By Eli Henderson

calling them bad is not good, and I think there’s even a term for that: racism.

There is also a word that the Torah uses that always seems to catch me. In the Scripture, God proclaims that He has “Hardened” the Pharaoh's heart on purpose. Do the Jews not have it so bad already that God has to make it even worse by making the one guy who’s in charge of them more resistant to change? The word hardening has a lot of different interpretations. One says that God merely makes Pharaoh say what he truly thinks should happen, that the Jews should not leave, to show the true cruelty of the man to the Jews. Yeah I also hope that god was just making the Pharaoh say how he truly felt.

This Parshah is straightforward, but there are things that fall through the cracks. We assume that whatever evil befalls the Egyptians is just because of the cruelty that Jews had to endure because of the Egyptians and Pharaoh. We often don’t pause to consider the questionable role God plays in this story in allowing many innocent people to die. We also don’t consider the social codes that had allowed slavery to be a profitable and normal practice for many generations, or that the oppressors we demonize, that the fate they had was also not of their choosing. I don’t want defend the Egyptian people as victims here. It is easy to turn your head to see people being whipped and starving and think “That sucks, good thing I’m not that guy” but then realize that you could be that guy. So easily could you’ve been born a Jew or an Egyptian or the Pharaoh or anything. This to me is so obvious and is probably the thing that I think about the most, but for someone who didn’t know this, it is extremely difficult to wrap your head around. You’re literally going from God hand picking you over other people so you’re at the top to being just like everyone else; a result of something that has blessed everyone to simply exist. The Egyptians weren’t aware of this and therefore assumed that they were on this planet chosen by

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their various Gods and were to rule over the Jews just as sure as the sun rises and sets everyday.