Why I almost pitied Pharaoh
Pharaoh Image by iStock
Editor’s Note: The Forward is featuring essays, poems and short stories written for our Young Writers Contest. Today’s entry was written by Max Bamberger, a 17-year-old student at the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco. You can find more work from our young writers here.
Reading the Exodus story as a kid, it always seemed to me that one character lacked freedom on a deeper level than even the slave protagonists: Pharaoh. The Torah tells us that his “heart is hardened” repeatedly throughout his encounters with Moshe and the Israelites, which causes him to make evil, destructive decisions for those around him and eventually for himself. As an elementary schooler, this demonstration of a divine capability to completely overcome an individual’s free will terrified me. I wondered, what does this mean about the freedom of my decisions and the decisions of those around me? How can I ever feel truly free?
Alone in my bed at night, I feared I could never fully trust the integrity of others’ actions or what they said they were thinking. One year, however, a teacher offered a helpful interpretation: while Pharaoh started with freedom, each time he repeated a destructive decision, his heart hardened around this path, like he was addicted to making these choices that kept him in control, and his potential for a change of course dwindled.
This explanation never completely calmed me, and as I grew up I still often worried I was falling into auto-pilot, letting my freedom-heart freeze up and harden.
Never did these worries feel more evident than in the lead-up to this Passover. I had felt melancholy about the general situation but hopeful about the extra time it allowed me during the first couple of weeks of quarantining with my family. However, as the holiday approached, I found myself spending day after day trudging through schoolwork in my bedroom and watching one YouTube video after another until the sky turned dark. I felt stuck, physically and mentally. I reminisced about previous Passovers when I had celebrated and hung out with my friends and my synagogue community. The days preceding this year’s holiday, I worried I was throwing away even more of my freedom; I would be cutting myself off not only physically, as per the shelter-in-place order, but also digitally from my friends, from my community, and from the world.
On the morning of Passover Eve as I shuffled through the haggadot we would be using at that night’s Seder, I thought of how Pharaoh had tried to take away all of the freedoms of the Israelite slaves, particularly by attempting to destabilize and destroy any feelings of community, love, and kinship among them. Jewish tradition explains that while Pharaoh allowed his heart to harden and his personal free will to be diminished, the Israelites prioritized connection with their people. Despite the circumstances, the Israelites gave their children Hebrew names and communicated and showed love in any way they could, thus keeping their community and tradition alive for generations to come.
As the hour for Passover candle-lighting hour came closer to our home, my siblings and I, remembering the resisting Israelites, decided to call up our young friends from school and our much-less-young family friends from the synagogue community. We exchanged news, lamentations, laughs, happenings, and hopes for one another’s holidays over the phone. On both sides of the call, separated but together, we prepared our food, Haggadahs, and tables for the Seder. After those calls, we joined our grandparents and cousins from the other coast for a Zoom Seder full of singing and smiling together through the screen. When this, too, came to a conclusion, we closed and shut off the computer.
I watched the sun lower towards the horizon as we lit candles and said blessings. I felt more focused than I had any time in the past week. When we finally sat down and began our household Seder, my parents and siblings deliberated the possible intent for starting the Seder, like many holiday meals by sanctifying the moment with a blessing, Kiddush, over the wine. With social media and schoolwork long gone from my brain only a few minutes after I’d powered off my phone and computer for the next three days, I felt I could offer an answer. Though we may have been lacking in some freedoms that we normally enjoyed without a second thought, we were fortunate enough to have one of the deepest levels of freedom right at our fingertips: we had the freedom of intention. With only our focus during the blessing of the wine, we had sanctified the present moment and established it as new and ungoverned by the past. By giving our full attention to those we loved, we had transcended huge distances and reaffirmed our connections with them. I felt present, supported, and most of all, deeply, vastly free.
I almost pitied Pharaoh. Though he seemed like he should have had more freedom than anyone under his rule, his position above the Israelites and all his Egyptian subjects left him thinking that no person nor moment deserved his or called for his fullest attention, leaving him with a hardened heart that would lead to deep hurt for his family and his people.
Though we may face circumstances that restrict our mobility, media that seek to buy and sell our attention, and times of uncertainty in which every choice can be filled with fear, we hold a power that is much harder to strip away. It is our ability for intention and connection that sets our hearts free.
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