them because he simply isn’t ready to change?

Pharaoh is an effective metaphor for our own intransigence.  Despite knowing how good it will be for us to change our habits, we still don’t take the steps necessary to effect that change and bring about that good. With Pharaoh, all the evidence says that letting Israel go from Egypt will lead to a termination of the terror befalling Egypt and an overall improvement of conditions for all concerned. Despite the evidence, though, Pharaoh won’t or can’t have a change of heart. In our lives, we can know for sure that eating healthier, getting more exercise, being kinder, or just getting stuff done that we want to get done will significantly improve our lives, perhaps even extend our lives. Yet, when faced with a choice, we opt for the status quo. We won’t or can’t change our habits, even though our situation may worsen.

There is no magic pill for producing the change we desire. For Pharaoh, change comes only after seeing the death of his first born, and even then change comes reluctantly. To be sure, as I mentioned earlier, Pharaoh actively seeks to undo the change he had begun.

To be fair to Pharaoh and to ourselves, we should remember how reluctant Moses was to take on the role of liberator. When commanded by God, Moses protested. Moses, too, was not ready to change and become the person God wanted him to be.

Unlike Pharaoh, though, Moses did change. He did pursue the resolutions he had set for himself upon receiving his marching orders from God. Moses succeeded in transforming himself into a leader, liberator, and law maker.

What did Moses do that Pharaoh didn’t do? Moses opened himself to encouragement and feedback. God didn’t acquiesce when Moses pushed back against the call to free his people but rather kept helping Moses see how he could overcome the obstacles that Moses believed would prevent him from being the person God wanted him to be. Moses listened when God spoke. In addition, God provided Moses with a network and means to maximize Moses’s probabilities for success: Aaron, Miriam, Jethro and Joshua all came to Moses’s aid at crucial times to help him lead Israel through difficult times. Moses accepted the help from people he loved and trusted. Pharaoh, meanwhile, neither listened to his trusted advisors nor accepted their help.

What if we surround ourselves with people who will encourage us? What if we open ourselves to those who love us and are willing to support us in making the changes we seek? That support network, that cheering squad, might not exist at this moment, but if we are serious about changing, we can create that network, that cheering squad, simply by asking others for help and encouragement. More often than not, the people who care about us will accompany us on our journeys toward change. They will help free us from our own hardened hearts.

As we continue reading about our redemption from bondage in Egypt this January 1st, let us be mindful of the ways we’d like to feel freer in our own lives and resolve to loosen the shackles of habits that keep us from experiencing optimal health or realizing our full potential. Resolving to change is a necessary first step. Just as important, though, let us remember that we needn’t take that journey toward change alone. Moses didn’t. Like Pharaoh, Moses once experienced a hardened heart, but ultimately Moses let God and the people around him soften his heart. We all have a little bit of Pharaoh inside us, but we can overcome our inner Pharaoh if we choose, like Moses did, to have faith and to place our trust in the people who care about us most.

Parashah Ponderings

Resident aliens and sojourners are we on Christmas Eve

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Parashat Shemot 5782 / פָּרָשַׁת שְׁמוֹת
Torah Portion: Exodus 1:1-6:1

This year Shabbat Parashat Shemot falls on Christmas, a holiday that is not for or by the Jewish people, but one which we Jews in America observe in one of two ways: 1) as dispassionate observers, the way we might glance at merchandise in a store window while walking down the street without breaking stride. We see what’s there but don’t think about it much, if at all. Or 2) as interested, maybe even engaged observers, who stop and look at the merchandise, perhaps entering the store to get a closer look, maybe try it on, maybe even buy it and take it home! Either way, we are as dispassionate observers or interested consumers, we are still pedestrians relating to something that is not ours as we make our way through the world.

In our own community, we each relate to Christmas in our own way. Some don’t pay much attention. Some feel put upon by all the commercial trappings of the holiday. Yet some are uplifted by the joy of the season and are moved to participate in its festivities, perhaps as supportive, caring family members of people for whom Christmas carries great meaning. At most, we are resident aliens, paying deep respect for the tradition of our majority culture. We are sojourners with those who celebrate Christmas.

In many ways, our experience as Jews during this season is an extension of the experience of our ancestors that we begin to read about in Parashat Shemot this week. In Egypt we were outsiders, oppressed for four hundred years following the death of Joseph and the rise of a Pharaoh who didn’t know Joseph. Then we left Egypt and commenced 40 years of wandering in the wilderness, heading toward an unfamiliar destination. Eventually, we became a sovereign nation and would one day again, but for most of history, we were strangers in someone else’s lands. Even with the birth of the Jewish State in 1948, most of us have chosen to reside outside of our homeland. Maybe we are in a constant state of exile, or maybe we have come to call the place where we are “home.” In reality, these two possibilities are always present, always tugging at us, never letting us become too comfortable or complacent but also never letting us feel entirely rootless and out of place, either. That’s how it is today, and that’s how it has been for centuries.

As resident aliens and sojourners in Europe between the 16th and 19th centuries, our ancestors had their own response to Christmas. In the 17th century, they named it “Nittel Nacht” – the Night of the Nativity, but beginning with the Protestant Reformation in the early 16th century, they had already begun to refrain from studying Torah on Christmas eve. They also refrained from having sex, and they ate lots of garlic. In the beginning, they were doing what their Christian neighbors were doing, but for different reasons. Christians were getting rowdy and turning up the lights to ward off evil spirits and protect themselves from the walking dead. They refrained from sex, lest the children they conceive “be cursed and become tools of the devil”(https://daily.jstor.org/daily-author/matthew-wills/).

The Jews did these things partly to look as busy as their neighbors and protect themselves against pogroms. They weren’t concerned so much with evil spirits and the walking dead as they were with the spirit of Jesus that their neighbors were conjuring up. At one time the Jews had mourned the birth of Jesus on Tisha B’Av, when they also mourned the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem. After all, it was in Jesus’s name that their neighbors and the church made their lives a living Hell. They had reason to mourn. That Tu B’Shevat tradition eventually gave way to Nittel Nacht, a concretization of Jewish antipathy toward the Christian’s savior. 

Nittel Nacht faded away as a common observance in the 19th century as relations with Christians warmed, but it is still practiced in some communities to this day. In fact, once when my family and I were living in Houston, a local Orthodox synagogue held a night of studying about Jewish views of Jesus – a clear departure from the synagogue’s regular fare of Jewish learning.

Thank God the days of Nittel Nacht are mostly behind us, those days of fear and loathing. In many places and at many times, rioting, rape and death were constantly lying in wait. Our ancestors resorted to standing in front of the store window as they walked down the street and engaged in mockery as they sought to gird themselves against hatred and oppression.

On this Christmas Eve, as we remember the wanderings of our People, we give thanks for our Christian neighbors and the love they bestow on us as a community and as individuals. Such would have been unimaginable at other times and in other places throughout history. And just as our Christian family members sojourn with us on our sacred festivals, so, too, let us sojourn with them in their celebration of Christmas. As Jews, will most assuredly eat Chinese food, go to the movies and take advantage of empty ski slopes, but let us also be sure to bless those around us with joy and peace and wish them all a very Merry Christmas.