This week’s Torah portion, Bo, opens with a theologically perplexing verse: “God said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart…’”. The question we have all asked is how God can punish Pharaoh if God has hardened Pharaoh’s heart to prevent him from freeing the people. After all, without free choice, it would not be just to punish someone.

There are many approaches to this question. One is that the plagues were so extraordinary, so compelling that hardening Pharaoh’s heart actually leveled the playing field. It was only through this hardheartedness that Pharaoh could truly have the free and equal choice to either let the Jews go or to refuse. Another is that God did indeed harden Pharaoh’s heart but this was not done in the first few plagues, so Pharaoh had ample time to freely let the Jews go; thus he is being punished for that earlier choice.

Maimonides addresses this question in the Mishnah Torah (Laws of Repentance, Chapter 6). He writes that, although people have free choice, after sinning for a while God may remove from the person the ability to repent in order to punish them. In this sense, teshuvah is not a right but a privilege.

Indeed, says Maimonides, this was the case with Pharaoh. Pharaoh had free choice at the beginning of the plagues, but as part of his punishment for sinning, God removed his ability to repent by hardening his heart. Some of the commentaries (e.g. the Maharsha) say that this is really a natural process, not necessarily God stopping people from repenting, but this being the nature of sin: we do it a few times and soon we are down a road from which it is very hard to return.

But Maimonides follows this theory of reward and punishment with a very different idea in the next paragraph, where he seems to backpedal from both the idea that it is God which stops someone from repenting and that repentance may be impossible:

“This is what is implied in the requests of the righteous and the prophets in their prayers, asking God to help them on the path of truth, as David pleaded (Psalms 86:11): ‘God, show me Your way that I may walk in Your truth’; do not let my sins prevent me from reaching the path of truth which will lead me to appreciate Your way and the oneness of Your name…let my spirit be willing to do Your will and do not cause my sins to prevent me from repenting. Rather, let the choice remain in my hand until I repent and comprehend and appreciate the path of truth. In a similar way, one must interpret all the verses which resemble these.”

Here, Maimonides seems to say that repentance is always possible, and when the option for repentance seems to have been taken from us and God has “hardened our heart,” the option which is left is prayer. We can always, it seems, ask God to show us his way and lead us on the path of truth.

It is a profound idea for when we have trouble doing teshuvah and repenting seems impossible. Though the door to repentance may be closed, the door to prayer, to talking to God, is never closed and, in fact, it is a good way to relocate the key to the door of repentance. As Resh Lakish stated in the Talmud, “One who comes to make themselves impure, the door is opened for them; one who comes to purify, they are assisted.”