Refusing To Harden Our Hearts To Pain

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our service on January 23rd when Rabbi Steven returned from leading an educational trip to Israel. He shared reflections what it was like to be in a nation consumed by grief and political turmoil, only to return to a nation consumed with grief and political turmoil.

If you’ve been educated or encouraged by Rabbi Steven and want to share your reflections, please drop us a five star rating and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen — it helps us a lot. 

***

For upcoming Shabbat services and programs, check our event calendar, and see our Accessibility & Inclusion page for information about our venues. Follow us on Instagram and like us on Facebook for more updates. To support Mishkan's important work of creating radically inclusive, down-to-earth, inspired Judaism, we invite you to join as a Builder or donate today.

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/support/be-a-builder/

https://www.mishkanchicago.org/support/makeyourgift/

Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

This sermon was delivered at our service on January 23rd, 2026. You can listen to this drash on Contact Chai Podcast or watch it on our YouTube channel.
****

When you land at the airport in Tel Aviv, there is a long descending ramp that connects the concourse to the arrival hall. With its sun-filled windows, the floors and walls tiled with shimmering Jerusalem stone it is a dramatic welcome to the State of Israel. But for the past two years, the ramp has also been lined with posters of the remaining hostages left in Gaza — their pictures, names, and ages — demanding that each arriving passenger bear witness to the fact that these individuals can’t traverse that same hallway to the friends and loved ones anticipating their safe arrival. Over time, with each successive ceasefire, the number of posters dwindled as the hostages came home — some alive, thank God, but too many dead. When I arrived at Ben Gurion Airport just a few weeks ago, there was still one poster remaining: a young man in a blue uniform, a short beard, wire framed glasses. His name is Ran Gvili (his family calls him Rani). He was 24 years old when he was killed by Hamas on October 7. His body is still in Gaza.*

I was in Israel to help lead an educational trip for young couples from Chicago. In addition to seeing places of cultural and historic significance, we had the opportunity to meet with civic leaders, educators, and activists — Israeli and Palestinian. They spoke powerfully about their work and its importance. They shared stories, both beautiful and heartbreaking, about living in this complicated land. But when speaking about the past 27 months, each of them struggled to put their experience into words. Many broke down in tears. I’m thinking about our conversation with Gili Roman, who talked about the desperate search for his sister Yarden, her husband and daughter, and her husband’s family in the days following October 7. He shared that as the scope of devastation became known, as he found out that some of his family had been killed, what had previously been the worst possible scenario became his most fervent and hoped for wish. Or I’m remembering our exchange with Nivine Sandouka, a Palestinian peace activist and the Regional Director of the Alliance for Middle East Peace. 70 members of her family have been killed in Gaza. 70 people. As anyone who has experienced death knows, it is impossible to eulogize all the ways a loved one has impacted us, to adequately summarize the breadth and depth of who they were. No one should have to do this 70 times.

Our tour guide warned us that everyone in Israel and Palestine is grappling with PTSD, so we should be prepared for short tempers and big feelings. But the poster of Ran Gviri, still hanging at Ben Gurion Airport, was a reminder that we are not post-trauma. The wounds inflicted on October 7, the festering sores of conflict that preceded it, and the lacerations of the heart that came in the months and years following are still bleeding. There is no one living in that land, Jew or Arab, who is not proximate to loss. It accompanies each person as they move through their day, a constant shadow. Sometimes they are forced to confront it; around every corner in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the faces of the dead peer at you from posters, bumper stickers, and makeshift memorials. But even when people try to focus on what is good and what is right, that shadow is still there — darkening the edges of their lives. It waits in the next devastating headline. It hangs in the air, in the heavy silence that precedes the next siren.

https://youtu.be/x-OeR1MbJNg

It takes incredible resilience to continue living in the midst of so much loss. And not only to live, but to carve out space for music, for dancing, for laughter with friends, for sharing food with loved ones, to even make room for love itself takes a kind of hope and courage that seems impossible. Yet Israeli and Palestinian, Arab and Jew — each person I spoke to showed me the strength of the human heart. This is not to valorize tragedy. We should not live in a world that requires this degree of resilience. Yet this is the world, at least as it is right now, and somehow these people have found a way to move forward where others may have (understandably) collapsed under the burden of despair.

