If God Strengthened Pharaoh's Heart, Why Was Pharaoh Punished?

Parashat Va'era (Exodus 6:2–9:35)

These ideas grew out of reading and meditating on Rabbi Sacks's 10 to 15 weekly essays on the parasha, and on his books and worldview.

We see the beginning of the ten plagues. We read how Pharaoh's heart is strengthened every time, when Moses comes to him and tells him: please let my people go. Every time, Pharaoh strengthens his own heart, until the sixth plague, where we read that God strengthens Pharaoh's heart. And subsequently, every other plague after the sixth one, we read that God strengthened Pharaoh's heart.

But how come? How could he have no choice, no freedom to pick and choose? If he has no freedom to choose, he therefore has no responsibility and no blame. So what exactly is going on here?

As Maimonides puts it: if there is no free will, what room will there be for the entire Torah? By what right or justice could God punish the wicked or reward the righteous? Should the Judge of all the earth not do justice? Maimonides crystallizes the problem. How come we could punish Pharaoh for something he didn't do?

Well, the rabbis explain that the reason God strengthened Pharaoh's heart was not to take away his free will, but to the contrary. It was because of his free will that He strengthened his heart.

So the Talmud in Tractate Sukkah says as follows. Rav Asi said: at first the evil impulse is like a thin strand of spiderweb, but at the end it is as thick as a wagon's rope. What he's telling us here is that you may start doing something rationally, from your choice. Pharaoh maybe started by saying no, I want to resist this, because of his choices. Later on it was no longer his free will, but an addiction. It became a habit.

Modern neuroscience is also aware of this. We see that the more a person does a habit, the more myelin there is around the area, and the more extensively and more rapidly we do a behavior, the more difficult it is to break from that behavior and have a new habit and a new behavior.

And so Pharaoh, who enslaved Israel, ended up being enslaved himself. He became enslaved to his ideologies, which now he cannot change anymore. He's not rational anymore. He already made a decision, and he hardened his heart himself so many times that he became addicted. He's obsessed. He no longer cares about what the reality is, or what the Egyptians tell him. As we're going to read early in next week's parasha, the advisors of Pharaoh tell him: "Let the people go, so they may worship the Lord their God. Do you not realize Egypt is ruined?" He cannot see rationally anymore. He's obsessed. It's an addiction. He chose this way. He became obsessed. He is no longer rational.

This is exactly what the Torah is warning us of. Because people through history thought of free will as an either-or. Either we have free will or we don't have free will. It's black and white. But the Torah is often not in the black or white. It's in the nuance. It's in the gray. It's often more complex than it seems.

That's why Judaism always speaks in stories. It doesn't speak in an abstract idea of this is good, this is bad. It's more complex than that. It talks through stories like this one of Pharaoh, where you see he did have free will completely. He was a ruler. Everybody listened to him. And then later on he became enslaved himself. He became enslaved to his choices, and he could not turn around and pick something else.

Free will is a range, and we could extend that range or lose that range. We need to acquire our free will. We're not born with it. To the contrary, we're born with dependencies, and as we grow up, we can choose to become more and more free and act from our own choices.

Modern scientific experiment talks about this extensively: how people are influenced by groupthink, by other people, by authority, in all the different ways. There are many experiments pointing to this. In one famous experiment there was a group of eight people, seven of whom were part of the experiment and one was not. They told him to choose which one here is the longest line. In 75% of the cases, the eighth person chose to be in agreement with the other seven. Even though it was easily understandable to be false, he still picked to be part of the group.

There are multiple experiments showing this idea of people not being free themselves, being part of the collective without thinking about what they're doing. Being enslaved and addicted to video games, to drugs, to their phone, to social media, to different problems, and not choosing to be free and rise over those things.

Freedom is not a given, nor is it an absolute. We have to acquire it slowly, in stages. We can lose it, just like Pharaoh did, just like drug addicts, or we can work at it. We're not born free. We have to work hard to achieve freedom.

To be free takes a conscious understanding of making rituals to combat this world, to create new neural pathways and strengthen them through constant ritual and habit. It requires a certain distance from society and from the culture around it, to not get swept away by fads or the fashion of the time, by things that may look liberating at the time but, looking back, were destructive. It needs a mindset of examining, of stepping back and waiting and analyzing before acting, of asking yourself: Should I do this? May I do this? It is constantly asking yourself: Is this who I am? Is this what I stand for?

This is exactly what Judaism does. It is an ongoing seminar of impulse control and willpower. By keeping Shabbat, by stepping away once a week and examining our lives and not doing everything impulsively, not being addicted to our phones, to notifications, to having to keep updated, it liberates us from that. And by delaying gratification before eating, to bless God, and waiting and examining the food you're eating, making sure it's not meat and dairy together. And Pesach, the first festival, teaches us everything about collective freedom and provides us with the skills of personal freedom.

Freedom is less a gift than an achievement. The most powerful man in the ancient world lost it, but a nation of slaves, with the help of God, achieved it. Never take freedom for granted. It takes hundreds of small decisions, consistently, over time. And that is what Jewish law is all about: preserving our freedom, becoming more free and more in control.