Cultivating Freedom: When is Character (Not) Destiny?

Transcription

1 Cultivating Freedom: When is Character (Not) Destiny? Rabbi Shai Held I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse, says the book of Deuteronomy; choose life, that you and your children may live (Deuteronomy 30:19). The conviction that human beings have the freedom and the responsibility to choose how we will act lies at the very heart of Jewish theology and spirituality. As Maimonides (Rambam, ) writes, free will is a great principle and a foundation of the Torah The choice is yours, and anything a person wishes to do, for good or for evil, he can do (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance 5:3). Moreover, Maimonides insists, without a robust conception of human freedom, the whole idea of moral responsibility collapses into incoherence: If God decreed that a person should be righteous or wicked what place would there be for the Torah? By what right or justice would God punish the wicked or reward the righteous? Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly? (5:4). No freedom, says Maimonides, no moral responsibility; no moral responsibility, no Judaism. Not surprisingly, then, commentators both traditional and modern have often found the idea The conviction that human beings have the freedom and the responsibility to choose how we will act lies at the very heart of Jewish theology and spirituality. of God hardening Pharaoh s heart so central to the book of Exodus deeply disturbing. As God first sends Moses to Pharaoh, God says: When you return to Egypt, see that you perform before Pharaoh all the marvels that I have put within your power. I, however, will 1

2 stiffen (ahazek) his heart so that he will not let the people go (Exodus 4:21). Then, as Moses is about to come before Pharaoh a second time, God tells him again, But I will harden (aksheh) Pharaoh s heart, that I may multiply my signs and marvels in the land of Egypt (7:1-3). Commentators are understandably perplexed: How could God rob Pharaoh of his freedom, they wonder, and then punish him for his deeds? As R. Abraham Ibn Ezra ( ) asks, If God hardened his heart, what was his transgression and what was his sin? (Commentaries to Exodus 7:3). Important as Ibn Ezra s question is, it is not where the Torah s attention is focused. Rather, what animates the text is God s desire to make God s sovereignty unambiguously clear. Pharaoh brazenly dismisses God derisively, he asks, Who is the Lord that I should heed Him and let Israel go? I do not know the Lord, nor will I let Israel go (5:2) and now he will learn that God is lord and master of creation. Never again, God hopes, will God s power 1 and presence be doubted. As Bible scholar John Durham puts it, God is orchestrating, in a combination of opposing and unlikely forces, a deliverance that will above all be a proof of [God s] active presence. A reluctant Moses, an unbelieving Pharaoh[;] a crushed and dispirited Israel, a proud and ruling Egyptian people[;] a non-nation against the greatest of nations, are brought together, and the opposing sides are set still more firmly in their respective ways, so that proof of [God s presence] which is to turn everything upside down, may be established irrevocably. 2 1 Cf. the comments of R. Samuel b. Meir (Rashbam, ) to Exodus 7:5. 2 John I. Durham, Exodus (1987), p. 87. Bible scholar Peter Enns writes that for the Torah, Pharaoh is God s plaything. God will do as [God] wishes to the king. God will not only act mightily and sovereignly in delivering Israel, [God] will also dictate Pharaoh s response The deliverance of Israel from Egypt is entirely God s doing and under [God s] complete control. Peter Enns, Exodus, (2000), pp Jon Levenson offers a more nuanced and, I think, more compelling view: In Exodus, he maintains, we are dealing with a narrative need for a worthy and formidable antagonist to the protagonist, on the one hand, and the need to make the protagonist incomparably powerful, on the other. The resolution? The formidability of the antagonist is itself owing to the incomparable power of the protagonist. Personal correspondence, 12/31/14. 2

3 And yet, for many readers, Ibn Ezra s How can God punish Pharaoh for question still demands a response: How deeds over which he exercises no can God punish Pharaoh for deeds over control? which he exercises no control? Jewish thinkers have put forward an array of responses, but one in particular deserves careful consideration. Although, as we ve seen, Maimonides maintains that free will is fundamental to Jewish theology, he nevertheless adds that it is possible for a person to commit a sin so egregious, or to commit so many sins, that the judgment rendered before the True Judge is that his retribution for these sins, which he committed freely and of his own accord, is that he is prevented from repenting and is no longer able to abandon his evil ways so that he dies and perishes on account of those sins he committed. This, Maimonides insists, is how we should understand the hardening of Pharaoh s heart: Since he initially sinned of his own free will and wronged the Israelites who lived in his land justice required that he be prevented from repenting, so that he be punished. This is why the Blessed Holy One hardened his heart. (Laws of Repentance, 6:3). What does Maimonides mean when he says that sin can lead to loss of freedom? Some interpreters take his words literally that is, they assume that at a certain point, when a person has persisted in choosing evil, God actively intervenes to undermine his capacity to repent. But this is not a defensible interpretation of Maimonides, who embraced a 3 naturalistic metaphysics that severely restricted or even virtually eliminated instances of 4 direct divine intervention in the universe Indeed, Maimonides reduced prophetic locutions 3 Among Maimonides scholars, cf. Adiel Kadari, Studies in Repentance: Law, Philosophy and Educational Thought in Maimonides Hilkhot Teshuvah (Hebrew) (2010), pp Among contemporary teachers of biblical interpretation, cf. Michael Hattin, Passages: Text and Transformation in the Parasha (2012), pp I hasten to clarify that Maimonides naturalism should not in any way be confused with the naturalism of Mordecai Kaplan. Maimonides entire religious universe is built around the acknowledgment and worship of a transcendent Creator. 3