The resilient heart comes in many forms. There is the heart hardened by anger, that lashes out at a world that has treated them unfairly. There is the heart weighed down by apathy — made numb through loss, immobilized by the feeling that there is nothing we can do other than put one foot in front of the other. And there is the heart strengthened in its resolve to ensure that the tragedies of the past are not repeated, to not only envision a better future but take the steps needed to get there. Each of these are reasonable responses to terrible circumstances. Yet what we often forget, particularly when moving through trauma, is that the shape of our heart is not dictated by context, but by choice.

When we open the Torah this week, we find ourselves in the middle of the Exodus narrative. Short recap to catch us up: the Israelites have been enslaved for centuries, they cry out against this injustice, God notices, and so God sends Moses to lead them to freedom. Moses goes to Pharaoh, he says “Let my people go!”, Pharaoh says “No!”, and in response God sends successive plagues on Egypt. We have blood, frogs, lice, rabid animals, pestilence, boils, and hail before we reach this moment in our story. God speaks to Moses, saying: “Go back to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the hearts of those who serve him so I may display my wonders in their midst.” Now given his hardened heart, it is not surprising that Pharaoh (again) refuses Moses’ request. And so locusts, darkness, and tragically the death of every first born, whether adult or child, descend on Egypt before Pharaoh finally relents and lets our ancestors go.

I have a problem with this text. Why would God harden Pharaoh’s heart, when the consequences of his refusal extend far beyond him? Our ethical tradition flatly refuses collective punishment as a means of achieving justice. Think about Abraham (the first Jew), standing before the condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, who cries out against God “Will you sweep away the innocent along with the guilty? Far be it from you, that the judge of all things will fail to render fair judgment.” And so reading this story, we are confronted with what seems like a gross abrogation of justice by the very source of justice itself. It would be right to put God on trial, for punishing the innocent child alongside the slave owner and taskmaster.

This is where we benefit from a close reading of the story. There are three words used to describe the transformation of Pharaoh’s heart: אקשה, aksheh (I will harden), אכבד, ach’beid (I will make heavy), and אחזק, a’chazeik (I will strengthen). Yes, these are synonyms. But the subtle differences between them are important. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, often considered the father of Modern Orthodoxy, writes that they represent different ways the heart responds to trauma: a hard heart refuses to be bent by the world, fighting against the hand it has been dealt; a heavy heart remains unmoved by the world, feeling it has no means of changing things for the better; while a strong heart is able to take in the pain of the world, but retain its resolve. And so it is not that God has made Pharaoh’s heart unyielding, suspending agency to prove some point. Rather, God gives Pharaoh a choice: how will he respond to the moment, when all that he knows begins to crumble around him. God says to Moses, I have hardened his heart so I may display my wonders. Yes, the plagues are a terrifying miracle. But just as miraculous, just as demonstrative of God’s power, would have been Pharaoh choosing a strong heart, over one hardened by anger or made heavy by apathy. This was the choice God placed before Pharaoh. And in his choosing, there are terrible consequences for him and for his people.

Writing centuries earlier, Rabbi Abraham ibn Ezra notes that the multivalent nature of resilience is true for all people. Each of us is endowed with a heart able to meet the challenges that we encounter — whether through hardness, or heaviness, or strength. How that manifests is our choice to make.

And we see this choice played out among our siblings, Israeli and Palestinian. We see the hard hearts Jewish extremists like Itamar Ben Gvir and his allies in the Knesset, mirrored by Hamas and its supporters, all of whom believe that the safety of their people can only be achieved through the elimination of the other. Their hearts refuse to see the humanity of the “other side.” They justify the violence and destruction brought down on their enemies — and their own people, as necessary to achieve their ends. They are aided and abetted by the many whose hearts have become weighed down by apathy. Yes, these individuals are surviving — going about their lives, day to day. But the heavy heart is a bystander to the hatred being fanned by those in power, and eventually they too will be caught in this conflagration. I don’t feel like we need to spend too much time analyzing these folks. These are hearts we know all too well, dominating headlines in the news or lurking in the comments on social media – aware of the pain around them but unable or unwilling to change anything about their own lives to stop it. Perhaps we know people like this. Perhaps we are people like this. So instead, I want to share a story about those who have chosen strength and in choosing strength found hope.

