January 18, 2026|כ"ט טבת ה' אלפים תשפ"ו When Pharaoh - and the Ayatollah - Are Still Standing: Power, Empathy, and Faith in the Middle of History By Rabbi Jonathan Muskat

This week, as we read Parashat Va’era, Iran’s Supreme Leader posted an image comparing the President of the United States to Pharaoh – declaring that every arrogant ruler, like Pharaoh, ultimately falls.
What is striking is not the insult, but the language.
Pharaoh is not just a biblical character. He remains a living symbol of how power understands itself – and how it collapses.

And that forces us to ask: who is Pharaoh in this story?
Va’era invites us to look at Pharaoh through three lenses: power, empathy, and faith.

First, Pharaoh is not just a villain. Pharaoh is a theory of power.

Parashat Va’era is not interested in why Pharaoh is cruel. The Torah never asks, “What went wrong in his childhood?” Instead, it asks something far more unsettling: What does power do to a human being?

Pharaoh does not see himself as a tyrant. He sees himself as a god.
The Nile is his creation.
The economy is his miracle.
The state is eternal because he is eternal.

And that is why the Torah says something frightening: at a certain point, Pharaoh can no longer repent.

We struggle with this. From the sixth plague onward, the Torah says that God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. We ask: What about free will?

But perhaps the Torah is teaching something deeper.
Free will is not removed arbitrarily.
It erodes when a person so completely identifies with an ideology, a system, a self-image of infallibility, that choosing differently becomes unthinkable.

The Torah does not ask why Pharaoh does not change.
It teaches that absolute power becomes incapable of repentance.

Redemption does not come because unjust systems suddenly grow a conscience.
Redemption comes because they cannot endure.

And here we arrive at something deeply uncomfortable.

Why is the world so quick – again and again – to label Israel as Pharaoh, as genocidal, as uniquely evil, while remaining comparatively silent about the Iranian regime’s violent repression of its own citizens?

Part of the answer is political.
But part of it is something older – and darker.

There is an expectation – sometimes explicit, sometimes unconscious – that the Jew must remain the galut Jew: moral, sensitive, suffering – but never sovereign. Never powerful.

Jewish power unsettles people.
Not because power itself is immoral, but because Jewish power disrupts a long-standing moral fantasy: a Jew with a conscience but no army; values but no sovereignty; ethics but no capacity to act.

Jewish power reintroduces a deeply biblical idea into modern politics:
that sovereignty is accountable not only to interests, but to conscience.

We are a people formed by law, by divine accountability, by moral memory. And so the world expects – sometimes rightly, sometimes viciously – that Jewish power must behave differently.

But too often, that expectation is weaponized – 
detached from context,
selectively applied,
turned into hostility.

And yet its very existence is revealing.
Because the world knows – whether it admits it or not – that power without morality is Pharaoh.
But it also knows, even if it refuses to say it aloud, that morality without power is not redemption – it is abandonment.

To demand morality while denying the right to power is not righteousness.
It is the sin of omission.
It leaves the innocent defenseless.
It emboldens brutality.

Va’era teaches us that we need both. We need the God of power and the God of conscience.

Secondly, the Exodus was not only the liberation of a people.
It was the first time in human history that God publicly aligned Himself with the weak, the enslaved, the vulnerable.

And if that is true, then it must apply not only to Jews – but to all human beings.

So we must ask ourselves honestly:
When we read the news from Iran, what do we feel?

Are we relieved that our greatest enemy might fall?
Are we calculating strategic advantage and regime change?
Or are we thinking about the body bags, the tortured protesters, the mothers who will never see their children again?

Everyone is created b’tzelem Elokim.

The Gemara in Shabbat teaches that one who has the ability to protest and does not is held accountable – within their home, their city, and ultimately the world.

Today, influence does not belong only to kings and prophets.
It means voices.
It means attention.
It means refusing selective silence.

The Torah tells us that Bnei Yisrael could not hear Moshe – not because he was wrong, but because of kotzer ruach and avodah kashah: shortness of spirit and crushing labor. They had lost the ability to imagine a future.

And today, the people of Iran are suffocating under kotzer ruach.
They need something as simple – and as radical – as hope.
And that is our responsibility, irrespective of how it impacts the State of Israel.

Third, the lens of faith.

Pharaoh’s heart hardens.
So does the Ayatollah’s.

The Iranian regime has become so committed to repression and violence that one wonders whether it has lost the capacity to choose differently.

This is not accidental.
The Torah teaches that tyranny does not soften under pressure.
It hardens.
Censorship increases.
Punishment escalates.
Fear becomes policy.

And yet Va’era teaches something counterintuitive:
this hardening is not proof that hope has failed.
It may be the first sign that hope is working.

We imagine redemption as immediate and clean – a breakthrough, a sudden collapse.
The Torah tells a more unsettling story:
first imagination,
then backlash,
then intensified suffering,
and only later, liberation.

Watching Iran today is dizzying.
One moment collapse seems imminent; the next, the protests quiet.
America threatens – and hesitates.
We vacillate between cynicism and faith.

Va’era is written for precisely this moment.
It is the parsha of the middle – 
not slavery,
not redemption,
but the terrifying space in between.

A moment when Pharaoh is still standing – 
but no longer believable.

And that is the most dangerous moment of all.
Because the regime already knows what the people are just beginning to realize:
the system is not permanent.
The story it tells about itself no longer holds.

And when that illusion breaks, history moves – slowly, painfully – but inexorably.

Faith, the Torah teaches us, is not the belief that change will be quick.
It is the courage to recognize that when tyranny hardens, it is often because the end has begun.

Parashat Va’era leaves us with three demands.

Clarity about power: power is not evil, but it is dangerous. Untethered from conscience, it becomes Pharaoh. Refused in the name of false piety, it becomes abandonment. Redemption requires power that answers to law.

Moral courage born of empathy: to stand with the vulnerable not only when it is convenient or familiar, but because they are human beings created b’tzelem Elokim. Silence itself is a form of guilt.

And faith for the middle of history – not naïve optimism, not despair, but the disciplined belief that tightening tyranny often signals fragility.

Va’era teaches us how to live in that middle:
to hold power without becoming Pharaoh,
to feel compassion without paralysis,
to believe without certainty.

We are not asked to predict redemption.
We are asked to act responsibly while waiting for it.

And that may be the deepest lesson of all:
that history moves not only through miracles,
but through people who refuse to surrender conscience, empathy, or faith – even when Pharaoh is still standing.