4 of the form God does x to statements of the form, within the natural order ordained by God, x occurs. Moreover, Maimonides insists in the Guide of the Perplexed that God never 5 interferes with human freedom (3:32), and that divine providence never takes the form of direct divine intervention to punish the wicked (3:18). So what does Maimonides mean? 6 There comes a point when a person has become so totally entrenched in bad behavior that he simply loses the ability to choose any other path. Crucially, the person remains responsible 7 for his actions even after he has lost his freedom because his consistently bad choices are what led him to his current state. Human nature is such that freedom at a particular time may be 8 constricted by decisions made earlier. God can be said to have hardened Pharaoh s heart only in the sense that God created human nature this way. Maimonides interpretation is philosophically and psychologically compelling, but does it find any support in the biblical text itself? Some argue that it does. Despite God s informing Moses at the outset of his mission that God would harden Pharaoh s heart, the fact is that during the first five plagues we hear nothing at all about any divine role in Pharaoh s stubbornness; the text speaks only about Pharaoh hardening his own heart (7:13, 22; 5 David Shatz, Divine Intervention and Religious Sensibilities, in Dan Cohn-Sherbok, ed., Divine Intervention and Miracles in Jewish Theology (1996), pp ; passage cited is on p Maimonides makes this move explicit in Guide of the Perplexed, 2:48. 6 I am grateful to Professor Bernard Septimus who emphasized this last point in personal conversation. 7 Cf., for example, Eliezer Schweid, Iyunim BiShemonah Perakim LaRambam (Hebrew) (1989), p. 121 (commenting on the eighth of the Eight Chapters); and more expansively, David Shatz, Freedom, Repentance, and Hardening of the Hearts: Albo vs. Maimonides, Faith and Philosophy 14 (1997), pp On this interpretation, Maimonides would endorse what Aristotle writes in the Nicomachean Ethics: It is irrational to suppose that a man who acts unjustly does not wish to be unjust or a man who acts self-indulgently to be self-indulgent. But if without being ignorant a man does the things which will make him unjust, he will be unjust voluntarily. Yet it does not follow that if he wishes he will cease to be unjust and will be just. For neither does the man who is ill become well on those terms. We may suppose a case in which he is ill voluntarily, through living incontinently and disobeying his doctors. In that case it was then open to him not to be ill, but not now, when he has thrown away his chance, just as when you have let a stone go it is too late to recover it; but yet it was in your power to throw it, since the moving principle was in you. So, too, to the unjust and to the self-indulgent man it was open at the beginning not to become men of this kind, and so they are unjust and selfindulgent voluntarily; but now that they have become so it is not possible for them not to be so. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 3:5. 4

5 8:11,15,28; 9:7). Only with the sixth plague (boils) do things change: But the Lord stiffened the heart of Pharaoh, and he would not heed them, just as the Lord had told Moses (9:12). The same happens after the seventh (hail) (10:1), the eighth (locusts) (10:20), and the ninth 9 (darkness) (10:27). In terms that echo Maimonides, Bible scholar Nahum Sarna maintains that the fact that the Torah describes Pharoah s first five refusals as self-willed and thereafter speaks of them as divinely willed is really just the biblical way of asserting that the king s intransigence has by then become habitual and irreversible; his character has become his destiny. He is deprived of the possibility of relenting and is irresistibly impelled to his selfwrought destruction. 10 Is this a convincing reading of the biblical text? I am not sure. Nineteenth century Bible scholars Karl Friedrich Keil and Franz Delitzsch introduce the helpful idea that for the Torah, there is a twofold manner [in which] God produces hardness : permissive hardness, whereby God giv[es] time and space for the manifestation of human opposition, even to the utmost limits of creaturely freedom, and effective hardness, whereby God drive[s] the hard heart to such utter obduracy that it is no longer capable of returning. Maimonides and 11 Sarna see only permissive hardness in the text, but it seems likely that effective hardness Piling bad decision upon bad decision deeply compromises our ability to choose a different course. plays some role as well. In other words, God does not merely allow something to happen; God actively does something More precisely: After seventh plague (hail), we hear both that Pharaoh hardened his own heart (9:34-35) and that God hardened it (10:1). 10 Nahum M. Sarna, Exodus (1991), p. 23. Sarna notes that the motif of hardening, or stiffening, occurs twenty times in Exodus; exactly half of the occurrences are attributed to Pharaoh and half to God. For a full cataloging, cf. Sarna, Exodus, p. 241, nn C.F. Keil and F. Delitzsch, Commentary on the Old Testament: The Pentateuch, Genesis, Exodus 1-11, trans. James Martin (1989), p The ambiguity some find in the text is God engaged in permissive hardening or effective? is encapsulated well in Robert Alter s observation that Pharaoh is presumably manifesting his own character: callousness, resistance to instruction, and arrogance would all be implied by the toughening of the heart. God is not so much 5

