Parashat Va’Eira: There’s knowing and then there’s knowing!

“I appeared to Avraham, to Yitzhak, and to Ya’akov as El Shaddai, and I was not known to them by my name….”

Here we have an interesting contradiction. In the earlier Parashiot, this name of God–called the Tetragammaton, or Four Lettered Name–was used by the Patriarch’s themselves. So why does God here tell Moshe that the Patriarchs did not know Him by that name?

There are several ways that one can resolve this contradiction. The easiest–and probably the least enlightening–is the way in which it’s resolved by academic scholars, who point to different source material that was eventually incorporated into the Torah, complete with contradictions and paradoxes. Another solution is that the final book was written from the point of view of its generation, and so the names of God were given from their standpoint, regardless of how the Patriarchs themselves had known God.

Contradiction as a gateway to truth

But there is a third possibility.  Rather than reasoning away the contradictions, we can use them to learn a deeper truth from a close reading of the text.

Most of this week’s parsha is concerned with Moshe and Aharon’s mission to Pharaoah. They use the public relations strategies common in their day, performing signs and wonders, while Pharaoh repeatedly “hardens his heart” and refuses to release his Israelite slaves.

It is a tale of the institutionalization of oppression, and how difficult it can be to break through stereotypes, bureaucratic apathy, and governmental obstinacy. It’s also a lesson in how those in power can rationalize their decisions–even disastrous decisions–in order to avoid acknowledging past mistakes. But even more, it’s a lesson in seeing the miracles for what they are.

Two wrongs don’t make a right, but they can make a Concept

Pharaoh compounds his first mistake by becoming further entrenched in his determination not to let the slaves go free. It’s a known phenomenon that when presented with a diversity of information, we selectively filter out anything that does not corroborate past experience. In Pharaoh’s case, this is made much easier by the fact that Aharon and Moshe start out with easily-replicated tricks. Once assured that his own magicians can reproduce their “signs and wonders”, Pharaoh has no reason to see that anything unusual is afoot. The challenge to the status quo can be reasoned away.

Even when things escalate to a plague of lice, which Pharaoh’s court wizards are unable to reproduce, Pharaoh continues to “strengthen his heart.” Only when a plague strikes which the court wizards not only can’t reproduce, but from which they can’t even save themselves, does the text say, “Hashem strengthened Pharaoh’s heart.” The Midrash Rabbah, in noting the change of language says:

When G-d saw that Pharaoh did not relent after the first five plagues, He said: Even if Pharaoh now wished to repent, I shall harden his heart, in order to exact full punishment from him.

Pharaoh’s problem is well-known to psychologists. Once a way of thinking becomes habituated, each time we resist change, we further lose our ability to see contradictory facts. While it first Pharaoh’s dismissal of the evidence at hand was a conscious act, by this point, it’s out of his hands; he has become a slave of his own “Concept” and can no longer see what is obvious to everyone else.

And of course, what happened to Pharaoh in the realm of the mind had happened to Egyptian society in a more physical and tangible sense. They had institutionalized slavery. It had become a habit, a permanent feature of their economy, which they could not leave behind of their own free will.

Seeing God in the improbable

For both Pharaoh and his people, it will literally take a miracle to shake them out of their habits and make them do the right thing. And this is the solution to the contradiction pointed out above. At every major turning point, God tells Moshe that Pharaoh will not listen to him, and will inevitably bring about the next escalation, until finally the results can no longer be reasoned away.

By highlighting–and even deepening–the institutionalization of the slavery, the eventual emancipation is shown for the miracle that it is. “By this you’ll know I am Hashem”–by the fact that something will happen that the could not normally come about in the natural course of things. A whole people will be freed from the iron grip of institutionalized slavery, not because the slave-holders have seen the error of their ways and not because the institution is no longer profitable. The emancipation will happen against the will of society and its leaders, long before social norms develop against slavery, and long before human rights organizations and lobbies exist that might fight the institution on its own ground.

And yet, it will happen.

The hardening of Pharaoh’s heart is a sign that what happens next is a miracle. It is a lesson in seeing God in the improbable and seemingly impossible.

A lesson for whom?

But for whom is this lesson intended? Obviously, the Egyptians are the immediate audience, since only when they are convinced that they’re dealing with something outside of their experience can they be induced to take action.

But the broader lesson seems aimed at Bnei Yisrael themselves:

…and you will know that I am Hashem your God, Who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.

While the Patriarchs may have known God by the same name, it is through His direct intervention in Egypt, an event that seems to go completely against the natural course of history, that Israel will know what their God is all about.

But the lesson isn’t confined only to the generation that actually experienced it. It is equally applicable to our generation. The same miracle is evident in the survival of Am Yisrael as a people through two thousand years of exile, persecution, and assimilation.

Perhaps that lesson too is hidden in plain sight at the very beginning of our parsha, which speaks of more than just the end of the Egyptian slavery….

And I will take you to Me as a people, and I shall become your God, and you will know that I am Hashem your God, Who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians. And I will bring you to the land, that I swore to give to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, and I will give it to you as a heritage; I am Hashem.

The lesson in “knowing God” taught by the seeming impossibility of the Egyptian emancipation is applicable to our own day, as we come out of another, much harsher and much longer exile.

But the lesson is the same lesson.