Parshat Va'era
by Rabbi Avi Billet
The Torah mentions “ויחזק ה' את לב פרעה” three times in the latter plagues (9:12; 10:20,27), indicating God’s role in strengthened Pharaoh’s resolve to not let his slaves leave. One of the more difficult questions we are faced with as we contemplate this evidence is “Did God remove Pharaoh’s free will?”
The crux of the question boils down to how we translate ויחזק, and what God in fact did to Pharaoh’s heart. The word can literally be translated to mean “and He strengthened,” which is arguably a better translation than “and He hardened.”
Giving Pharaoh strength can be understood in at least three very different ways. It could be making him more stubborn, it could be giving him the strength to not give in to his own fears, it could be removing his free will.
Ramban notes that Pharaoh lost the right to have free will under these circumstances because a. he went above and beyond anything tasked of him in enslaving Avraham’s descendants, and b. he indicated through his personal stubbornness in the first 5 plagues that he didn’t believe in the God of the Hebrews and that he was unwilling to let Israel leave to worship their God in the wilderness.
This is not a complete absolution of the challenge created in removing Pharaoh’s free will. However, perhaps the idea of “giving him the strength to not give in to his own fears” is a direction we can better relate to in our understanding of this tale.
When Pharaoh responded to Moshe and told him “Who is Hashem that I should listen to Him? I do not know Hashem. And I will also not send Israel out” (5:2) the focus of the plagues became answering that question. One need not look too hard to see this play itself out throughout the plagues. See the following verses: 7:5,17; 8:6,18; 9:14, 9:29
Pharaoh or his sorcerers indicate a belief that God wrought the plagues in the following verses: 8:4,15,21,24; (9:7?), 9:27-28, 10:16-17.
In essence, the need to give Pharaoh strength, then, is less about giving him resolve and stubbornness, as much as it is about giving him the ability to make a clear decision that Hashem is in charge of the world, that Pharaoh understands Who He is, and that giving permission to Israel to leave comes from that recognition and a place of personal peace, more than from a place that says “I am being pressured to let the slaves go.” Religious coercion is never really a good thing.
How many times does Pharaoh let the Israelites leave? 8:4 (during frogs), 8:21-24 (during arbeh), 9:27-28 (during hail), 10:8-11 (before locusts), 10:24-26 (during darkness), 12:31-33 (during plague of Firstborn). In five of those six times he changes his mind. In only two of those times does God “strengthen his heart.” That is hardly a pattern of God removing free will.
“[Pharaoh] sent for Moses and Aaron during the night. 'Get moving!' he said. 'Get out from among my people - you and the Israelites! Go! Worship God just as you demanded! Take your sheep and cattle, just as you said! Go! Bless me too!' (12:31-32). Note that Pharaoh does not say “Worship YOUR God.” He simply says “Worship God.” This means that he learned the lesson.
What we see from Pharaoh’s “journey” is that he comes around to the notion that God runs the world. He may have his own need to process the idea that his slaves don’t really belong to him, and that their need to be free is really the most basic human right that he is simply withholding because he has lost sight of what human dignity is.
Go through the text in these chapters, and see if you can find when “the nation” is mentioned, and see if you can determine the difference between Israelites and Egyptians. Who, for example are עבדי פרעה and עבדיו?
(See 7:10, 7:20, 8:20,25, 9:20, 10:1, 10:7, 11:3,8, 14:5-6) These servants/slaves do not seem to be Israelites. Is anyone in Egypt truly free?
Pharaoh’s emotional upheaval and personal transformation would certainly make for a great psychology study. How much can one man take? How many hits can his ego swallow before he comes to the realization that Hashem is fighting for Israel, that this is an unfair fight, and that his best move would be to accept the reality he is now facing?
This is where strength from the Almighty comes in. And so Hashem gives him strength. ויחזק ה' את לב פרעה.
The history of the world has shown that God runs the world. He has His ways, we don’t always understand. Mankind has been through wonderful times and terrible times. While those not religiously inclined, or those cynical of God’s role in the world might blame God for famine, drought, pestilence, disease, floods, storms, etc., the God-fearing look at everything that takes place and says “God is always reminding us that He is running things.” Perhaps the God-fearing even blame Man for causing God to bring these and other calamities upon us. God has an infinite number of ways of proving this, over and over and over, and somehow, too many of our fellow humans aim, like Pharaoh, to come up with natural explanations, or to blame God for being anything but benevolent.
But the opposite is the case. The simple definition of a free society is that you can do, think, and say what you want, you can engage in mutually acceptable transactions, and you can’t do anything that deliberately hurts another person. (Of course there are many asterisks and explanations that can go with that.) There needs to be a basic respect for human dignity of the other – which should go in both directions – without looking to blame good and decent people for everything that’s wrong with society.
At the same time, we must recognize that some of the worst travesties that have befallen humankind were manmade – whether wars and weapons of mass destruction, biological weapons, and certain failed efforts at responding to disease.
When we see plagues in the Torah, whether in Egypt or in the wilderness, we know that no amount of human intervention would have stopped what God had unleashed. What stopped plagues? In Egypt, it was either the plague running its course, Moshe’s prayer, or Pharaoh coming to the realization that God is in charge and human beings need to be free. In the wilderness, the plagues ended either a. when all who were supposed to die died (it ran its course), b. when Aharon stood heroically with a firepan of ketores, c. when people looked at a copper snake, d. when Pinchas killed Zimri and Kozbi. The people who got involved were divinely inspired – not human beings thinking they could outsmart God.
Rather than viewing Pharaoh’s experience as a loss of free will, I prefer to see Pharaoh’s heart being strengthened as his being gifted the ability to see through his pain and suffering to come to the realization that Hashem is in charge. It is true that God once again strengthened Pharaoh’s heart in Parshat Beshalach (see 14:4,8,17), but to what goal? They (Pharaoh and his army) needed to have the resolve to overcome their own fears of what might happen again, in order to come to the penultimate conclusion that God is truly in charge (see 14:25), even if that realization only comes in the moment before they drown.
Ironically though, Israel also needed to learn this (see 6:9-13). Israel was not ready to accept that God was indeed on the cusp of redeeming them. Moshe needed several messages of support, and several instructions to go back to Israel to convince them that he was truly sent by God to redeem them. Perhaps, deep in the traumatized minds of slaves, they don’t want to be free. But God had promised their forefathers, and was not about to reneg on His promise simply because His children were enslaved in their minds as well as in their bodies.
Our task is to remember our creed. There is a teaching from our Sages, “There is none who is as free as one who engages in Torah.” Using a Gemara in Brachos 17a, Rabbi Zev Leff explained this notion very simply. The Torah makes a person free – because all a person wants to do is serve the Ribbono Shel Olam.
The free person does what he or she wants to do. For the Jew, who wants to follow God’s will, the task is simple. Choose Godliness, follow the Torah, engage with mitzvos, respect your fellow Man.
If only we were to have our hearts “strengthened” in the way that Pharaoh’s was strengthened, so we could see through our own free will that God is in charge, and that where we go from here is up to Him, and not in the hands of Man, would we truly be free!
Choose God. Choose the Torah. Everything else is a distraction from our task at hand – to be servants of the Almighty, and to want to do His will, in as free a manner as should be available to us, under the wings and protection of the Divine.
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