Pharaoh's Free Will and Our Own

Parshat Va'era 

by Rabbi Avi Billet

One of the most difficult questions we face when looking at the narrative of the plagues is in understanding the chapter 7 verse 3. In explaining how the plagues will go down, God says to Moshe, “'I will make Pharaoh obstinate, and will thus have the opportunity to display many miraculous signs and wonders in Egypt.”

Why make Pharaoh obstinate? Why not let the man cave and let his slaves leave?

It should be noted that Pharaoh did not exactly need God’s help, as he is stubborn through the first fives plagues without divine intervention. It should also be noted that there are two different terms which indicate Pharaoh’s inability to give in – one is “kvd lev,” a heaviness of the heart; the other is “chzk lev,” a strengthening of the heart.

What do these terms mean, and what do they tell us about Pharaoh’s own transition from not giving in to finally letting his slaves leave? And what does all this have to say about the seeming lack of free will – meaning, if we believe that God allows humans to make their own choices, including to dig their own graves if necessary, what do we say about a king who seems to be helpless because God is preventing him from exercising his free will to let his slaves leave? Why would Pharaoh be deserving of all the extra plagues mentioned in the verse, if he is not being stubborn of his own accord, past plague 5? Is it fair to put him in this untenable position, and then punish him for doing what God, in essence, made him do?

One approach (Ramban and others) suggests that Pharaoh had it coming. Once he flippantly dismissed God and God’s role in the world, God helped make things worse for him, so He could punish Pharaoh accordingly.

Abravanel has great difficulty with this line of reasoning for the simple reason that God does not desire the death of the wicked, but rather for him to turn from his evil ways to a path of righteousness.

His first answer focuses on the different forms of Teshuvah a person can experience.

One who sins towards God can regret, cry, repent and return to God. But when one sins towards human beings, returning to God is meaningless. One needs to make peace with the people with whom there was a fallout. He goes on to list a litany of ways in which humans need to pay up, pay back, fix, reconcile, etc with the other human being before Teshuvah can be fully accomplished. The Egyptians could cry to God all they wanted, but without recompense and without restitution and payment for their misdeeds and crimes against the Israelites, Teshuvah could never be complete. They were deserving of punishment in a way that could never be circumvented. 

His second answer is that Teshuvah, first and foremost requires a belief in God who grants the Teshuvah. Since the Egyptians remained idolators through everything, their acceptance of God’s role in the plagues was mostly superficial in their jumping to accept God’s dominion over the world. For this too, Teshuvah efforts are useless.

His third, and (in his own words) preferred answer, is that Pharaoh’s stubbornness was not as much brought on by God’s involvement in his own emotions, but through his own seeing that the plagues did not last very long, leading him to believe they were lucky coincidences not brought about through the hands of a Divine power. What first truly got his attention was when the fourth plague only affected Egyptians and not Israelites. At the same time, the break which existed between plagues was actually part of the divine plan, to allow for “And so that you may tell over His name in all the land.” This pattern of “plague, cessation of plague, break,” Abravanel argues, is what caused Pharaoh’s heart to strengthen and harden. In other words, it is not that God changed Pharaoh’s ability to have free will. On the contrary, God played a game with Pharaoh, on account of Pharaoh’s past behaviors and track record of stubbornness, that was actually a continuation of a pattern which Pharaoh had already chosen to succumb to – that when a plague ends, it shows God has gotten tired and lost His strength. That “victory” on Pharaoh’s end, a victory of patience, is what caused him to strengthen his own resolve that he could win in the waiting game.

Though I like this final interpretation very much, I also like the explanation Rabbi David Forhman has shared, that Pharaoh needed to be in a position in which he lets the people leave because it is the right thing to do, and not because he is under duress from the plague. The point of God strengthening Pharaoh’s heart is essentially to bring Pharaoh back to a position of “I can handle this. And now I have the choice as to whether I will let Israel leave, without giving in because I have been defeated.”

What these last two interpretations have in common is that God is less manipulating Pharaoh’s mind and thought process, as much as He is giving Pharaoh the opportunity to embrace his chance to set aright his over-extending his cruel arm of slavery. In many ways, this is a tremendous credit to Pharaoh’s ability to exercise his free will, had he only chosen to do so.

It can be argued that free will is in the eye of the beholder. When people succumb to societal pressures, whether its living up to the Joneses, spending money on things they can’t afford, or signing on to things they don’t believe in because “society demands it,” then we are not free beings.

If my free will pushes me to follow rules that I agree with – then I am exercising my free will in doing so. This can certainly be said in the world of Torah observance, that those who opt in do so of their own free will. But it is the particular style and culture within the observant community which sometimes creates a less than free-will submission to an arena of group-think which can be reflective of an uninformed (because of apathy? Because of lack of curiosity? Because of a “we turn to experts with our questions without doing our own homework” attitude?) society which does not truly exercise free will.

Every time I see someone post an “obligatory photo” on social media, I wonder where the person’s free will in the arena of privacy, humility, shame has gone.

Unlike Pharaoh who used his free will to deny God’s existence, let us use our free will to get closer to the divine. When we waste our free will choices on the kinds of things that contribute little to our humanity and instead turn us into unthinking sheep, we have indeed lost a spark of what raises us as humans above the herd.

We owe it to ourselves to seek, to study, to learn, to discover, and to make free will choices that reflect deep thought processes rather than doing what everyone else is doing because everyone else is doing it.