This Shabbat we will read in Parashat Va’era about Pharaoh king of Egypt who is repeatedly asked to free the people of Israel from Egypt, even enduring beatings by the ten plagues, but he did not give up. Why did Pharaoh stand firm in his refusal? Were Pharaoh’s consideration to continue denying the freedom of people of Israel rational? Even ten painful plagues did not make him free the captives. Pharaoh insists on being seemingly “irrational” and sticking to his position.

Sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that rationality is an objective standard (ours, of course), and are disappointed to find out that there are other rational points of view, and there is no one “rationality” for everyone. Thus, the “rationality” of the citizens in Tel Aviv is different from the “rationality” of the Hamas terrorists in Gaza. Both have a rational logic that is based on different assumptions and goals – this assumes the good life and productivity as a supreme value, and this dreams of seventy-two virgins…

There is a well-known experiment where you put a banana into a box with a small hole in it. A monkey can easily put his loose hand into the box and take it out without difficulty. The monkey puts his hand into the box as expected, grabs the tempting banana and fantasizes – how delightful it will be to eat the banana. But when the monkey tries to remove the hand holding the banana it finds that the hand holding the banana cannot pass through the narrow opening. The monkey can, of course, let go of the banana and pull out his hand, but he is not ready to let go of his loot, and so he remains bound to the trap.

The case with Pharaoh forces us to rethink the monkey holding onto the banana. Is he completely irrational? It is possible that, in a very rational way, according to his banana, the monkey thinks that his life will not be a life worth living if he carries within himself the disgrace of breaking away from the banana, which he considers a betrayal of his mission; For him, an admission of his personal failure, if he retreats, will be intolerable and unforgivable, and therefore it is rational, from the monkey’s point of view, to pay with his life, provided that he remains in possession of the banana.

It is possible that from the description of the monkey’s rational thought one can also learn about Pharaoh’s rational line of thinking. It is possible that Pharaoh already understood that the whole world was revolting against the continued slavery of the Israelites, since Pharaoh felt on his flesh the attack of frogs, lice and locusts and other diseases and plagues; All of them united to make one hand against him in order to dissuade him from continuing to control the foreign people living in his midst. Pharaoh understood that the battle was already decided, but as with the monkey, the real battle is no longer about the banana or the exploitation of cheap labor. The battle is about consciousness, about the ethos that will be engraved on the pages of history.

Will Pharaoh be remembered as a soft-hearted king, whose poor survival considerations guided him to free the enslaved people, or will he be remembered as a hard-hearted warrior who refused to compromise his principles, and was left to fight against all odds, and die a hero’s death, somewhere in the depths of the sea? Pharaoh chose the second option…

It is appropriate to emphasize a small difference between the monkey and Pharaoh: in his principled stubbornness, the monkey decrees doom only for himself, whereas Pharaoh in his time and Hamas today same as Sadam Husein in Iraq or the Taliban in Afghanistan same as the Nazis in Germany, dragged their entire nation with them into the destruction….

It is easy to judge other nations or leaders and more difficult to be introspective and improve our character!

In each of us there is a little pharaoh who, out of arrogance and/or fear, disrupts something in our common, simple, survival sense that should have told us when it is better to stop fighting or being stubborn and move on.

Let’s improve our behavior being better jews, better spouses and better family members learning from the error of others.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Refael Cohen