ON HEARTS HARDENED AND OTHERWISE
There is one type of Biblical interpretation or exegesis, which is called the p’shat, the plain meaning, and is dedicated to understanding a text in its own right. And there is another, perhaps more creative, means of understanding the texts, the way we employ/are inspired by/are moved to action by the Biblical material, in our lives: the midrash, the drash, the sermon.
The plain meaning in this richly rendered text is compelling – a snippet of the Exodus story that unfolds like a film or theatre script:
A plea – let my people go
An action – a plague
A refusal of the heart
A plea – let my people go
An action – a plague
A hardening of the heart
The suspenseful interactions increase until the final act, in the following parashah, culminating in tragedy and liberty – but that is for the next darshan, interpreter, to write about!
Three words are used for the hardening heart episodes:
קשה (kashe) – difficult or challenging
כבד (cabad) – heavy, weighty, burdensome, honoured
חזק (khazak) – be or grow firm, strong, strengthen
These words are in common use in our Jewish lives. In modern Hebrew, we can say zeh kashe, that is ‘difficult to understand’. Kabed we know from kavod, koved in Ashkenazi, as in the 4th of the 10 Commandments – kabed et avikha v’et imekha, honour your father and your mother. And khazak, well, a couple of weeks ago, we stood and called out the phrase khazak, khazak v’nitkhazek, as we completed this year’s reading of Bereyshit, the book of Genesis, wishing each other all strength and conviction.
Why use 3 words, when one might have done? Was the author of the text exploring how to use an earlier version of Roget’s Thesaurus? It is interesting that the words do not, in themselves, hold negative connotations. In general, we use those 3 words in quite positive ways, which makes their use in this story quite puzzling.
And what about לב/לבב? Lev, levav, the words translated as heart?
Many pop songs and common expressions ran through my mind as I sat down to write this.
Hard-hearted
Heart of stone
Broken-hearted
Half-hearted
A change of heart
Heart-sick
Heavy-hearted
Lose heart
Many scholars teach that ‘heart’, for us moderns the metaphoric locale of our emotional life, does not carry that meaning in Tanakh. We are often taught that ‘heart’ means ‘the mind’, that is, the site of our cognitive functions. However Kohelet Rabbah, the collection of midrashim on the book of Ecclesiastes, commenting on the verse in Ecclesiastes ‘I have spoken with my heart, saying: Behold, I have amassed and added wisdom… my heart has seen much wisdom and knowledge’, tells us that the heart [with a Biblical proof text for each]:
Sees, speaks, goes, falls, stands, rejoices, cries out, is consoled, grieves, hardens, softens, is saddened, fears, breaks, becomes arrogant, is recalcitrant, fabricates, contemplates, overflows, calculates, deviates, strays, is sustained, is stolen, is humbled, is enticed, goes astray, trembles, awakens, loves, hates, envies, is searched, is rent, meditates, is like fire, is like stone, repents, is incensed, dies, melts, absorbs things, absorbs fear, thanks, covets, is toughened, becomes merry, deceives, speaks from within, loves a bribe, writes, matters, devises, absorbs mitzvot, acts with malice, arranges, glorifies. [Kohelet Rabbah 1:16]
In fact, according to the midrash, the heart is the centre of what it means to be a human, in our grandeur and in our degradation, all that can be positive and all that can be negative, our deeds and our thoughts and our emotions. This was summed up in a lovely teaching from Pirke Avot:
He [Rabban Yohanan] said to them [his students]: go out and perceive which is the right way to which a person should adhere. Rabbi Eliezer said, a good eye; Rabbi Joshua said, a good companion; Rabbi Yose said, a good neighbour; Rabbi Shimon said, foresight. Rabbi Elazar said, a good heart. He [Rabban Yohanan] said to them: I prefer the words of Elazar ben Arach, for in his words your words are included. [Pirke Avot 2:9]
The late Leonard Cohen wrote the following poem, about what it means to be a human being, entitled:
ALL THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT ADOLPH EICHMANN
| EYES | Medium |
| HAIR | Medium |
| WEIGHT | Medium |
| HEIGHT | Medium |
| DISTINGUISHING FEATURES | None |
| NUMBER OF FINGERS | Ten |
| NUMBER OF TOES | Ten |
| INTELLIGENCE | Medium |
What did you expect?
Talons?
Oversize Incisors?
Green saliva?
Madness?[1]
Pharoah, in all of his various iterations of obduracy and coldness and cruelty, is no monster, but rather, a human being like all of us. And God set the stage for the performance, with a searing challenge – how will he, Pharoah, respond, when confronted by the reality of the suffering of the enslaved Israelites and their request for justice and freedom. And how will he, Pharoah, respond when the agony of suffering is visited on his own people due to the choices he makes about how to respond to the plea of Moses and Aaron for freedom. What does his heart lead him to think, feel and act?
Pharoah again and again chooses hard-heartedness, malice, obduracy, and even, even at the end when he cannot remove himself from the horrors happening in his country, shielded in his palace, for his own child is killed. And yet, he will once more close up his heart.
As Heschel reminds us, ‘We are all Pharaohs or slaves of Pharaohs. It is sad to be a slave of a Pharaoh. It is horrible to be a Pharaoh.[2]
We sit in our castles next to hovels of pain and suffering and we too harden our hearts, instead of opening our hearts, seeing, being humbled, loving, breaking, for what is happening all around, to humans and to the non-human world. We have all the choices that Pharoah had, all of that which the author of Kohelet Rabbah tried to teach us. What type of heart do we choose?
Heschel continued:
Daily we should take account and ask: What have I done today to alleviate the anguish, to mitigate the evil, to prevent humiliation? Let there be a grain of prophet in every man [sic].[3]
We are immersed in a world which is in great distress, with difficult challenges that demand our response. Do we have the heart to allow compassion and empathy to guide our actions? Or do we turn away, as Pharoah did, with a cold and unfeeling heart? Do we choose a heart of stone, or a heart of flesh? [Ezekiel 36:26]
—
[1] From Selected Poems, 1956-1968 by Leonard Cohen, published by Bantam Books, 1971
[2] Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Religious Basis of Equality of Opportunity: The Segregation of God,” January 1963
[3] Ibid