Parshat Va’eira, January 27, 2017

Last week we read about Moshe’s first encounter with Pharaoh after returning to Egypt. Pharaoh, of course, refused Moshe’s demand that he allow the Israelites to go worship God in the desert. Moshe and the Israelites are discouraged in the extreme.

In the opening of Parshat Va’era, God reassures Moshe that He will redeem them eventually, but the Israelites are too discouraged to listen to him. Moshe himself is so discouraged by the failure of his first encounter with Pharaoh and his failure to rally the support of the Israelites, that when God Himself commands him to go speak to Pharaoh again, he demurs not once, but twice (Shemot 6:11-12, 29-30).

In response, God gives Moshe something of a pep talk, telling Moshe that he is to serve in the role of a god to Pharaoh, with Aharon, his brother, as his prophet. The Natziv interprets this surprising instruction as a way of indicating that he should let Aharon do the talking. Pharaoh will be impressed that Moshe is so great that he doesn’t deign to come speak for himself directly, but has others represent him. This transforms Moshe’s weakness, his difficulty speaking, into an opportunity to project strength and confidence. God is coaching Moshe to tweak his approach to Pharaoh to be more successful next time.

After this pep-talk, God makes the famous declaration, “But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart…When Pharaoh does not heed you, I will lay My hand upon Egypt and deliver My ranks, My people the Israelites, from the land of Egypt with extraordinary chastisements” (Shem. 7:3-4). The placement of this statement here, after Moshe has become discouraged by his initial failure, is to let Moshe know that though there will be many more failures, success is guaranteed in the end, and that short-term failure should not discourage him. Perhaps we might even understand from this a reason for the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart: that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart in order to train Moshe and the Israelites not to be discouraged by failure. Had Pharaoh released us after only a plague or two, Moshe and the Israelites would not have come out of Egypt with the knowledge that repeated failure can lead to success.

By finally redeeming us from Egypt only after “failing” to convince Pharaoh 10 times, God was preparing us for the hardships our people would face throughout history.  Our experience in Egypt gave us the faith that justice and virtue will ultimately triumph, no matter how many setbacks we may experience along the way. We cannot know when or how the ultimate redemption will be achieved; how many plagues will it take before the Pharaohs of this world stop hardening their hearts; how many failures we must go through before we experience success. All we can do is carry on trying. In the words of Samuel Becket: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Eventually, with God’s help, we will fail our way to success.

Rabbi Garth Silberstein