PHARAOH’S HARDENED HEART – THE EXCEPTION THAT PROVES THE RULE
Rick (not his real name) was admitted on New Year’s Day after a night of binge drinking. “I guess I wasn’t too steady on my feet when I walked into the middle of the road,” Rick tells me. “They say I flipped over the windshield of the car that hit me. I guess I’m lucky to be alive.” When I peruse the medical records, I see that Rick has landed in the hospital four times in the last seven years from accidents and injuries. “I know I’m an alcoholic, but sometimes the urge to drink is so strong, it blocks out everything else.” I think about all the times in my own life that I feel possessed by the desire to shut down and withdraw emotionally, possessed by the impulse to act out in rage, or possessed to distraction by obsessive thoughts.
And Adonai said to Moses: “When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the marvels that I have put in your power. I, however will harden his heart so that he will not let the people go.” (Exodus 4:21) Beginning with this verse, ten times, the Torah tells us that God intends to harden Pharaoh’s heart. Ten times, God afflicts him and his people with plagues. Can God be so cruel, so sadistic, that He hardens Pharaoh’s heart only to punish him for it? Whenever we reach the point in the Torah’s narrative of this week’s portion, Va’era, I find myself perennially gravitating to the age-old theological dilemma clearly posed by the Biblical commentator, Umberto Cassuto: “if it is the Lord who hardens the heart of Pharaoh, then the latter cannot be blamed for this, and consequently it is unethical for Pharaoh to suffer retribution.” More basically, the story seems to contradict the fundamental Jewish doctrine of free will. As Maimonides puts it: “If God were to decree that a person should be either good or bad, … what room would there be for the entire Torah?” (Hilchot Teshuvah 6:4)
There is no shortage of explanations to show that Pharaoh actually deserved all that he suffered. Many interpreters point out that before God sent any of the plagues, Pharaoh had already transgressed seriously enough to warrant them, when he ordered that all Israelite male infants be thrown into the Nile. Others cite the subtle but significant shift in language midway through the plagues. Each time God reverses the first few plagues, the text reads: “and Pharaoh hardened his heart,” but after the sixth plague, the plague of boils: “and God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” From this literary detail, Maimonides makes an astute, psychological observation about human nature. Although when we transgress initially, it may be voluntary, once we transgress over and over again, it becomes habitual. The behavior takes on a life of its own, and becomes nearly impossible to break.
The problem with these justifications is that they seek a rational basis for rejecting the position that the Torah seems to plainly maintain: Pharaoh, or any human individual, can be robbed of his ability to choose his behavior. They remind me of the slew of rational conjectures for explaining away the plagues themselves. The Nile turned to blood, for example, because of the red tide, a fungus that in turn killed the frogs. When the frogs died, the lice came to feed upon the corpses, and so on. However, the import of all these signs and wonders lies precisely in their supernatural transcendence, and any attempt to naturalize them misses the point. The plagues are miracles. What’s more, Pharaoh’s hardened heart is a miracle too. Pharaoh’s hardened heart is a subversion of the natural order. Pharaoh’s hardened heart is the exception that proves the rule.
Ten times (once again ten!), the Torah reminds us that the purpose of all the signs, wonders and plagues of Egypt is knowledge of God, beginning with: “Thus says the Lord: By this you shall know that I am the Lord.” (Exodus 7:17) However, awareness of the Divine is an elusive thing. The 19th century Eastern European Rabbi, Joseph Caro, writes the following about our general incapacity to perceive God’s presence in the world: “People are fools, for everything that seems to them the usual course of nature, they will pay no attention to. They have eyes, but will not see, unless God creates something totally new upon the earth. Then, they will hop and skip like a ram, on the hind legs of their reason, saying: Look! Now, sure, Adonai is God!, as they exclaimed at the Red Sea. Only then do they believe, whereas the insightful sage will say, aren’t these mighty waters that have been flowing for thousands of years a greater testament to the power of their Creator? What could the [circumstance] of the waters drying up for a few hours at His command possibly add to that?” (Arthur Waskow, Torah of the Earth: Volume I, pp. 194-195)
If we admit that the divine act of hardening Pharaoh’s heart is no less a miracle in the moral universe as the divine act of splitting the sea in the natural world, where can we apprehend God’s underlying presence? The natural world and the moral universe lie very close. Rabbi Caro chides us with his reminder that God surrounds us in the everyday wonders of nature, if only we opened our eyes to them. Well, maybe God surrounds us just as surely in everyday acts of human kindness—a smile, a look of understanding, a gesture of compassion—if only we opened our hearts to accept them. We sit bolt upright and cry foul when God shuts up Pharaoh’s heart, but that’s only because we take our moral freedom for granted.
