Hardening Hearts: The Mirror Image

And the Lord said to Moses: “Go to Pharaoh, for I [ani] have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I might show these My signs in the midst of them.” Exodus 10:1

My father suggested that homiletically, it is possible to understand the verse to mean: it is Pharaoh’s ego (ani in Hebrew), his feeling of power, which has caused the hardening of his heart.

Indeed, in last week’s parasha and in ours, we read of the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart ten times, from the sign of Aaron’s staff turning into a crocodile and swallowing the staffs of Pharaoh’s necromancers [7:10-13], through the penultimate plague, the plague of darkness [10:27]. Only thrice is it God who hardened Pharaoh’s heart [9:12;10:20,27], while the remaining seven times it was Pharaoh who hardened his own heart, even after his necromancers declared that “it is the finger of God” which brought the plague [8:15].

Pharaoh chose to ignore the truth which was apparent to everyone else, and seemingly convinced himself that Egypt’s travails resulted from natural phenomena.

We have a tendency to look at Pharaoh and wonder in amazement how he could have ignored the obvious divine intervention in the affairs of Egypt and harden his heart through failure to accept what should have been self-evident. Yet, we must ask ourselves whether we too take Pharaoh’s approach (at least in its mirror image). To accept as self-evident the blessings we receive without acknowledging that they are true gifts of God, is, in a real sense, to harden our hearts.