Throughout the story of the ten plagues, we find that Pharaoh is stuck. He won’t budge. Each time he says he’s prepared to obey G-d and let Beneh Yisrael leave, he immediately changes his mind and refuses.
The Torah says that this happened because Hashem “hardened his heart.” It seems that Hashem prevented Pharaoh from repenting, from changing course. How could this be? Is it fair that Hashem continued punishing Pharaoh for a decision which Hashem Himself repeatedly forced Pharaoh to make?
This is a very famous question that has been answered in several ways. One of the most common answers is that Hashem took away Pharaoh’s ability to change only after giving him many opportunities to change. At first, Hashem did not intervene. Pharaoh was fully capable of obeying and letting the slaves free. But after he persistently refused, Hashem eventually forced him to continue refusing.
Many of us, unfortunately, do something very similar to what Pharaoh did.
I have met many singles who, like Pharaoh, become “stuck” in a very bad decision. When they first start dating, they turn down prospective marriage partners because they don’t want somebody above or below a certain height, who lives or doesn’t live in a certain place, who plans or doesn’t plan to pursue a certain career, who comes or doesn’t come from a certain kind of family, and so on. Then, after making these “rules,” they need to stubbornly stick to them. They get stuck by their own bad decisions.
The story of Pharaoh teaches us to acknowledge our bad decisions, and then try to change them. Pharaoh refused to listen to Hashem once, and then twice, and then several more times, and then he got stuck. At a certain point, he could not acknowledge that he was wrong, and so he was unable to change. We need to recognize when we made a bad decision, and then see what we can do to fix it.
Which brings us to another important lesson – that we can change things.
When Hashem commands Moshe to bring the plague of blood, He instructs him to take the מטה אשר נהפך לנחש – the staff that he had previously brought to Pharaoh and transformed into a snake, as a sign that he was sent by G-d. The water was changed to blood by the same staff that had changed into a snake – because the message of this plague is that things can drastically change. We are never stuck. Just as Hashem is capable of turning a staff into a snake and turning water into blood, He is capable of turning our bad situation into a good situation.
We’ve all made wrong decisions in our lives. We’ve all made bad mistakes. The way to handle these wrong decisions is, first and foremost, to acknowledge them and be open to change, and then, secondly, we need to trust that Hashem can change any situation for the better, that we are never permanently stuck, and that drastic positive change is always possible.