Timeless Torah

One thing makes G-d laugh, humans playing G-d. A marvelous example is the Tower of Babel. King Nimrod decided to build a ‘skyscraper’ that would literally “reach heaven.” From His vantage point however, their attempt was so pathetic and their tower so miniscule that G-d had to figuratively “come down” to see it.
Divine humor is sometimes more than just satirical. Hashem’s laugh may tickle His funny bone, but for the Egyptians it was hardly amusing. Egypt’s magicians strutted about, imagining they controlled nature. The ten plagues which underscored their impotence, was Hashem’s snicker. Already by the third plague of lice, the necromancers gave up all pretense and admitted their helplessness. Thus the cultic priests who initially behaved as if the ‘gods’ were in their power, fell before a tiny louse.
How embarrassing. But if the magicians could not command their environment, at least they ruled themselves. In that vein, Pharaoh was much worse off for G-d had declared, “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart...He will not listen...Then I will lay My hand on Egypt and with mighty acts of judgment ...they will know that I am the L-rd..”

Pharaoh’s loss of self-control obviously guaranteed an outcome predetermined by G-d, but it also brings into question, how could Pharaoh be held liable? As Maimonides puts it: If there were no free will, by what right or justice could G-d punish the Egyptian monarch?”

The general outline of an answer is already implicit in the biblical narrative itself. After each of the first five plagues, the Torah tells us that Pharaoh hardened his own heart. It was only from the sixth plague onward that his stubbornness is attributed to G-d. Rashi understands this Divine intervention in the last five plagues as a form of punishment for Pharaoh’s own obstinacy during the first five.
Sforno offers the opposite interpretation. Hashem interfered precisely to restore the king’s free will. After the succession of plagues that had devastated the land, Pharaoh was under overwhelming pressure to let the people go. Had he done so, it would not have been out of free choice, but due to external factors. G-d therefore toughened and strengthened Pharaoh’s heart so that even after the first five plagues he was genuinely free to do as he wished.

Simplest and most profound are the words of the Talmud. “At first the evil impulse is as thin as a spider’s gossamer, but in the end it is as thick as a cart-rope...At first the evil impulse is call a wayfarer, then a guest, finally a master.” (Sukkah 52)

Evil has two faces. The first is what it does to its victim. The second is what it does to its perpetrator. Evil traps the evildoer in its own mesh. Slowly but surely he loses freedom and becomes not evil’s master but its slave.

Pharaoh is in fact a tragic figure trapped in an obsession which may have had rational beginnings. But inevitably his mania for defiance not only ruined him, it destroyed his entire country. Later Pharaoh’s own advisors would plead with him, “Let the people go...Do you not yet realize that Egypt is ruined?” But Pharaoh could not hear, for he had left all rationale behind. Compare the Torah’s treatment of freewill with that of other philosophical or scientific theories.

In those other systems, freedom is almost invariably an either/or: either we are always free, or we never are. Both are too crude and too simplistic. Freedom is not absolute. It can be won and lost in degrees. Unless the will to be free is constantly exercised, it gradually atrophies and dies. At that point, we are swept along by the caprice of desire, or the passion that becomes a fixation.

Torah paints a more accurate picture of the human condition than its philosophical or scientific counterparts. The subtlety of Pharaoh’s slow descent could have been stopped by Pharaoh himself. Left unchecked however, it evolved into a self-destructive madness that could not be reined in.
The Exodus is more than the story of physical liberation. Its counterpoint is the spiritual side of slavery. He who ruled the world’s greatest empire, lost power over everything, even himself. Thus it was not the Hebrews who were the real slaves, it was Pharaoh.

Many things influence us - our genes, parents, childhood, race, creed, culture, the persuasions of our peers, and the pressures of our environment. But influence is not control. Causes do not compel. It was a survivor of Auschwitz, Viktor Frankl, who discovered in that nightmare this truth to which he subsequently devoted his life. The Nazis robbed us of every vestige of our humanity, but one, the freedom to decide how to respond.

Judaism is, among other things, a complex tutorial in freedom; in the ability to say No, to conquer instinct by conscience, to resist the madness of crowds and their idols. That needs discipline, and the ability to stand a little apart from society, even while contributing to it. To be a Jew is to know that though we are here, we are also elsewhere. We live in time, but we are addressed by the voice of One who is beyond time.

Pharaoh was born free but became his own slave. Moses was born into a nation of slaves but led them to freedom. Easily lost, hard to sustain, freedom is our most precious gift. But it must be exercised if it is to be retained. Its greatest discipline is to let G-d’s will challenge ours. That is the path to freedom and the cure for hardness of heart.