Pharoah as God

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Saturday, January 24, 2009

There’s an old joke, that probably goes back to the years after the Six Day War, about the boy who comes home from Sunday school and his parents ask him what he learned that morning. The class had been studying the Exodus from Egypt. Well, he said, it was pretty exciting. The Israelites made a pre-emptive strike against the Egyptian’s chariot forces. They surrounded the Pharaoh and his militia and cut off their supplies. Then they headed for the Suez Canal and built pontoon bridges across…..His parents interrupted, is that really what the teacher said? Well, the boy conceded, I tell it better.

Our rabbis ask, in that there were any number of ways that God could have delivered the Israelites from Egypt, why ten plagues? Why not cut to the chase, to the tenth plague that leads to their deliverance, or avoid the plagues completely and just carry the people out of Egypt on eagles’ wings? Why this ongoing confrontation between God and Pharaoh, witnessed by the Egyptians and by the Israelites?

They find the answer in a careful reading of the first plague, in the section of the book of Exodus that Alex chanted for us this morning. Moses is told that Pharaoh is stubborn and refuses to let the people go. Then Moses is told to go to Pharaoh in the morning as Pharaoh is coming out of the water of the Nile.

What is the relationship between these two verses that come one right after the other? What does being stubborn have to do with Pharaoh’s morning routine? And how is it that Pharaoh, with all his power and high position, is alone as he comes out of the Nile in the morning? The answer the rabbis give is rather earthy.

The Sephardic Commentary Me’am Loez quotes Midrash Rabbah and other earlier commentators reminding us that Pharaoh was considered a god by the Egyptians. They go further to say that this wasn’t just a metaphor but an understanding that Pharaoh encouraged. However, being a god, Pharaoh should not have had any physical needs, and so he was forced to take care of his body in secret.

Every morning he told his advisors that he wanted to be left alone to meditate along the mighty Nile, while really needing this privacy to take care of his bodily functions. Zelig Plishkin, a contemporary Orthodox commentator, points out how much physical discomfort Pharaoh must have gone through every day just to keep up this charade.

The ten plagues, the long drawn out confrontation between God and Pharaoh, was not only to physically free the Israelites. It was also to liberate the Israelites and all humankind from the belief in a human as god.

Now divine right monarchies have been out of favor in the west for hundreds of years, so the idea of the king as god is not an issue for us. Still Jewish moral writers argue that we, as individuals, have not totally moved away from Pharaoh’s hubris. Sometimes we act as if we thought of ourselves as gods, “Masters of the Universe,” seeing our own desires as paramount, or feeling justified in using our power to get what we want without regard for the rights or needs of others.

Further, we sometimes think of ourselves as god in ways that cause us as much discomfort as Pharaoh experienced. We cause ourselves emotional hardship when we feel the need to be in control of things of which we really are not, or stubbornly cling to the belief that we must be right all the time as if we had divine wisdom.

Judaism does not have a catechism, a list of necessary beliefs about God that make one a good Jew. There are a variety of viewpoints that all co-exist within Jewish theology, ranging from the personal God of the Bible, the mystical view of the Kabbalists, the rationalism of Maimonides, and the naturalism of Mordechai Kaplan. But there are core themes that unite Jewish theology; one of them is the belief that though we cannot say what God is, we do know what God is not. God is not human, nor are we God. If we can avoid Pharaoh’s sin, if we can say to ourselves with real understanding, “I am not God”, then we have learned an important lesson from this ancient confrontation.