Our Rabbi's Message
January 15th 2010
By Rabbi Aaron KriegelThe story of Pharaoh is a story of prejudice, not only against the Children of Israel, but also as a result of his constant refusal to see the world as it was. Pharaoh’s world was what he perceived. He perceived that all Egypt had to bow before him, and that was his truth. He imagined that he was a god, and that was his truth. He was the sun as another god and he believed that also. That was his truth. He refused to admit that the plagues, which fell upon Egypt, were anything other than happenstance, and that was his truth also.
Pharaoh’s problem stemmed from his inability to see the world through the eyes of anyone other than himself. He was so certain that he was right in all his beliefs and in all his pronouncements that he went to war and had men killed to protect those ideas. He could not see the sanctity of human life because all human life, save his own, was mortal and not godly. People, in his eyes, were no different than the animals.
The plagues that befell Egypt and Pharaoh in the sedra, which we read this Shabbat and next, reattempts over time to allow the Children of Israel and the citizens and slaves of Egypt to recognize what Pharaoh could never recognize. Sadly, like the Children of Israel all who lived in Egypt were too powerless to understand a truth that came from any source other than Pharaoh. The consequence of that blindness was the destruction of large populations in Egypt.
However, the long-term results of that story would bring awareness of oppression and of freedom to most of the peoples of this earth. In time peoples would also learn that prejudice forms when people close their eyes to the world as it is and in its place create a world organized by their rules, rules which almost always bring oppression upon those who do not fit in with the plan of the oppressors.
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