Torah This Week
Welcome to Torah This Week, where you will find thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the Torah portion of the week.
PARASHAT BO
(Exodus 10: 1 - 13:16)
The Torah reiterates several times that during the Ten Plagues, God hardened Pharaoh's heart, so that he would not allow the Hebrews to leave. God's behavior is morally problematic; God deprives Pharaoh of free will by hardening his heart, then punishes him for being hardhearted. As the medieval Bible commentator Nachmanides asks: "if God hardened his heart, then what was his crime?"
Paradoxically, however, had God not hardened Pharaoh's heart, he likewise would have been deprived of free will. If someone twists your arm behind your back until you sign a contract, can you be said to have signed it willingly? Similarly, had God turned the Nile into blood and sent frogs throughout Egypt, but had not hardened Pharaoh's heart, of course he would have let the Hebrew slaves go, not out of free will but out of terror. It was only because God hardened his heart that Pharaoh no longer feared the kind of physical devastation that would evoke instant obedience from a normal person. As Joseph Albo wrote in the medieval philosophic classic, Sefer Ha-ikkarim: "The Lord hardened [Pharaoh's] heart, so that he imagined the plague was accidental rather than providential. This was to eradicate the cowing effects of the plague itself, leaving his free will uninfluenced by any compulsion."
Though freed from physical fear, Pharaoh could still have recognized the injustices he had inflicted on the Hebrew slaves, and let them go on that account. Unfortunately, morality was irrelevant to Pharaoh. It was only when the first-born started dying that he finally accepted that he was facing a force immeasurably greater than his own.
(Joseph Telushkin)
To join the conversation at CLAL Torah Talk, click here.
To access a CLAL commentary on this week's Haftorah, click here.
To access the Torah This Week Archive, click here.
To access the Haftorah This Week Archive, click here.
To receive the CLAL Torah Talk column by email on a regular basis, complete the box below:
