Va'era (Exodus 6:2-9:35): January 16, 2021/3 Shevat 5781

At the end of last week's portion, God was giving Moses his orders to go to Pharaoh and demand the Israelites' freedom. Moses and Aaron go to the court and demand "let my people go," a request which Pharaoh declines. And then comes a famous course of events - the Ten Plagues. Or at least the first seven of them. Each time it follows a similar pattern: Moses and Aaron go to Pharaoh with their demand, Pharaoh refuses, cue the plague, Pharaoh agrees to let the Israelites go, plague stops, Pharaoh's heart is hardened, and he changes his mind. But, there's an important note to be taken. At the start of the whole process, God advises Moses, "I will harden Pharaoh's heart, that I may multiply my signs and wonders." So God is telling Moses that he will ensure that Pharaoh doesn't let the Israelites go until God has had sufficient time to cause enough damage.

The question of why an omnipotent God needs to impose punishments for violating commandments has puzzled theologians for millennia. If God is all-powerful, then presumably, God can just make humans not violate the commandments. If that's the case, then how can people still sin? The answer that our sages tend to land on is free will. After all, we are admonished to choose life and blessing over curses and death, so even the Torah must be based on the understanding that humans have the ability to freely choose between following God's commands and disobeying them. After all, if God were the one making us sin, then it would be pretty capricious to also punish us for the sins. But that seems to be exactly what God is saying here. And what is more, there's a hint of malice - God wants to make sure that Pharaoh's obstinacy is prolonged enough to merit the full regimen of plagues.

Through the ages, commentators have spent much time and ink on understanding this verse, each one with their own take on the apparent sadistic streak being shown in God's briefing to Moses.  Rashi theorizes that God punishes the nations of the world is so that Israel will see God's power and be awed. Ramban proposes that part of the punishment for Pharaoh's mistreatment of the Israelites is that God withdrew the opportunity to repent. Both Ramban and Rashi make a note of the fact that the text describes the situation of the first five plagues as "Pharaoh's heart was hardened," only changing the wording to "God hardened Pharaoh's heart" for the second half of the plagues (that is, perhaps after five plagues did not soften Pharaoh's heart, God decided enough was enough and there would be no more chances). The 12th-century Aragonese commentator Rabbeinu Bahya (Bahya ben Asher ibn Halawa, not to be confused with the 11th-century Aragonese ethicist Bahya ibn Paquda, who is known by the same sobriquet) posits that if God had allowed Pharaoh to repent, then he would escape punishment for his previous sins against God's chosen nation, the comparison being made to the people of Nineveh in the book of Jonah, who repented and God was unable to punish them. Rabbeinu Bahya makes an interesting implication here - that God may be all-powerful, but that does not mean that God is not bound by rules. This caveat to divine omnipotence is an interesting way of looking at God's power. Indeed, a truly forgiving God must always accept sincere repentence, but can a God who intentionally stops the wicked from repenting in order to impose harsher punishments really be called omnibenevolent?

Perhaps, the lesson to be learned is that we have less free will than we really think we do. We believe that we are choosing to do things, but that is a consequence of our inability to wrap our minds around just how powerless we are to choose our own path outside what God ordains. How, if that is the case, can the principle of reward and punishment exist? It certainly seems unfair for God to punish us for things that God made us do. The medieval philosopher Hasdai Crescas, one of the few Jewish thinkers to promote this sort of hard determinism, squares the metaphorical circle by understanding reward and punishment not as consequences intentionally meted out by God for humans' misdeeds but as natural results which follow as a reaction those misdeeds. We are no less able to escape the consequences of our actions, for good or ill, than we can walk off a cliff and not suffer the effects of gravity. As for the passage about "choosing life," the human mind cannot fully comprehend a deterministic world view. We certainly feel like we are choosing to do things, but that doesn't mean we are actually doing so. God did not give the Torah to the angels in Heaven, God gave it to humans, and therefore, the language used must be that of humans. We understand things better when they are put in human terms, God has neither a body nor any corporeal form at all, but the text speaks of "the finger of God" or "the face of God" because it helps us relate to God better. So too, the Torah speaks in terms of our own choices because true determinism is scary. The enormity of the idea that our actions are not our own, like sprites in some sort of cosmic game of The Sims, is enough to make most people's brains overload. So the Torah tells us "choose" as if we have that ability, because thinking that we are choosing to be close to God helps us actually be close to God.