Notes:
How can Pharaoh be made to suffer plague after plague for not letting Israel go when G-d is hardening his heart? It's not fair!
There have been numerous attempts to explain this moral dilemma which seems to deny Pharaoh the Free Will necessary to release the Children of Israel, then punishes him and his country for not doing so.
Some attempts (Sforno) involve the notion that Pharaoh needed his heart hardened in order that, if he did release the Hebrews, it would come from his overcoming G-d's condition upon him and thus, truly exercising Free Will rather than just capitulating to whichever plague.
That's all well and good but I am firmly in the camp against Free Will -- that Pharaoh never really had a chance, poor fellow, and that G-d made sure of that.
So why do I not have a moral dilemma with this?
The Midrash tells us that although the Torah initially says the Hebrews would be enslaved for four hundred years, the ancient Egyptians subjugated us with such zeal and diligence that the foretold four hundred years of slavery were already served by the time a mere two hundred and ten years had passed.
During this time, the ancient Egyptians managed to torture, abuse and break the spirits of the ancestors of the Jewish people in egregiously onerous, and horrible ways. The Torah twice describes this as "B'pharech," which I might loosely translate as "hardship with extreme prejudice."
We all know the story. Taskmasters setting a daily quota for the production of bricks, then denying the ancient Hebrews access to the straw and materials necessary to make the bricks, then whipping the slaves to within an inch of their lives for failing to meet their quota.
This kind of thing does a good job of breaking the spirit, and, so it did. The Hebrews, descended from Abraham, a great military general, and giants like Isaac, Jacob, Judah and Joseph, and possessed of the DNA which would later give rise to huge proletariat movements in Europe and North America, did not rise up against this persecution. They were morally and spiritually beaten down flat, like the matzah we eat at the beginning of the Seders, the ritual meals commemorating Passover, which is this story, the matzah which we call the "Bread of Affliction" symbolizing the fallen, flattened state of the Hebrew slaves.
As one would expect, but as is very telling to me, there is no mention during this time of egregious persecution, that G-d had hardened the hearts of the ancient Egyptians in order for them to be so cruel. It was, evidently, their own initiative to not just enslave the people but to do it extra-harshly and smartly, "b'Pharech."
So, in my books, that was when Pharoah and his cronies had their Free Will, all two hundred and ten years of it. Noone was forcing them to be so zealously inhumane. They rejoiced in it. A small joke: in the Torah, when Pharaoh decides to oppress the Hebrews, he says "Hava nit-chakma lo," i.e., "Let's outsmart them," where the first word in the expression is "Hava," the same word used later in "Hava Nagila,", i.e., "Let us rejoice!"
I think they were having a great old time oppressing the Hebrews. Noone was holding a gun to their heads, notwithstanding that maybe only the ancient Chinese had guns, if anyone at all, at that time.
Two hundred plus years is a long time to abuse a people. Surely, someone might have piped up, and asked, "Is this really necessary? Do we really have to torture these people this way?" Alas, noone was inclined to do this, as they were, evidently, all having too much fun.
The ancient Egyptians may have been ordained by G-d to enslave the Jewish people but the contraction of the planned four hundered years of slavery into two hundred and ten, is an indication that they used their Free Will to enhance the experience infamously well above and beyond the call of duty.
So, that's when they exercised all kinds of Free Will, over those two hundred and ten years.
And, they thus created a problem for G-d.
Here was a people, the Hebrews, descended from the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and Jacob's twelve sons, literally the Children of Israel, "Israel" being Jacob's heavenly bequeathed name, who had forgotten who they were.
This slave people, descended from spiritual giants, did not fear G-d. They feared the ancient Egyptians -- who had terrorized and beaten them for over two centuries -- and why would they not?
Out of fear, or, perhaps, Stockholm syndrome, or just plain old assimilation, they had either learned great respect for the pagan deities of the ancient Egyptian culture or had outright accepted them as their gods -- which is why G-d performed the miracles of the plagues, and now stipulated that, before the final plague, the Hebrews tether, slaughter, and publically roast lambs outside their homes, then put the blood on their lintels.
This was an outrageous act, and a hard demand because lambs were revered as deities by the ancient Egyptians.
Remember when Joseph did not want his brothers to assimilate with Egyptian society? He told them to be sure to mention to Pharaoh that they were shepherds -- because this was an abomination to Egypt.
It was an abomination because, to the Egyptians, lambs were sacred. Thus, Pharaoh would not let the Hebrews live in Egypt proper, and gave Goshen, a neighbouring area for the Hebrews to keep to themselves.
Land o'Goshen! Can you imagine? Sheering the gods, and making lamb chops out of them? Abomination! Still, they were Joseph's family, so ...
Back to the more recent past, and the Hebrews who had been bullied and beaten by the ancient Egyptians for over two hundred years were now being asked to commit an act of defiance which defied the imagination, to fly directly in the face of Egyptian religion -- which many had adopted as their own -- in order to align themselves with Hashem, the vaguely remembered G-d of their past, yet to whom they had cried out when things had hit rock bottom.
G-d had tried to jog their memories and impress them with the plagues, expressly stating His intention to get the Hebrews to believe in Him, but there was a problem.
In the early going, the Egyptian sorcerers had been able to duplicate the wonders performed through Aharon and Moses. When Aharon threw his rod down, it became a snake. But so did the Egyptian sorcerers, notwithstanding that Aharon's rod/serpent swallowed theirs.
When G-d, through Aharon, turned the water in the Nile to blood, so, indeed did the Egyptian conjurers.
And, of course, the singularly funniest, and stupidest, act in the entire Torah: when G-d filled Egypt with frogs, in their bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens etc., along came the Egyptian sorcerers, and, guess what? Just to show how great they were, too, they filled Egypt with what? More frogs! As Yogi Berra might have said, it was deja frog all over again. It was frogs everywhere, and when they died, this double cohort of dead frogs really -- really -- stank, according to the Torah.
Like I say somewhere else in this blog, the ancient Egytians, they were sorcerers, yes; rocket scientists, not so much.
But the problem G-d had was, if the Egyptian sorcerers were able to duplicate the signs and wonders He was doing, how were the Israelites going to believe in Him, which is his stated intention?
The answer, He removed Pharaoh's free will by hardening his heart so that He could do more signs and wonders, ones which exceeded the capabilities of the Egyptian sorcerers, again and again, until the point was made.
Free will? They had free will during the two hundred and ten years.
Now? Not so much.
