Shabbat Vaeyra: Hard Hearts
Moses and Aaron are locked in a power struggle with Pharaoh, who seemingly holds all the cards.
It is a battle both physical and spiritual, with God exercising superior authority. The theological issue, of course, is if God has decided in advance to “harden Pharoah’s heart”, where is the choice? And does it matter? And why does God have to drag the whole process out? Couldn’t God have simply ended it by killing the firstborn right away?
The traditional way of looking at this is that theatrically was necessary to wear down Pharoah’s obduracy. And to inspire a nation of slaves, downtrodden and depressed, and the process of raising their spirits, to give them a sense of purpose and positive identity. This was a process that took time. It took time getting Pharoah to change his mind, and it took time for the Children of Israel to accept the authority of God and Moses.
But let’s leave God out of it for the moment because here we are dealing with something supernatural, and in the realm of the supernatural, there can only be speculation. They struggled to explain this paradox. Despite the best intentions of Jewish philosophers over the years, it has not been rational arguments or theories that have won the battles of identity so much as feelings and commitments.
The Torah is describing a very important common thread throughout history. The ebb and flow of battles, struggles, and empires. After all, Egypt was the most powerful empire of the time and locked in constant conflict with the Hittites and Assyrians of the North, the Nubians of the South, and the nomadic Hyksos from the east. History is rarely just the conflict of two kingdoms or powers. There are crucial moments and crucial allies and enemies. This narrative is as much about the politics and arrogance of power and human fallibility as it is about Divine intervention.
Pharaoh was the master of his universe, technologically and financially, and believed in his gods and magicians. He was faced with someone with no army, no kingdom, and no assets. But someone with a sense of his identity and a mission. Why should he, from his point of view, pay any attention to Moses and Aaron? He could crush them. But slowly, first his experts, then his people began to see his policies were failing. And he still could not see it until, finally, the collapse of his regime. Because he underestimated his opponent. It did not happen right away, the Bible doesn’t tell us exactly what the timescale is. But it did, and it calls to mind Stalin and Hitler, both convinced they were right and all-powerful. And I dare say both Putin, Khomeini, and Mao will learn the lesson, too, eventually.
But to return to the question of free will. We like to think we all have the freedom to make choices. And to me, the extent we do is why theologians have always placed so much emphasis on free will. If they believe that God knows exactly what will happen but still gives us the freedom to choose, how unfair it was for God to harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he wouldn’t give in?
Since B.F. Skinner’s experiments with Behaviourism, we have come to realise how much of our behaviour is both planned and predictable. In recent years scientific progress has reinforced the extent to which we know we are the tools of our genes as well our environment. And the mining of information about us from advertising and Artificial Intelligence’s ability to “read our minds and preferences” narrows down the field of choice a great deal. And yet it is clear there are still areas where we do have choices and the capacity to defy predictions. However limited they may be.
Pharaoh might have expected that he had made the right choice in his terms of reference. The fact is that, like most humans, we repeat our mistakes. We are stubborn by nature. We do not learn most of the time. Pharaoh was just that sort of character. We have met the throughout our lives. Those who will just not see another point of view. In other words, a hard heart without necessarily any compulsion or magic. We do try to convince ourselves we are right, nevertheless, on politics, religion, and morality.
This is why it is so important to have a Torah, a moral code, and a set of rules to remind us of what are better choices. And to remind us that just possibly an unseen, non-material, Divine conscience might have its uses. And this message about Pharoah is as relevant as it was thousands of years ago.
