The Pharaoh Within - Ari Abramowitz: The Land of Israel Fellowship

and so the plagues begin and the illusions start getting peeled back one by one the idols start getting shattered one by one right the nile turns to blood and why'd the first plague emanate from the nile well the nile was their god it was like the source of their fertility they worshipped denial they placed their faith in the nile they didn't need god they had everything that they needed or so they thought right and then this great god of theirs this great and mighty nile turned to blood right it was like the nile itself was slain like it was killed and this is not only it not only shattered their belief in the nile but it started chipping away at their belief in pharaoh himself but then just in case that anyone thought perhaps this was a plague of the god of the nile and that he only had power in the nile well then came the frogs now what are frogs they're amphibians which start in water but then venture out of the water and cover the face of egypt in every room in every home in their ovens and in their furnaces and it became clear that this deity has control and autonomy not only over the nile but over land itself as well and this is this is how it kept going right this plague by plague the falsehoods of the egyptian worldview were becoming exposed shattering these belief systems bringing down the haughty just humbling the arrogant and it was a process right because anything real tends to be a process there was a reason that the jews needed to travel 40 years through the desert because human nature takes time to integrate and internalize these new realities this one cataclysmic plague it was not enough to have one plague it needed to be done step by step and i always wondered how the general population of egypt responded because we don't really hear that much about it were they like as obstinate and stubborn as para were they like why doesn't paro just back down was there disagreement among them about how the nation should progress uh i don't know but we we don't hear that much about them but who do we hear about we hear about paro himself about his reaction about the process that he went through now i'll tell you it seems like a shame that friends of mine that i went to grade school with look at the torah and they say i know it i know it i read it in school i went to a jewish day school i know the stories because they know these stories through the eyes of a first grader on the most simple and remedial level but being that the torah is not a book but a living teaching as we change and we evolve in our journey through this world the torah speaks to us in completely new ways and it imparts these radically new wisdoms and truths that we need exactly when we encounter it so and so i've noticed that as i'm experiencing the tour in my adult life the characters cease being black and white right they stop being good and bad they develop this complexity to them and i start seeing myself in those other characters as well alarmingly alarmingly i find myself empathizing with the pain for example of asaph upon finding out that he traded his birthright for a bowl of soup for who of us have not betrayed hashem in some way for a fleeting moment of a forbidden pleasure right trading in true closeness to god which is the greatest joy and pleasure imaginable we trade that in for illusions and stupidity right seeing this conflict within him of of hating his brother jacob but loving him at the same time it was just very real and very human well it's the same with paro there's there's real room for empathy and compassion for paro i know maybe that's a contentious controversial thing to say it doesn't mean that he was anything other than profoundly evil right it doesn't mean that he didn't deserve every single thing that he got but it still means that we can empathize with him or at least i feel like i can okay i'll speak for myself i i couldn't help feeling it as i'm going through the torah portion and i intentionally didn't did not say sympathize because when you sympathize with someone you feel compassion for what they're going through you feel bad for them but empathy means that you can actually see yourself in them and i think that if we all dig deep into our hearts we'll see that that we all indeed may have a little bit of pharaoh in us perhaps we have more than we'd like to admit and by the way i i believe that the mystics tell us the very same thing i should really have called jeremy and asked them because i couldn't find the source but i believe they tell us that that there is a spark of each character from the torah within us that that it's all that it's all within us now these ideas i'm about to show you were very much inspired by a rabbi adeen steinzaltz may his memory be a blessing and he was just such a giant and he's so missed from the world i feel like we're just increasingly an orphaned generation anyways so let's think about paro for a moment he was born as the son of paro the paro before him and he was raised being taught that he was a god whose brothers were the sun and the moon and the nile and that's why he had to say no to moshe and moshe's request that the nation of israel go to worship god in the desert because number one he's god so how could he let them leave and worship another god when he himself is the most powerful god number two letting them go would be a tacit recognition that the people of israel have a certain degree of independence and that is not a joke for paro