The ten plagues in last week’s and this week’s Torah portions present us with the age-old philosophical dilemma: How can God punish Pharaoh if God has hardened Pharaoh’s heart?  Justice dictates that reward and punishment can only be for violations or merits which are the product of one’s free will.

Maimonides takes the Torah at its face value and writes in the Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 6:3, that when a person sins as severely as Pharaoh had, God holds back the ability to repent from them.

The great medieval Spanish philosopher Rabbi Yosef Albo (1380-1444), in his book Sefer Ha’ikrim (4:25), on the other hand, is not willing to say that God prevents the wicked from repenting.   He writes rather that Pharoah repented only under the burden of punishment- the pain of the plague had softened Pharaoh’s heart allowing teshuvah, repentance.  But as soon as the plague was removed he became a sinner once more.   God did not “harden” his heart and prevent him from repenting, but rather gave Pharaoh the intellectual ability to come to the conclusion, after the pain of the punishment was gone, to forget God, and to assume that it is not God who brought the punishment but nature.  This choice of how to see the world, as just a place of random plagues and no reason, rather than a universe of harmony and intelligence, -this choice was entirely Pharaoh’s.   According to Rabbi Albo God gave Pharaoh the ingredients for the worldview which would lead to a hard heart, but in the final analysis it was Pharaoh’s free choice of perspective which rendered his heart one of stone instead of flesh.

This parsha invites us to reflect upon our own hearts and our own worldview. What role does God play in our lives and how does our perspective on life and the universe impact our heart? Does our current worldview and personal theology positively impact the state of our heart and our ability to connect to, appreciate and have deference for the Divine?