How Long?
On Being Stuck and Getting Out
So Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh and said to him, “Thus says the LORD, the God of the Hebrews, ‘How long will you refuse to humble yourself before Me? Let My people go that they may worship Me’” (Exodus 10:3).
And the LORD said to Moses, “How long will this people spurn Me, and how long will they have no faith in Me despite all the signs that I have performed in their midst?” (Numbers 14:11)
[The LORD said:] “How much longer shall that wicked community [Israel] keep muttering against Me?” (Numbers 14:27)
“How Long, Oh LORD, will you abandon me, forever?” (Psalm 13:1)
Until when, O God, will the foe blaspheme, will the enemy forever revile Your name? Why do You hold back Your hand…? (Psalm 74:10)
This week’s Torah reading, Bo (Exodus 10:1-13:16), opens with the idea that the fundamental obstacles to Israelite liberation are Pharaoh’s interconnected character traits of stubbornness and arrogance. Of course, God has hardened Pharaoh’s heart, so the story is complicated. In some ways, Pharoah’s obstinacy is a caricature—God has caused Pharaoh to become an exaggerated version of himself. In another sense, the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart may simply be the summa of years of calcification and self-worship. The point is—whether God or Pharaoh is the cause of Pharaoh’s hardened heart—suffering, oppression, decadence, and corruption persist because we refuse to change our minds.
The opening of the mind, heart, and imagination, are painful prerequisites for those who wish to come back to reality before or after a bubble bursts. But it takes humility—it’s very hard to admit that we were wrong. Because Pharaoh would rather be right in his fantasyland than wrong in reality, he must take refuge in his model of the world while shutting out any counter-evidence that would disturb his certainty. As Pharaoh’s sense of reality is “not grounded in fundamentals,” it’s only a matter of time before his entire world comes crashing down. The text emphasizes Pharaoh’s lack of humility as a point of contrast with Moses. The tyrant seeks to make reality in his own image. The shepherd lets reality reveal the way. The tyrant seeks total domination to the preclusion of dialogue and relationship. The shepherd practices what Meister Eckhart calls Gelassenheit, letting things be what they are. Whether we pursue the path of one-sided domination or the path of dialogical shepherding has consequences not just at the national scale, but at the personal level as well.
Moses and Aaron ask Pharaoh, “How long” (10:3) will you stay like this? But the question is rhetorical—Pharaoh can’t and won’t change, and that’s the problem. Even Pharoah’s advisors repeat Moses’s language, “How long will this man [Moses] be a snare to us?” (10:7)
“Let my people go” is one of the most famous lines from the Exodus story and yet we mostly focus on the objective side of it, “the people.” Just as important is the subjective side of it, as emphasized by the the word “Let.” The reason Pharaoh won’t let the people go is internal to Pharoah—Pharaoh cannot let himself let them go; he’s stuck. Yes, Pharaoh is the archetypal bully and so our compassion naturally flows to his victims, the Israelites. But as we well know, the bully also has a story, and Pharaoh is also a kind of victim, held hostage by his own unfreedom. As Xenophon’s Simonides argues in the Hiero, tyranny hurts the tyrant as much as it hurts his subjects.
The language of “How long” (ad matay) and “until when” (ad ana) recur throughout the Bible as a whole, and tracking their usage leads to some surprising conclusions. I included only a handful of references above (there’s 20+ more places where the phrases appear). The first thing to note is that who asks the question, who is asked the question, and who is asked about, change. Yet if we take the passage in Exodus 10:3—where ad matay first appears—as archetypal, then we must imagine all repetitions place the speaker of the question in the role of Moses/God and the spoken to or spoken about in the place of Pharaoh. To ask “How long” is to be Moses, channeling Go. To be asked “How long” is to be Pharoah, stuck with a frozen heart.
When, in the Book of Numbers, the people go astray, it’s as if they have taken on the attributes of Pharaoh. God now directs the question “How long” at them. The Torah does not say arrogance and obstinacy are attributes unique to Pharaoh or Egyptian society—they are universal vices that cross cultural and political lines. Even the “chosen people” is not exempt from becoming hard-hearted, to its detriment and the detriment of others. The former slaves can become like Pharaoh.
