One of the foundations of religion and morality is free will.
With good reason, Maimonides identifies free will as a foundational principle underpinning the entire Torah. If humans can’t deliberately choose between right and wrong, there can be no reward or punishment. If we can’t choose, our actions have no value as we don’t control them; if you are bad, it’s not your fault because being good is impossible.
The Exodus story poses a problem, however.
Throughout the story, God tells Moshe that He has hardened Pharaoh’s heart, and Pharaoh refuses to free the Jews. But if God had hardened Pharaoh’s heart, his free will was hopelessly compromised; why was Pharaoh’s punishment?
Maimonides’s exposition of free will allows for the possibility of doing something so egregiously wrong that the path of making amends and repentance is foreclosed, and the person can no longer return to who they once were.
There is an old folk saying that the axe forgets, but the tree remembers, meaning that the person who hurts another forgets, but the person who gets hurt does not. Someone abusive can reform themselves, regret their actions, and resolve never to harm another person again; they should do all those things. But they can only hope to find a new path; they can never return to their old one, and that’s what happened to Pharaoh.
Pharaoh’s government enslaved, tortured, and murdered people, particularly children; justice required that he be prevented from making amends. Pharaoh was so far down his path of madness and violence that he could not see or hear the Egyptian people overwhelmed by the plagues, and his adviser’s pleas fell on deaf ears:
הֲטֶרֶם תֵּדַע כִּי אָבְדָה מִצְרָיִם – “Do you not see that Egypt is already lost?” (10:7)
Pharoah was determined to hold onto his power over his Jewish subjects; this conflicted with his duties to the Egyptian people. These beliefs were incompatible and mutually exclusive, but Pharoah would not address the core issue and let the Jewish People go; he only ever asked Moshe to remove the symptoms of the plague at hand.
Contemporary psychology might refer to this as a form of cognitive dissonance, the uncomfortable feeling when two beliefs conflict. When confronted with challenging new information, people may seek to preserve their current understanding of the world by rejecting, explaining away, avoiding the new information, or convincing themselves that no conflict exists.
If we are puzzled about Pharaoh’s free will, we ought to invert the question back at ourselves because people lie to themselves all the time to justify bad decisions and hypocrisy. It’s not so difficult to imagine becoming so entrenched in a worldview that you get tunnel vision and can’t change course.
The Midrash warns us that sin is like a passing visitor, then a houseguest who overstays their welcome, and before long, it’s master of the house. R’ Jonathan Sacks suggests that we can all too easily become prisoners to our pride on a microcosmic level.
R’ Yisrael Salanter says that the first time you do something wrong, it’s a sin. When you repeat the sin, it seems permitted. When you do it again the third time, it can feel like a mitzvah!
R’ Shimshon Pinkus suggests that this is the definition of the Rosh Hashana blessing to be the head and not the tail – שֶׁנִּהְיֶה לְרֹאשׁ וְלֹא לְזָנָב. It’s a wish for an intentional year, with conscious and constant course corrections, because if today’s actions are based on yesterday’s decisions, you end up being your own tail!
As much as we value the notion of freedom, you must consciously choose it daily.