Reading Torah at face value is fraught with danger and difficulty. Recently, readers of this publication have jumped into the fray around Torah and transgender. When columnist Dennis Prager cast his opinion on that most contemporary of social phenomena in the light of our most ancient and authoritative text, the stakes felt high and the passions ran hot. Prager — as well as some of the most compelling responses to him — sought to limit the debate to the Torah’s perspective. Tellingly, however, this textual focus did nothing to narrow the gap about what we should learn from it.
A culture defines itself not merely by what it reads, but also by how it reads it. The question that animates us is not “What does Torah say?” but rather “What does Torah mean?” To answer the first question, all you have to do is look it up. Tackling the second question, by contrast, has driven Jewish civilization for millennia. This week’s Torah portion, Va’era, illustrates how our tradition struggles to read around the inevitable anachronisms and moral problems posed by plain-sense Torah. The plot of Va’era begins with God’s deputizing of Moses and Aaron and continues through the first seven of the Ten Plagues. Twice Torah describes Pharaoh’s state of mind as the engine behind the plagues: Pharaoh’s stubbornness precipitates his just deserts.
In fact, however, it is God who plays upon Pharaoh’s heart and instills his recalcitrance. God unabashedly plans to manipulate Pharaoh’s motives directly and “stiffen Pharaoh’s heart” (Exodus 7:3). Later, Pharaoh apparently exerts freewill over his own heart when, after shameless waffling, “he continued to sin and he made his heart harden” (Exodus 9:34). But by then, Pharaoh’s apparent agency is a chimera; it merely brings God’s predetermination to bear.
A straightforward reading of the text leads us to conclude that God makes a pawn of Pharaoh. Though Pharaoh does not exercise choice, he must pay its price. To modern readers, this predestination puts us at odds with Torah because our understanding of choice connotes responsibility, and responsibility justifies consequences. We are hardly the first to reason this way — our greatest post-biblical commentators also associate choice with responsibility. For them, God’s intervention in Pharaoh’s state of mind seems to remove choice from the realm of Pharaoh’s agency and, with it, Pharaoh’s responsibility. And absent Pharaoh’s responsibility, the commentators lack a moral justification for the Ten Plagues.
In short, if we take Torah at its word, it contradicts a kind of moral logic that we and our leading scholars take for granted. But the commentators are deeply pious, and they also take for granted that Torah reflects God’s perfection and could not possibly relate, or even intimate, anything less than God’s perfect justice. So they supply the missing justification for wreaking havoc on Egypt. They apply non-biblical sensibilities, such as midrash or philosophy, as lenses through which they can read their own morality into the Torah and solve a problem that they feel keenly, but which Torah blithely ignores.
Rashi, for example, is at pains to chalk up God’s manipulation of Pharaoh to the innate godlessness of the Egyptians. In Rashi’s midrashic imagination, God points out Pharaoh’s previous bad behavior. But more than that, God also pre-empts the possibility of redemption, reasoning that “idolaters lack the moral refinement required to bend one’s heart toward true atonement.” Egyptians, as idolaters, therefore lend themselves a priori to punishment.
Subject to the same qualms, Abraham Ibn Ezra asks point-blank: “If God stiffened Pharaoh’s heart, then wherein lies [Pharaoh’s] crime and sin?” He acknowledges a certain degree of predestination, but Ibn Ezra also hedges. He says the simple fact that humans can reason means that we are responsible to reach for goodness — or, at the very least, to try to mitigate the evil impulse that God may implant in us. So, yes, God set Pharaoh up to be evil, but Pharaoh could have chosen righteousness. Choosing otherwise, he and Egypt bear responsibility and deserve punishment.
Long before these medieval commentators, scripture itself flip-flops its moral posture on choice, responsibility and punishment. The Ninevites in the Book of Jonah fully atone for their sinfulness, while Ezekiel focuses on Pharaoh’s irredeemable arrogance to justify Egypt’s “fall into desolation and ruin” (Ezekiel 29:9). Not coincidentally, the rabbis designated this passage from Ezekiel as the haftarah for Va’era, perhaps to assuage the same concerns later exhibited by Rashi and Ibn Ezra.
Ezekiel, Rashi, Ibn Ezra, their peers and their heirs all steward our tradition with an activist approach to textual meaning-making. For its part, Va’era does not recognize any moral quandary about punishing Pharaoh for actions that God choreographed on his behalf. But later readers do, so they patently write their own moral code into Torah’s narrative. Subsequently, we, in learning Torah through the lens of these commentators, acquiesce to a reading that materially changes Torah’s original tone and meaning, even if the words remain the same.
This approach promotes an uncomfortable indeterminacy about divine truth. It demands tremendous scholarly investment — generation after generation — and it can be very contentious, as the recent exchange of letters in this Journal proves. But it also forestalls fundamentalism and guarantees Torah’s vitality, sometimes quite paradoxically, by reversing its positions.
Joshua Holo is dean of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Jack H. Skirball Campus in Los Angeles.
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