~
Thoughts on the Parsha ~
Parshas Va'eira
Let There Be Hope
By: Daniel Listhaus
וַיְדַבֵּר משֶׁה לִפְנֵי ה'
לֵאמֹר הֵן בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל לֹא שָׁמְעוּ אֵלַי וְאֵיךְ יִשְׁמָעֵנִי פַרְעֹה
וַאֲנִי עֲרַל שְׂפָתָיִם
“Moshe spoke before
Hashem saying, 'Behold, the Children of Israel have not listened to me, so how
will Pharaoh listen to me? And I have blocked lips!”
-Va'eria 6:12
This
week's parsha continues to relate the unbelievable conversations that
Moshe and Hashem shared. We know that Moshe was the greatest navi (prophet)
to ever live,[1]
yet it is still incredibly difficult to comprehend the relationship between
Moshe – a person, and Hashem. Hashem had commanded Moshe to say to the B'nei
Yisroel, “I will bring you to the land about which I have raised My hand to
give it to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov; and I shall give it to you as a
heritage – I am Hashem.”[2]
However, when Moshe relayed this message to the B'nei Yisroel, the passuk
(verse) testifies that they refused to listen because of shortness
of breath and hard work.[3]
In
the next passuk, Hashem commands Moshe, “Come speak to Pharaoh, king of
Egypt, that he send the B'nei Yisroel from his land.”[4]
Moshe responds that, “Behold, the B'nei Yisroel have not listened to me,
so how will Pharaoh listen to me? And I have blocked lips.”[5]
Rashi[6]
comments that this argument that Moshe made to Hashem, is one of ten kal
v'chomeirs[7]
found throughout Tanach. The Mizrachi[8]
explains that Moshe said to Hashem as follows, “If the B'nei Yisroel
won't listen to me, and what I am saying is beneficial for them [that they will
be able to leave], then certainly Pharaoh will refuse to listen because the
news I am relaying is bad for him.”
However,
as the Mizrachi himself points out, this kal v'chomeir is hard to
understand because there is a pircha (flaw in its logic). After all,
Moshe seems to have conveniently omitted an important piece of information. As
mentioned earlier, when the Torah says that the B'nei Yisroel did
not listen to Moshe, it describes that the reason they did not listen was
because they were stressed out from their strenuous labor. If so, Moshe did not
have a valid reasoning because perhaps the B'nei Yisroel only didn't
listen for that reason, but for Pharaoh, to whom the excuse of working hard
surely did not apply, on what basis could Moshe be so sure that Pharaoh would
not listen?
The
Mizrachi answers that Moshe himself did not know the reason why the B'nei
Yisroel refused to listen to him; and that when the Torah was telling us
that it was indeed because of being stressful from their work, it was telling
us from an omniscient point of view.[9]
Let
us take a step back, though, for a minute and examine the situation. The B'nei
Yisroel were slaves in Mitzrayim. They had gone through so much at this point
– there was a decree that their babies be thrown into the Nile, they were
forced to do hard work, and they were constantly being beaten up. There is no
doubt that Mitzrayim would not have been a first-choice vacation spot for a
Jew. Yet, for some reason, when Moshe came to them with a message from Hashem
that they were going to be rescued from their horrible living arrangements and
be brought into their own land, the B'nei Yisroel seem to have just
turned the other way. One would think that if one were a slave and someone
would tell him that he would be released to freedom, that he would be jumping
for joy. So, why is it that the B'nei Yisroel seemed to be indifferent
about staying in Mitzrayim? Did they enjoy doing work all of the sudden?[10]
Why did they not listen to Moshe? The passuk says that they did not
listen because they were short of breath and tired of hard work. Wouldn't that
be exactly the reason why the B'nei Yisroel should listen to
Moshe?
In 1965, a scientist names Martin E. P. Seligman performed
an interesting experiment.[11]
At that time, everyone knew of Ivan Pavlov's famous experiment with his dogs
which demonstrated that if you ring a bell every time you bring a dog its food,
then you will observe that at a later time you could ring the bell, and even
without having any food present, the dog will begin to salivate. This proved
the concept of conditioning. The object of Seligman's experiment was to prove a
similar concept by shocking dogs. Seligman had a bunch of dogs which he
harmlessly shocked while they were restrained. Later, he put the dog in a
shuttle-box which had two sides with a low fence dividing the two compartments.
They went to the side the dog was in and shocked it, expecting it to utilize
its freedom and jump to the other side. However, the dog just stayed put.
Seligman showed from here that there is a concept of “learned helplessness”.
The restrained dogs had learned to just give up hope without exploring other
options. Therefore, even when the opportunity existed for the dogs to escape
pain and suffering, they refused to make any such effort.
Unfortunately, dogs are not the only
ones who could be conditioned to feel helpless. People too sometimes experience
times of defeat and then give up completely and do not care when a solution is offered
in the future. Feeling depressed without hope for a long period of time could
dangerously effect the mind to start believing that there is indeed no hope –
even when the answer appears later in front of one's face.
Perhaps this was the reason that the
B'nei Yisroel refused to listen to Moshe. After being in Mitzrayim for a
long time going through so many hardships, evil decrees, and manual labor, the
Jews felt hopeless and were unable to accept the message of freedom when it was
offered to them.
Hashem, though, proceeded to bring
the ten plagues on the Egyptians and clearly differentiated between them and
the Jews. It was a time of Hashem showing his pure love for us. A Jew must
never give up and always have hope because we understand that Hashem cares
about us and watches over each of us individually. If we could condition
ourselves to constantly be aware that Hashem is always here for us, and does
not allow for things to happen that will effect the life and circumstances we are
supposed to find ourselves in, then we could live an enhanced life with hope
even in the darkest of times. If we do not condition ourselves to think along
these lines, then we never truly left Mitzrayim and are really slaves to our
own psychology that when things look grim, we just accept the position we are
in and remain depressed over the fact that bad situations do not change.
May Hashem help us condition
ourselves to truly believe that everything is in His hands. With this
mentality, there is no room for giving up hope.
[1] The seventh of the “Ani Maamins”
which could generally be found in the siddur immediately following Shacharis
davening.
[2] Shemos 6:8
[3] Shemos 6:9
[4] Shemos 6:11
[5] Shemos 6:12
[6] Ibid.
[7] Kal V'chomeir is a fortiori argument
based on logic which essentially states that if something applies in a more “kal”
situation (where there is less of a reason for it to apply), then certainly it
should apply by the “chomeir” – where there is more reason for it to
apply.
[8] Ibid.
[9] The Mizrachi continues to ask: Still,
why don't we just throw that pircha into the kal v'chomeir as
well (as we do often throughout the Gemara), and construct the following
argument that Moshe was saying: “If B'nei Yisroel are unwilling
to listen to me and it is beneficial to them, even though they are stressed
from the hard work; so certainly Pharaoh will not listen to me because the news
is detrimental to him, despite the fact that he is not stressed from being in
slavery.” The Mizrachi then gives and answer to this question as well by
saying that we do not apply this concept when the Torah itself lists the pircha.
[10] The passuk in Shemos 3:7 says
that Hashem heard the crying of B'nei Yisroel, so certainly they were unhappy
in Egypt.
[11] Learned Helplessness, by Martin Seligman.
No comments:
Post a Comment