6 Whether or not it fully captures the Torah s intentions, Maimonides interpretation does powerfully evoke a fundamental truth of the human condition. In psychologist Erich Fromm s words, Every evil act tends to harden a man s heart, that is, to deaden it. Every good deed tends to soften it, that is, to make it more alive. The more man s heart hardens, the less freedom does he have to change, the more is determined already by previous action. But there comes a point of no return when man s heart has become so hardened and so deadened that he has lost the possibility of freedom. Consistently repeated, sinful behavior can take 13 deep and unrelenting hold of us. Piling bad decision upon bad decision deeply compromises our ability to choose a different course. Sin may have a tenuous hold on us at first, but over time its grip becomes tighter. The Talmudic Sage R. Akiva observes that at first sin is like a spider s web, but eventually it becomes like a ship s rope, and R. Isaac adds that at first sin is like a passing visitor, then like a guest who stays longer, and finally it becomes the master of the house (Genesis Rabbah 22:6). Repeated often enough, bad behavior can eventually take over our inner world. As anyone who has ever taken the project of repentance seriously can attest, to stop committing sins that have become deeply ingrained habits speaking ill of others, violating Shabbat, eating unhealthful foods, etc. can be excruciatingly difficult. On the surface, at least, there is a tension here between what Maimonides, Sarna, and Fromm Sin may have a tenuous hold on us say, on the one hand, and what I have written, at first, but over time its grip on the other. Following the biblical narrative, becomes tighter. they all speak about losing the capacity to repent and change altogether, while I have suggested that over time change becomes pulling a marionette s strings as allowing, or perhaps encouraging, the oppressor-king to persist in his habitual willfulness and presumption. Robert Alter, The Five Books of Moses: A Translation with Commentary (2004), p. 330 (emphasis mine). Allowing is permissive hardening; encouraging is effective. 13 Erich Fromm, You Shall Be as Gods: A Radical Interpretation of the Old Testament and Its Tradition (1966), p

7 difficult but not impossible. Yet the tension may be more theoretical than real: Pharaoh is the paradigm of freedom run totally amok, of human evil utterly without trammels or limits. Most of us are not Pharaoh; even if in certain situations change becomes impossible, it is nevertheless crucial to emphasize that such cases are extremely rare. Most of us are faced with the daily struggle of exercising our freedom in the midst of very real limitations, not least the limitations we ourselves have created. Maimonides writes what he does about Pharaoh in the context of motivating people to change, not dissuading them that it is possible. What the extreme case of Pharaoh is intended to teach is that we should be careful with our choices and not Pollyanna about how we are always and everywhere free without limits. We often think of freedom as a fact, but it is We often think of freedom as a fact, also and perhaps primarily an aspiration. but it is also and perhaps Real freedom requires, R. Joseph Soloveitchik primarily an aspiration. ( ) writes, a continuous awareness of maximal responsibility by man without even a moment s inattentiveness. Mindfulness and constant, exquisite attention are 14 necessary for freedom to flourish. Freedom needs to be nurtured and attended to, not taken for granted. R. Shlomo Wolbe ( ) adds that freedom is not at all part of humanity s daily spiritual bread. It is, rather, one of the noble virtues which one must labor to attain. It is not lesser than love, and fear, and cleaving to God, acquiring which clearly demands great effort. We can acquire freedom, and therefore we must acquire it. Freedom is, in other 15 words, a spiritual project. In order to thrive, it must be brought into awareness (Soloveitchik) and actively cultivated (Wolbe). Then, and only then, can we soften our hearts. Shabbat Shalom. 14 Joseph Soloveitchik, On Repentance: The Thought and Oral Discourses of Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik, ed. Pinchas H. Peli (1984), p Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, Alei Shur, vol. 1, p

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