The fundamental doctrine of Jewish ethics is encoded in the second half of the classic paradox formulated in Pirkei Avot: hakol tzafui ve-hareshut netunah, “everything is foreseen, but permission [to choose] is given.” (Pirkei Avot 3:19) We certainly have plenty of excuses for wrongdoing besides pinning our “villainy upon the spherical predominance of sun, moon, stars, and planetary influence,” as Shakespeare puts it. (King Lear, I, ii, 125-130) “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” “they were a bad influence on me,” “I needed the money,”… More sophisticated exculpatory defenses, especially in a legal context, might invoke psychological, social, or genetic factors. However, the entire ethical and Halachic structure of Judaism rests on the principle that all such determinisms are fundamentally false.
If so, then how do we reconcile the two halves of the aphorism from Pirkei Avot, “permission to choose is given” with “everything is foreseen?” Perhaps they refer to two different time periods—the present and the future. Perhaps the statement means that in the age that we live, God has voluntarily set limits to His own power, vowing not to interfere in human affairs just as He has chosen not to interfere with the “Laws of Nature,” but at the end of days, He will reassert His omnipotence (in both the natural and moral order). Note that ha-reshut netunah could just as well be translated “the domain is given:”—this world is our domain to act freely, but in the Next World, God will retract our freedom.*
Alternatively, perhaps the tension between “everything is foreseen” and “permission to choose is given” lies entirely in the present, within this world. Perhaps the paradoxical formulation operates like a Zen koan, inviting us to meditate upon our freedom of choice, teaching us not to take our moral autonomy for granted, not to throw it away, not to confuse it with random, instinctual, or coerced behavior. Note that hakol tzafui could just as well be translated “everything is observed.” Freedom of choice demands that we observe, watch, and remain on the lookout for opportunities to open our hearts and turn them to good. After all, a hardened heart is not always the willful expression of rebellion. Sometimes our callousness simply stems from apathy.
I told Rick that I couldn’t predict the future, but that if he continued down the path he’s on, chances are that one of these days he would wind up in the morgue, not the hospital. He nodded his head in agreement. “But it’s not inevitable,” I continued, and the two of us spent the rest of the pastoral visit strategizing on the structures he would put in place to support his recovery once he left the hospital. His heart was open and receptive—at least for the moment. Actually, that’s where free will has to operate for all of us—in the moment. Rick and I concluded our conversation by reciting the Serenity Prayer. I would like to conclude now with a serenity prayer of my own: “God, grant us the wisdom to appreciate Your underlying presence in the moral as well as the natural order, the courage to open our hearts to change, and the serenity to observe and celebrate the prevailing moments for exercising our God-given freedom of choice.”
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*The Aleinu prayer, recited three times daily, includes the following powerful eschatological vision: “We therefore hope in You, Lord our God, that we shall soon see Your glory, to remove the abominations of the earth and all idolatry destroyed, to perfect the world under the kingdom of the Almighty, and all humanity will call upon Your name, to turn to You all the wicked of the earth.” I have intentionally tried to preserve in translation the grammatical ambiguity of the Hebrew text. Who will remove the abominations of the earth, God or human beings? Who will destroy idolatry? Who will perfect the world? Will God Himself turn every human heart to Him (just as He once hardened Pharaoh’s heart), or will every person on Earth of her own accord be inspired to turn her heart to God? Which outcome would be more miraculous? The syntax is vague—perhaps deliberately so.
I was reading this Torah portion last night, and I thought of another possible reason why G-d was able to harden Pharaoh’s heart:
ReplyDeletePharaoh and his people believed that Pharaoh was a living god, a descendant of Horus. If you wanted crops to grow well, the sun to rise every day and the Nile to flow properly, then you relied on Pharaoh and his priests to intercede with the gods and perform their magic to make life go well.
Under normal circumstances, G-d would never interfere with anyone’s free will. However, because the Pharaoh truly believes that he is a god, and enforces his will on the Egyptians and Israelites as if he is a god, then G-d is allowed to enter Pharaoh’s heart and harden it.
This is because, if Pharaoh sees himself as a supreme being and acts as if he is a supreme being, then this opens the door for G-d – the actual Supreme Being – to then act on himself (through Pharaoh) to perform his miracles. Since there cannot be a Supreme Being of All in heaven and a Supreme Being of All on Earth then there must be only One Supreme Being. If G-d accepts the Pharaoh’s assumption that he is G-d, then the logical conclusion is that G-d and Pharaoh are one Supreme Being and G-d can do whatever he wants to Himself. After all, G-d cannot manipulate himself!
It is as if G-d said, “Okay, Pharaoh, you say that you are Me. Well, then, if you are Me then I can use you as I would use my right arm and do whatever I want with my arm to accomplish my goals.”
G-d, being the actual Supreme Being, of course knows that Pharaoh is not G-d. He uses Pharaoh’s illusions about his god-like status to teach Pharaoh two lessons:
1. Only G-d can give life, and take life away.
2. If Pharaoh can be manipulated by G-d, then he is either one with G-d, or he is apart from G-d. G-d is either performing his miracles with Pharaoh (as if Pharaoh is one with G-d) or by Himself. This exercise in manipulation is meant to show Pharaoh that he is not one with G-d, as Pharaoh and his people claim he is. He is not a deity, but simply a man, and G-d is the only Supreme Being.
Nikki Anderson