Va’era: Stubbornness as Vice and Virtue

This week’s sedra (Torah portion) continues the story of the exodus from Egypt with the first seven of the ten plagues. Pharoah refuses to release the Israelites until the final plague, but his reactions to the previous plagues are interesting. On five occasions, Pharoah asks Moshe (Moses) to end a plague “early.” This usually seems to be when the plague involved risk of death rather than mere discomfort.

Going through all ten plagues, Pharoah accepted water turning to blood (according to rabbinic tradition, the Egyptians were able to purchase unaffected water from the Israelites, although one Medieval commentator suggested that they were able to dig wells); asked for the frogs to be removed (as they are described as getting into oven and kneading bowl, the food supply was being contaminated); accepted lice (an irritant only); asked for the wild animals to be removed (inherently dangerous); accepted both the cattle disease (the cattle were dead, so there was no risk of escalation) and the boils (another irritant); asked for the hail to stop (described as heavy enough to kill people); asked for the locusts to be removed (they were eating the food supply); and for the darkness to end (a possible exception to the rule, but the tangible darkness must have been terrifying, particularly as the Egyptians worshipped the sun as a major god).

There is a feeling of escalation as the narrative progresses, with Pharoah asking for plagues to end more frequently and giving slight concessions that Moshe rejects: the Israelites can worship God, but only inside Egypt; or, the men can go to the wilderness to worship, but not the women and children; or, they can all go to worship God, but they can’t take cattle to sacrifice. Moshe insists on all the Israelites leaving with all their cattle and it takes the final and most terrible plague, the death of the firstborn, to get Pharoah to agree to this.

There is a famous question to be asked on this, namely how could God “harden Pharoah’s heart” to make him refuse to release the Israelites until the final plague. As with all Jewish questions, there are many proposed answers. However, I want to look at Pharoah’s refusal, not from the point of view of theology, but psychology: how could Pharoah refuse to release the Israelites until after the tenth plague when even his own courtiers were telling him by plague eight that the country was being destroyed? In fact, Rashi (eleventh century) tells us that Pharoah was sleeping soundly in bed on the night of the death of the firstborn despite Moshe having warned him of the plague in advance, not sitting up anxiously with fear that his son would be killed. He was sure that God would not be able to follow through with plague ten, despite the evidence of plagues one through nine.

The Kotzker Rebbe (Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk, nineteenth century) tells us admiringly that Pharoah was “a man” who was not afraid to stand up to God, contrasting him favourably with contemporary sceptics who, he said, start saying Tehillim (Psalms) or try to find a mystic to heal them should they get so much as a headache.[1] The Kotzker, a controversial figure himself, admired people who were strong individuals, who knew themselves and their own minds and Pharoah fitted into this category, even if he misused these attributes.

Pharoah was a man who refused to back down. While he took this to extremes, it is something most of us can relate to on some level. We do things that do not go the way we expected, yet we do not just give up or even try a different approach, but persist in our behaviour. On one level, this is foolishness, particularly if we are actually causing harm to ourselves or others in the process. As the popular saying goes, insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting the outcome to be different.

However, it can be admirable, if we persist in something meaningful and beneficial despite adversity and eventually succeed. Sometimes, it is a virtue to persist in behaviour that seems to be failing, if we genuinely believe it to be worthwhile. Trying to placate an angry relative or friend might finally bear fruit on the fourth or fifth attempt. Likewise, when studying a complex subject, one might need to go over the same material multiple times before understanding it. With Talmud study in particular, I have experienced something that seemed utterly opaque and incomprehensible on the first reading become understandable on the third one.

The line between admirable persistence and stubbornness can be a thin one indeed. As that quote about insanity indicates, the question we should ask ourselves in such a situation is, am I varying something, trying something new, however small? Or am I literally doing the same thing over and over? If it is the latter, a new approach is probably warranted or maybe a reconsideration of whether this is a sensible task to be attempting. However, if we are trying to see why we have gone wrong and adjusting accordingly, then, as the saying goes, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.”

[1] As with all of the Kotzker’s teachings, this is an oral tradition and some have cast doubts on the reliability of many of these teachings. However, with a teaching like this, that is preserved in later Jewish writing, discussion and sermonising, even if we don’t know for sure that the Kotzker said this, it has become a kind of Jewish folk commentary on the Torah, as with many other orally-transmitted Hasidic teachings and tales.