politically any leader politically right that is exactly what could lead to untold numbers of rebellions and revolutions we see even today that i think the next world war could very much be sparked by exactly that same scenario right whether it's taiwan seeking independence from china or ukraine from russia will the world get involved will america get involved will it smart spark a global war but it's all that it's all coming from that same route so there's no such thing as an isolated situation everything can be a precedent so of course paro had to say no for in his mind he was god and egypt was this uncontested superpower of the planet that's what it always will be and always has been that's just what is and you really can't blame him for it right it's it's it wasn't only what his family told him but the rest of the world really seemed to affirm this truth so now we may not have been raised believing that we are literally god but i think that sometimes the torah gives us this extreme example of certain attributes to help us understand underlying truths about ourselves that are true to a lesser degree obviously but they're true it's just that we need to see it in the most extreme manifestation to understand this truth about ourselves and so who is the pharaoh within us the pharaoh within us is the voice that knows the way things are supposed to be right the pharaoh within us is the one that's sometimes furious that's righteously indignant at the way things have turned out in some aspect of our lives things were not supposed to turn out this way why because we know right the pharaoh within me is that voice that just stubbornly refuses to accept the fact that we don't know that refuses to accept the truth that hashem runs the world and not us so rabbi steinsault points out this this very powerful truth he explains that while parrot does seem to yield in certain ways throughout the initial plagues um you know after which he backtracks and rescinds his decrees and says they could leave and know they can't leave and the whole thing we know the story but um there seems to have been a much more fundamental and profound shift within him after the sixth plague the plague of hail so as opposed to to uh yielding for pragmatic reasons uh like just putting an end to whatever plague they were going through paro expresses an entirely different sentiment after the sixth plague right chapter nine para sent could we get that slide up para sent and called for moshe on our own and said to them i have sinned this time god is righteous and i and my people are wicked it's hard to believe that para was saying that something has really changed in his heart yet he definitely he definitely never experienced hail raining down on egypt amongst thunder and lightning that doesn't happen in egypt if you know that that uh terrain that territory the weather there let alone the coexistence of fire and ice which are two completely antithetical elements within the hail yeah this in and of itself must have just rocked him to the core at this point he must have just been a bundle of frazzled nerves at this point but in his words you can see that something deep within him has been shattered right he speaks of sin which is like an objective right and wrong that exists outside himself he he recognizes god but even more powerfully he recognized that god is righteous and his people are wicked he and his people right he isn't just talking about the egyptians alive today at that time he's now reassessing his ancestors the people before him if there is a god and pharaoh is not him then everything that his life has been built upon has been a lie that his entire nation has been built upon falsehood and illusions and it's just it's hard not to feel bad for him his whole world is shattering before his eyes his father and his forefathers are now being exposed not as deities but as frauds and this my friend isn't just relegated to paro this is the story of each and every one of us to some degree or another because we have all inherited lies right lies that have penetrated their way into the very prison through which we see the world and so even we every jew and our prayers and confessions on the day of all right we say um that we will that we can't stand before hashem and say that we are righteous because we and our fathers have sinned that isn't just what paro said that's what we say as well the torah itself has built this into the process of confession which we actually learned before on rosh hashanah and yom kippur it's in leviticus right in chapter 26 verse 40 they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers that that's part of confessing is recognizing how deep that goes that's why he says i and my people the whole story of egypt has been a lie what we're seeing happen before our eyes is paro himself doing chuva sincere chuva because when chuva is sincere rabbi steins points out it penetrates to the very root of things and it encompasses the entire picture it rewrites the entire story as the masks are coming off and much of the world is turning not only against israel but yes against the jewish people if you feel different if your love for israel is growing deeper and stronger if you're thirsting to cleave to the nation of israel and to the god of israel if you're thirsting to learn authentic torah from jews in judea then the land of israel fellowship is for you hundreds of individuals and families from around the world come 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