There is an old tale about some jealous angels who were asked to hide the spark of God in the world from human beings. Seeing humans as their main competition for divine love, they schemed to make it difficult.
“Let’s put it atop the highest mountain,” suggested one.
“No, The Human is very ambitious,” said another. “The Human will find it there.”
“Well, then let’s bury it beneath the deepest sea.”
“That won’t work either,” another chimed in. “The Human is very resourceful — she will find it even there.“
After a moment’s thought, the wisest angel said, “I know — put it inside the Human heart. They will never look there….”
The story is cheeky, but the reminder to consult our hearts is timely. Perhaps the tale draws some inspiration from the Exodus story we’ll share this weekend around seder tables: Repeatedly, we are told, Pharaoh’s heart hardens against Moses and the Israelites, despite plea after plea for mercy, plague after plague brought by God. Each plea and plague acts as a wake up call to Pharaoh to choose compassion, yet at each opportunity, Pharoah refuses.
Passover sings of our people’s liberation, but the Haggadah also reads as a cautionary tale for us. If, at our best, we emulate the courageous Moses and Miriam, we can also admit how easy it is to become Pharaoh sometimes — to let our own hearts grow hard by failing to steer a different course at the first sign that we’ve lost our capacity for empathy.
Our hearts harden for any number of reasons — in trying times, we grow outer shells of cynicism and guardedness to protect inner layers of fear, and unhealed sadness. Understandably, our fears and hurts can close us off to situations that might expose us to more hurt, which, for a while we may need to do in order to heal, and rebuild.
Over time, however, that pattern of hardening the heart shuts us off from empathy, numbing us to the effects of our actions. As we see in the case of Pharaoh, heart-hardening is a process that occurs slowly over time — from a general attitude of disregard for a people, to treating them as strangers or servants, to an outright denial of another’s freedom and humanity.
Ultimately, Pharoah loses touch with the possibility of his own freedom by acting without regard for others, and God cannot accompany him in anything but his own self-destruction.
We are not Pharoah, but we all have that hard-hearted Pharoah capacity in us at times — especially when we feel threatened, isolated, or fearful. In those times, perhaps counterintuitively, it is in softening our hearts, releasing a bit of our emotional armor, that we can emerge feeling more resilient, free, and connected to a community that will lift us.
Our Passover story reminds us that one powerful antidote to a hard heart is to share communal joys and challenges with others. The Israelites model this by singing, dancing and praying their way to freedom. We can emulate this by finding others to sing, share meals with, and celebrate Passover with this season — whether we access community in-person or on Zoom.
I invite each of us to think about how we might invite more heart-opening practices into our weekly routines — whether your experience of community happens at synagogue, at a park, or on a yoga mat. The conditions that keep us connected keep the heart from growing hard — and move us toward a liberation all of us can celebrate.
Rabbi Laura Rumpf