About halfway through the trip, our group stopped in Haifa to volunteer at a local school. We were working with tenth graders to help them practice their English, in advance of the standardized test that determines what they might do after military service. Haifa is often held up as a model of a coexistence between Arabs and Jews, but fault lines do exist between and (more importantly, in this case) within these communities. Although the neighborhood we were volunteering in was Jewish, it is mostly first and second generation immigrants to Israel — including a sizable number of recent refugees from the Ukraine and Russia. As a result, many families struggle to integrate into Israeli society, leading to higher levels of poverty than surrounding neighborhoods. Hebrew is usually the students’ second language, English their third. With its proximity to the seaport and oil refinery, strategic targets in the ongoing war, these children have lived under the constant threat of rocket attacks — particularly from Hezbollah and Iran. Multiple times a month, they have packed into bomb shelters with their classmates hoping that they and their loved ones will be safe. It has not been an easy few years for them.

But somehow, the kids are alright. They talked about their favorite music. They chatted about places they hoped to visit one day. And a few spoke about what they wanted to study at university. There was a group of Jewish girls, who all said they wanted to major in Arabic. Why? Because the future they planned to live in was one where Hebrew and Arabic are spoken on the street, not to negotiate between enemies but to converse between friends.

And I have to admit: I felt some shame, hearing them say this, thinking of all the times I have acted out of anger or given in to hopelessness when faced with the challenges of this moment in history – that these children, born into circumstances beyond their control and coming of age in a war they did not start, had the moral courage to choose hope as the foundation for their resilience. Of all the people in this story, they had the right to be hardened by indignation or weighed down by despair. But no, they chose to strengthen their hearts. And what a contrast, to the adults around them who were so fragile, just one small nudge away from collapse. If that is not a wonder, an encounter with the miraculous, something so sacred that we cannot help but behold it with awe – I don’t know what it is.

And folks — if they can do it, then we must do it. I know that the world is a hard place. I know that in the midst of terrible news, so many of us are tenderly holding the broken pieces of our lives. But it is essential that we follow their lead. On the first day of our trip, I offered my group a teaching that I have come back to over and over again these past few years. The rabbis say, make for yourself a heart of many rooms. In one room, we find grief. In another, we encounter anger at the state of things. And there might even be a room for despair. Yet in the next room, gratitude — for blessings, big and small. And in the next, perhaps joy — the kind that helps us resist the despair in that other room. But the room that we must build, the one that is perhaps hardest to maintain given the state of things, is the one for resilience — not the kind that hardens us, nor the kind that makes us immovable, but a resilience that is both flexible and strong. One that is hopeful. One that is resolute. Pirkei Avot teaches that we should be like the reed, not like the cedar — because when the storm passes by, the reed bends, adapts, and stands back up while the brittle, hard tree breaks.

This kind of heart, a heart strengthened by hope and resolve, is not just a nice thing to have. In this moment, it is necessary. It is necessary if we are to offer an alternative path forward to the one being offered by those currently holding power — whether in Israel, in Palestine, or here in the United States. Like Pharaoh, the hard heart will not only destroy our enemies — but us as well. And like the average Egyptian, the heavy heart immobilized by the lie that we are powerless is not immune to the destruction that will come for us all. No, if we are to build the future envisioned by our tradition, one defined by peace and dignity for all people, we must continuously bolster our hearts for the journey ahead. And if you’re sitting here, thinking that you’ve already done this work — I want you to challenge yourself to find the place where you are still stuck, where intolerance has taken hold, where apathy has made excuses for inaction, where anger has justified the suffering of others, to search for the rooms that we have walled off or locked shut, where your heart has become heavy or hardened. This is a lifelong task. The choice faces us at every moment. But the time to choose is now.

*Over the weekend, Ran's body was recovered. May his memory be a blessing.