The Buddha’s insecure students sometimes asked him if his enlightenment was truly the result of years of inner work. After all, if the master had grown through patient self-cultivation, they too could grow.

Of course, the master answered “yes.” Still, some students worried. “Master, are you sure you don’t have a special gift that sets you apart? a quality that has been with you since infancy? Do you remember your childhood consciousness?”

And the Buddha would tell a story that would both answer them and reassure them.

“When I was only five years old, my father took me to a farming ceremony in the early spring. With a great party, we celebrated the plowing of the fields before the first planting. But the adult fun didn’t mean much to me, so I sat under a tree and played in the grass. But my game came to a sudden end when I noticed some shoots of grass accidentally torn up by a sloppy plow. I saw that the tiny insects clinging to the grass had been killed. And I felt a terrible pang of grief, as if my own family had been killed. And I entered a state of altered consciousness.

As an adult, I now have words to speak about this experience. I now know that this moment of empathy took me out of myself.  I felt a release of mind, and this release led to a profound feeling of joy.

You too can have joy by developing compassion.”

Par’oh’s story, as told in Parshat Va’era, is a shadow side of the Buddha’s story. Par’oh has no empathy for fish, frogs, insects, wild animals, domestic animals, human beings, or plants. Through all the seven plagues that strike these groups, Par’oh experiences no release of mind. In fact he experiences the opposite. His lev — his heart, or as it can also be translated, his mind – grows ever harder.

Obviously, he lacks good habits of feeling. But he also lacks habits of noble behavior that might compensate for his failure of feeling. He cannot even keep a simple promise. Seven times he agrees to let the Israelites go on a three-day journey; and seven times he changes his mind.

Without compassionate feelings and without habits of ethical behavior Par’oh is, according to the Hassidic classic Tanya, the absolute archetype of the rasha, the wicked person.

Into this stark portrait of a villain, Torah weaves philosophical hints about a path to goodness.

As Parshat Va’era opens, Moshe is having a crisis of faith in his leadership. He has done everything God has asked, and the result is more oppression for the Israelites.  “Why?” he asks God. “Why did you make things worse for these people? Why did you send me if this was to be the result?”

God answers:

“Because I am yod-hey-vav-hey [YHWH]. I appeared to your ancestors as El Shaddai and I didn’t make known to them my name yod-hey-vav-hey. Look, I intend to uphold the covenant I made with your ancestors. I have heard the groans of the Israelites and I will remember my covenant. So tell them, I am yod-hey-vav-hey and I am going to save them. I will take you to be my people and I will be your God and you will know that I am yod-hey-vav-hey. I will take you to the land I promised your ancestors, I am yod-hey-vav-hey.”

Edit out the yod-hey-vav-heys and you have an answer: Do not despair. We have a relationship and I am going to come through for you.

So why are the five yod-hey-vav-heys part of the answer? A key rabbinic principle of Torah interpretation insists that no word of Torah is superfluous. So, what do the yod-hey-vav-heys add to the answer?

In Jewish tradition, different names of God are said to emphasize different attributes of God. The name yod-hey-vav-hey is said to express God’s compassion.

A key to this tradition lies in the Holiness code in Parshat Kedoshim. The most famous chapter of the code is Vayikra-Leviticus 19. The chapter lists more than fifty instructions for decent social behavior, punctuated sixteen times with the words “I am yod-hey-vav-hey.”

At the very center of the code sits a teaching that isn’t behavioral at all. Instead, it expresses a habit of feeling. “Love your neighbor as yourself; I am yod-hey-vav-hey.”

As you live an ethical life, Torah suggests, you will learn many situational behaviors by rote. At the same time, you can learn a single principle that drives them all: As you feel for yourself, feel for your neighbor. If you can learn to be sensitive to the feelings of another person, to the point where hurting their feelings causes you hurt, you will choose to act decently.

We know this is not a simple learning. Even when we do feel pained by the hurt we cause, we may not know how to separate it from our own pain. Torah recognizes that learning to feel with your neighbor comes only with long experience, across many challenging situations. That’s why Torah places the principle within a detailed list of ethically demanding situations. And that’s why Torah reminds us that each decent action will bring us closer to the presence of “yod-hey-vav-hey” – compassion, or “feeling with” our neighbor.

In next week’s parsha, Bo, we learn that Par’oh’s terrible mistakes can only be repaired with an outpouring of compassion. This compassion comes from rest of the Egyptian people. Torah says “Yod-hey-vav-hey made the Egyptians look favorably on the Israelites.” Moved by compassion, the Egyptians gave the Israelites gold and silver for their journey into the wilderness.

But that’s a story for another day.

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