Va’era
I
will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply My signs and
My wonders in the
7:3
If God
hardened Pharaoh’s heart, then what was his transgression and what was his
sin? The answer is: God granted wisdom to man and implanted in
his heart the intelligence to receive power to add to his good or to diminish
his evil…Now the meaning of our verse is:
I will harden his heart in order to multiply My signs and My
wonders. Rabbi Joshua says that its
meaning is; I will harden his heart so that he will be able to bear the
plagues. However, he spoke
incorrectly. “Heart” in scripture refers
to an individual’s mental rather than physical capacity….This means I will, so
to speak, dull his brain so that he does not develop his intellectual capacity.
Ibn Ezra
(11th Century)
Rav
Yochanan said, “this provides an opening for the heretics to say: He (Pharaoh)
was not allowed by Him to repent.”
Shemot Rabbah (4th Century)
Know
that all acts are ascribed to God, since He is their ultimate cause, some by absolute
decree, and others through the operation of human choice granted by Him…(in
this way) He hardened Pharaoh’s heart…The acts ascribed to God in Scriptures
are those which are unusual, the caused of which are beyond our
understanding. Pharaoh’s stubbornness
was an example of this.
Shadal
The
wicked man becomes pious and returns to the Lord when the blow falls – out of
fear of retribution, as in the case of Pharaoh…Because such a situation smells
of compulsion and not of free will, the Lord hardened his heart, so that he
imagined that the plague was accidental rather than providential. This was to eradicate the cowing effects of
the plague itself, leaving his freewill uninfluenced by any compulsion.
Albo (15th
Century)
There
are many passages in the Scriptures which seem to contradict the principle of
freewill, and many have been misled by their tenor. They imagine that the Holy One preordains man
to do good or evil…When a man sins of his own freewill, he is punished…sometimes
in this world, sometimes in the Hereafter, and sometimes in both. When does this apply? When he does not make
amends. But if he makes amends,
repentance is an antidote to retribution…But it may sometimes be that the man’s
offense is so grave that he is penalized by not being granted the opportunity
to turn from his wickedness, so that he dies with the sin that he committed…
Maimonides
(12th Century)
He who
wants to defile himself is given an opening, he who
wants to purify himself is helped.
Ultimately, then it is man himself who chooses, who opens or hardens his
heart. The Almighty helps him on his
way. But the positive help afforded the
good man is not to be compared with the passive assistance given in the form of
removing the obstacles in his path should he choose evil.
Nechama Leibowitz (20th Century)