Rabbi Katie's B'nai Blog

Softening Our Hard Hearts – A Passover Message from Rabbi Katie 2024

When I think of the Exodus story at the heart of the Passover holiday, I sometimes jump to the grandeur of the great miracles – the splitting of the sea and the horror of the plagues.  Yet many of the critical twists of plot in the story come down to something far more subtle: the state of the human heart. 

In his confrontations with God and Moses, Pharaoh famously hardens his heart over and over again, prompting ever-more-intense plagues to afflict his people and their lands.  His daughter, raised in the same environment, opens her heart to a Hebrew infant and protects Moses through his vulnerable childhood.  Imagine how different the story would have been if Pharaoh’s daughter had not dared to love that forbidden baby, or if Pharaoh had let himself feel compassion for his suffering subjects after just one or two of the terrible plagues.

The miracle of an open heart may not be as flashy as the parting of the sea, but it seems to be just as consequential.  It is also something precious in our time.

There are a lot of reasons to harden your heart these days.  People causing harm, being stupid, hurting others, trashing the earth.  And worse.  Those who suffer – how painful it is to see them! To actually care!  It’s overwhelming to let in the grief and to empathize.  It’s tempting to protect oneself from feeling all of the heartbreak and disappointment.  Tempting to see those undeserving idiots as less than human and to simply turn away from those who suffer.

Yet as we prepare to revisit the story of Passover, the message seems clear – keep your hearts open!  Dare to care about the vulnerable. Don’t close yourself off to the humanity of those around you.  Take a risk like Pharaoh’s daughter.  Don’t be like Pharaoh and harden your heart.

Easier said than done.  And how far are we meant to go with this soft-heart thing anyway?

It’s one thing to call for a man of power like Pharaoh to soften his heart towards the peoples he is oppressing.  It’s another to ask ordinary people like us to soften our hearts towards those that look to us like Pharaoh and his army.  Is that really the implication of our story here? 

Rabbi Amy Eilberg would argue -- yes.  

In her book, From Enemy to Friend, Eilberg takes us to Deuteronomy, the final book of Torah which looks back at the adventures of the Israelites and packages them for future generations.  There, we see a curious instruction.  “Do not hate an Egyptian, for you were strangers in his land…(Deuteronomy 23:8)”.  Eilberg brings in Rashi here, the Medieval commentator who goes even further.  “Do not hate the Egyptians the slightest bit, though they threw your sons into the river.  Why? Because they gave you shelter in your time of need… (Rashi on Deut. 23:8).”

Eilberg explains:

Rashi essentially asks our question: ‘How could we NOT hate peoples that caused us grievous harm, even sought to destroy us?” … [He] understands that we will howl in protest, ‘but they threw our children into the river!’ He recognizes the humanness of that response.  But he stands with the Torah’s remarkable teaching here, that ultimately, we are to remember Egypt, not as the despotic regime that sought our destruction, but as the nation that gave us shelter in a time of need.

In this teaching, Deuteronomy challenges us to complicate the story and soften our hearts, even towards historic enemies. 

If we can do this as a practice relating to a story of the past, we can do it as a practice relating to the people in our lives in this moment, whether we may see Pharaoh in a neighbor, a political opponent, or some fighter across the globe.  All the more so with those who are not enemies but simply suffering souls – newcomer immigrants, innocent civilians caught in warfare, and in fact any human being we may encounter in need of our compassion.

Pharaoh’s daughter did not know when she drew Moses from the water that this child would become a prophet and lead the Israelites to freedom.  She did know he was one of the babies doomed to death by her father’s decree.  Yet somehow, her heart opened and she had the courage to let herself care and take action.  Her courageous compassion was the seed that made the rest of the story possible. 

We may never know what may come when we soften our hearts.

As we look ahead to our own opportunities tell the story of Passover, and to find ourselves in that story, I pray that we can all take Deuteronomy’s challenge seriously, and follow the example of Pharaoh’s daughter.  It can be risky to soften our hearts.  Painful.  But if the miracle of redemption is within our power to manifest, that is where it must begin.