Numbers takes the Hollywood-esque “us-them” framework of Exodus and says, this isn’t about good guys and bad guys, but about you and your own stuff. Let’s see how you fare when you don’t have Egypt to blame, when your identity isn’t virtuous simply by virtue of what you are not.
Psalms takes the radicalism further. Not only can the people become Pharaohonic, but, at least from the psalmist’s point of view, so can God. The psalmist directs his question “How long” at God, as if it is God who suffers from hard-heartedness, from a lack of humility and flexibility. The psalmist’s complaint can take two forms. In the hard version, God is directly responsible for the psalmist’s suffering (committing, as it were, a sin of commission). In the soft version, God is indirectly responsible (committing, as it were, a sin of omission). In one version, God seems to do the wrong thing, shocking as this may be. In another version, God simply allows evil to prevail. In either case—the psalmist’s “How long” is meant as a jolt and a challenge—can God change God’s ways, break an old pattern?
Just as Moses says “Let my people go,” the psalmist says, “Let me go.” For the psalmist, the national story is cut down to existential miniature. The others who oppress the psalmist are often undefined. We as readers will never know if they’re his neighbors, the voices in his head, or something else. In the psalmist’s mind, the roles of liberator and oppressor are dynamic and ambiguous. God is both the obstacle and the way, the toxin and the remedy. Similarly, the self gets in its own way, but also possesses the compass for getting out of its own maze.
Recall that in Exodus, Moses and Aaron speak on behalf of God to Pharaoh. Transposed into the psalmist’s paradigm this amounts to speaking on behalf of God to the part of God that is (experienced as) Pharaoh-like. The psalmist continues a longstanding prophetic tradition of arguing with God that we see exemplified in figures from Abraham and Moses to Jeremiah and Job.
Through the shifting use of the phrase “How long” and “Until when,” the Torah emphasizes that our problems do not disappear when we overcome the Egyptian Pharaoh. Pharaoh is a kind of eternal form that lives within us at a national level, at a personal level, and at a spiritual-theological level. Even God cannot but manifest to us, at times, as Pharaoh. When revolutionary movements gain institutional power and legitimacy, when outsiders become insiders, they confront the same challenges they thought they could overturn. The problem is not that those at the periphery are shut out from the center, as if a mere shuffling of the deck will bring better results, but that those at the center—no matter who they are—are positionally incapable of standing at the periphery.
What is the point of all the plagues in the Exodus story? If it were simply to persuade or compel the Egyptians to let the Israelites go, that would be that. Instead, the text emphasizes that Pharaoh is reluctant to let the people go despite the plagues. The teaching is not that the plagues help change people’s minds, but that they don’t.
If not even ten plagues can change someone’s ossified mind, we should be humble. What are we unable to see and know because of our own biases? To change one’s views on the basis of new information is perhaps more difficult than parting the sea. Pharaoh’s hard heart isn’t the exception—it’s the rule. The exceptions are those who leave Egypt, who are able to imagine a future different from the past. The point of the ten plagues is to contrast the futility of God’s mighty hand at the psychological level with the liberating might of the people’s hopeful imagination. Egypt doesn’t simply represent a bad ideology, but ideology itself—which subordinates the messiness of life to the order of human constructs.
God’s coercive power helped vanquish the Egyptian armies; imagination alone couldn’t have done that. Yet without the human desire to leave Egypt and believe in something else, the war with Pharaoh would have been pointless.
As a linear narrative, the Five Books of Moses move from Egypt to a Promised Land. As a spiral in time, the Torah assures us that the story we read is aspirational. For our part, we contain many voices and drives: we are Pharaoh, Moses, God, and the people, all at once. “How long” is an ambiguous question—it asks whether we have what it takes to do something genuinely novel while also implying that, too often, we don’t.
We need to ask “How long?” not just of others, but of ourselves. When we do, our hearts—we pray—become a little softer, our minds, a bit more open, the Promised Land nearer, further, and stranger.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins @Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—Pleased to share my new poem, “Life Is Too Short”
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study based in NYC.
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