Pharaoh is a very powerful force. The wisdom of Kabbalah does not discuss Pharaoh as a personality, because in practice it is a nonexistent persona. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, Pharaoh is the very big ego that the Creator created. It is a great desire to devour everything in the world for self-benefit.
The more humanity develops, the more this force of Pharaoh, the egoistic force, surfaces. One of its expressions is that we aspire to all kinds of accomplishments in our world, and the more we achieve, the emptier we feel. Likewise, the world appears to worsen the more we develop.
We become more and more dissatisfied with life. The more we connect technologically and economically, the more internally detached we feel from each other. Today, we witness such instances as people no longer feeling secure in the most distant villages. Our tightening global interdependence has led us to such paradoxes where farmers cannot even feed themselves from their own land.
Pharaoh represents the egoistic intention behind everything we do. On one hand, we make tremendous progress technologically, and we find ourselves in a situation where we are more dependent on others all around the world. On the other hand, we find ourselves feeling more and more detached from each other, and that we cannot tolerate being so tightly connected to others.
The ego, however, leads us to the need to correctly connect to each other, where we yearn for, build and ask for connection. What this means is that Pharaoh, by transforming our world so that it becomes increasingly interdependent and interconnected, brings us to a state where we hate the feeling of division, and we then transform our world into another one with positive connections. In other words, by abiding to our ego’s demands while connecting more and more, we find that we will simply be unable to achieve long-lasting happiness, success, or even survive. Pharaoh, however, constantly spurs our divisiveness. On one hand, Pharaoh awakens in us a desire for unity and acts so that we cannot live without making the right connections between us, since otherwise we cannot provide ourselves with essentials. On the other hand, Pharaoh will not let us unite. This contrast sums up Pharaoh’s merit.
We then start understanding that we have no other way out besides rising above and escaping from Pharaoh—the egoistic desire for self-benefit. Our escape from Pharaoh, from using others egoistically for the sake of self-benefit, is called the “exodus from Egypt.”
It is quite complicated because we still need to discover these concepts within ourselves. We live in a unique era. Today, we increasingly discover what has been prepared for us in the form of Pharaoh, i.e., in an egoistic form. We see a globally interdependent and interconnected world closing in on us more and more, and at the same time, we find ourselves feeling more internally remote from others. We thus need to respect Pharaoh, this overblown ego we find ourselves in today, because it leads us to realize how bad it makes our lives, and through such a revelation, we gain a desire to exit our ego and enter into a much more meaningful and joyous world where we are positively connected.
Based on “News with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman” from April 12, 2016. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
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