Free Will (Va'era, 24th January 2020)

When Moses comes to him to ask for the Israelites to be freed, God hardens the Pharaoh’s heart and he automatically says no. Our Rabbis quite appropriately use this and similar texts to debate whether or not Pharaoh has free will. In chapter 15 of the Book of Genesis (15:13-14), God explicitly tells Avram that his descendants will be enslaved and abused in another country for four hundred years, that God will punish their abusers, and that they will leave the land with great possessions. In the next book, Exodus, we find this happening. Therefore, did Pharaoh have free will?

The obvious initial answer is yes, because God doesn’t specify which land. Had it not been Egypt under the Pharaoh, it would have been another country. It was just that the Egyptians made the choice to fulfil the prophecy about which they knew nothing. But that doesn’t totally absolve God. When God summons Moses, as happened in last week’s Torah portion, God makes it very clear that Pharaoh will not let the people go and has to be shown a “strong hand” in order to “compel him” (Ex. 3:19). Where the prophecy to Avram was general, the prophecy to Moses is very specific. We still might excuse God here because maybe God is omniscient – that is, God knows everything – and God knows the kind of person Pharaoh is, and thus simply explains to Moses what God knows.

That’s all well and good, until we get to this week’s portion of Va’era. A number of times this week (e.g. Ex. 7:3), God says that God will harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he does not listen to Moses. That is an impingement on Pharaoh’s free will. Now, that’s actually totally in keeping with other Biblical thought – that God uses the other nations to reward and punish Israel. In other words, the Israelites may have free will, but the rest of humanity does not. The Rabbis did not like that idea at all, so they had to discuss whether or not Pharaoh actually had free will, and whether God restricted it. They find two ways to give God an “out” – the first that says that if a person chooses one moral direction, God simply helps them continue in that direction, the second says that Pharaoh was so terrified of the plagues that God hardened his heart only to bring him back to a point of rationality, at which point the decision was still all his.

The focus of the discussion is usually on the Pharaoh himself, but I think there’s another important focus which is often overlooked, which is the punishment of the people. Pharaohs aren’t elected by the people in a democratic process – there’s an automatic assumption that son follows father onto the throne. So, if the people didn’t elect the Pharaoh, why are they also punished because of his actions? The theological issue isn’t only about Pharaoh’s free will, it’s also about the Egyptian people being made to suffer because of a Pharaoh for whom they could not be held liable.

Because the Pharaoh says no to the Israelites’ release, the people are left scurrying around looking for water and, in the end, every Egyptian family loses their first-born son. One could suggest that the reason that the Egyptians are punished is because they don’t rise up against the cruelty displayed by their Pharaoh and the taskmasters, but this is a society where slavery is the norm and, moreover, the Egyptian military machine was enormous so revolt was unthinkable. Moreover, we don’t know how close the Israelites were to the rest of the Egyptians, so they may not have even been aware of the depth of inhumanity to which the Israelites were being subjected.

So why does God punish all the Egyptians for the actions of their Pharaoh if the right to protest, if the knowledge of what to protest and even if the possibility of not even knowing that there was to protest about were not present? Living in a desert society, having all the current water supplies turn to blood would have been nothing short of catastrophic for the upkeep of crops and animals. You can’t just dig for water anywhere. All of Egypt would have been ruined. Of course, we know it gets worse. The Egyptians suffer plague after plague, until the final, unspeakable horror when every Egyptian loses their first-born son.

How could God punish all the Egyptians for the actions of their Pharaoh? There are indications throughout Torah of an answer – on more than one occasion, God says that what happened in Egypt was proof for the other nations. In other words, the Egyptians suffer so that everyone else can see how powerful God is. And as I said before, while that clearly is Biblical theology, it’s extremely discomforting to the modern mind.

We could try an apologetic interpretation, but that can only take us so far. For example, after the plague of the Nile and all Egyptian water turning to blood, we read (Ex 7:24) that all the Egyptians dug round the river for water to drink. Instead of just boring wells near their own dwelling-places, they all came to the river to dig for water. By experiencing a dramatic change in their way of life, the people were brought together. An apologetic interpretation might say that this was the start of sowing the seeds of revolt against Pharaoh, which the people chose not to follow. After all, the Pharaoh’s task was to protect the people, so if he did not, perhaps he should be removed. We could say, then, that the plague of the Nile turning to blood was an inconvenience which didn’t cause any death and therefore brought the people together to give them a choice. The fact that they chose wrongly allowed them to be punished. This apologetic reading totally breaks down by the time we come to the final plague, though. Any theology that says that the death of innocent beings is to serve as a lesson for the survivors is a theology of a callous, cruel God. At most, we could say that it was punishment for the Egyptians for not rising up against the Pharaoh earlier, but as I said before, the Egyptian military apparatus was so strong that any possible revolt would have surely been thoroughly quashed.

To our mind, then, reading theology very differently to the Biblical mind, the Egyptians are innocent victims of a punishment against Pharaoh and that, in turns, demands very difficult questions of God. Remember that Torah believes that everything that God does is just, which is why Abraham demands justice of God over Sodom and Amorrah (Gen. 18:23).

Perhaps we are forced to change our original assumption. Instead of asking “Why does God cruelly punish the innocent Egyptians?” we may need to ask, “Since God is just and since God punishes not just the Pharaoh but the Egyptians as well, what did they do to deserve such punishment?” I’m wary of such questions because they sound very strongly like victim-blaming, but it’s important to see where that question can take us. When discussing this sermon with me earlier today, Asher suggested that maybe God has to punish the Egyptians as well as Pharaoh because otherwise without Pharaoh, the Egyptians might turn on the Israelites anyway, so punishing just Pharaoh would have been useless. What this rather astute viewpoint allows is for the Egyptians to be innocent at the time of punishment while God knows that if left leaderless, they would not be innocent. This allows them limited free will and yet still allows punishment. Another similar but slightly different viewpoint that I would suggest is that the Israelites lifted up their voice in protest against their harsh treatment but the Egyptians did not protest against the cruelty in their land. Maybe they didn’t perpetrate cruelty, but they tolerated it. They did not need to necessarily revolt against Pharaoh and remove him, but they could have at least raised up their voices against his cruel decrees.

I believe that we can use this to reflect on our own lives. When we see terrible human-rights abuses and do nothing about them, when we do not speak up against them, this reading implies that we contravene God’s will and deserve any negativity that follows. The Egyptians could have at least cried out – they could have showed their Pharaoh that they disagreed with his excessive slavery – but they did not. That is why they suffer a terrible fate. They suffer because they ignored the suffering of others. So, we must not suffer accordingly. We must speak up against inhumanity, even if it inconveniences us temporarily. We must speak truth to power.

The Hebrew for “Egyptian” contains the word “narrow.” May we not view humanity narrowly and only care for those near to us. May we not narrowly shut out the suffering of others. Instead, may we be constantly aware of those in need, and elevate their plight on the local, national and international stage. May we be Israelites, and not Egyptians. And let us say, Amen.