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A man sits at a slot machine. He’s been there for seven hours. His wife called twice; he didn’t answer either time. A year ago, he would have picked up without hesitation. Six months ago, he would have at least felt a pang of guilt. Now he feels nothing at all. Something fundamental has shifted inside him. The capacity to choose differently has atrophied like an unused muscle.
We recognize this pattern most clearly in addiction, but it shows up everywhere. Political views that have calcified beyond the reach of evidence. Old grudges that have become so much a part of our identity that we couldn’t release them even if we wanted to. The terrifying question underneath all these experiences is one most of us prefer not to ask too directly: What happens when our capacity to choose actually erodes? At what point does a person stop being someone who makes bad choices and become someone who can no longer choose otherwise?
Pharaoh faces something similar in Parshat Vaera. We usually read him as a cartoon villain, a stubborn tyrant who simply gets what he deserves. But the Torah presents him as something far more disturbing: a philosophical test case for the very boundaries of human freedom.
The text forces us to confront an uncomfortable sequence. In the early plagues, Pharaoh hardens his own heart through his own choices. Then, starting in Exodus 9:12, something shifts: “And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh.” If God locks the door, how can He justly punish Pharaoh for not entering? The question touches the deepest tension in religious thought—the collision between determinism and free will, between divine justice and human agency.
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Jewish thought and modern psychology converge on an insight that doesn’t resolve this paradox so much as deepen it. We are free to shape our character, but eventually, our character shapes us in return. The one who hardens becomes the one who is hardened. Pharaoh’s story isn’t ancient history; it’s a warning about the architecture of the soul.
1. The Habit Loop and the Loss of Plasticity
The first thing worth noticing is the subtle shift in language across the plague narratives. In Exodus 7:13, 7:22, 8:15, the text uses passive or reflexive forms—Pharaoh’s heart “was strengthened” or “became heavy.” These early plagues don’t describe God doing anything to Pharaoh. They describe Pharaoh doing something to himself, one choice at a time.
Consider the rhythm: Blood fills the Nile; Pharaoh dismisses it. Frogs swarm the palace; he promises to release the Israelites, then changes his mind the moment the frogs die. Lice cover Egypt; still his heart “was strong.” Each cycle reinforces the one before it, wearing a groove deeper into Pharaoh’s character until the response becomes automatic.
William James saw this with remarkable clarity over a century ago. In his foundational chapter on habit in The Principles of Psychology, James argues that every action leaves a neural trace making it easier to repeat. “The hell to be endured hereafter,” he wrote, “is nothing compared with the hell we make for ourselves in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong way.” Plasticity decreases with repetition. The first time you break a promise, it costs you something real. The 100th time, you barely notice.
Sforno on Exodus 7:3 offers a counterintuitive reading that initially seems to make the paradox worse. He argues that God strengthened Pharaoh’s heart to restore his freedom rather than remove it. The plagues were so catastrophically overwhelming that anyone would cave under that pressure—and caving under duress isn’t genuine choice; it’s coercion wearing the mask of decision. God’s strengthening allowed Pharaoh to choose based on conviction rather than survival instinct. The irony cuts deep: God preserved Pharaoh’s agency precisely so Pharaoh could use it to destroy himself.
Philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his 1971 article “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person”, articulated a distinction that clarifies what’s at stake. He distinguishes between “first-order desires” (what we want in the moment) and “second-order desires” (what we want to want). The addict wants the drug; the recovering addict wants to not want the drug. This second-order capacity represents a higher form of freedom—stepping back from immediate impulses to evaluate them. What happened to Pharaoh is that he gradually lost access to this level of reflection. He stopped wanting to want differently. Once that happened, the chooser disappeared behind the weight of choices already made.
As Steven Gotlib explores, Jewish thought locates free will at the “point of choice”—that moment when the decision hasn’t yet been made and genuine alternatives remain open. But once a choice is made repeatedly, it moves out of the zone of freedom and into the realm of nature. Make the same choice enough times, and it stops being a choice at all. Pharaoh’s early decisions to resist were freely made. But they were also cumulative, each refusal making the next one slightly easier, until refusal became automatic.
Freedom turns out to be a diminishing resource. Use it wisely, and it expands; use it poorly, and it contracts. The person who confidently declares “I can quit anytime” is often the very person who has already lost the ability to do so.
2. The Theological Threshold
Exodus 9:12 marks a turning point. For the first time, the text says explicitly: “And the Lord hardened the heart of Pharaoh.” The grammatical subject has changed. God is now the actor, not Pharaoh.
Any thoughtful reader will immediately object: If God is hardening Pharaoh’s heart, how can Pharaoh be held responsible? A locked door presents no moral test. Punishing someone for failing to walk through a door you’ve locked looks less like justice and more like cosmic entrapment.
Rambam addresses this directly in Hilchot Teshuva 6:3, and his answer is deliberately uncomfortable. It is possible, he argues, for a person to sin so greatly, or so many times, that repentance itself will be withheld as punishment. The gate of teshuva can close. Pharaoh serves as a case study: repeated sin, freely chosen over time, can result in losing the very ability to repent. The punishment fits the crime—you chose to close yourself off from change, so now you genuinely are closed off.
Modern neuroscience offers an unexpected parallel. The National Institute on Drug Abuse has documented how chronic substance use physically alters the prefrontal cortex, the brain region responsible for impulse control and judgment. Years of addiction don’t just create bad habits; they change the hardware. When someone caught in addiction says “I can’t stop,” they’re sometimes describing a factual state about their own brain.
Rabbi Shais Taub explores this intersection of spiritual and psychological reality. The “powerlessness” central to addiction recovery mirrors the religious concept of the closed gate. When an addict says “I can’t,” they’re often describing something factually true about their condition. The choice that once existed has degraded through repeated misuse. The door has begun to swing shut—not because someone outside closed it, but because the hinges rusted from within.
A view attributed to Abarbanel frames God as the “Cause of Causes”—the one who designed the system within which we operate. God didn’t reach into Pharaoh’s mind and flip a switch. He created the psychological and moral architecture of reality, and that architecture has built-in consequences. Norman Doidge documents in The Brain That Changes Itself how the brain physically reshapes itself in response to repeated thoughts and behaviors. The laws of character formation operate like gravity—they’re part of how reality works. When you harden your heart repeatedly, it becomes hard, not because God intervenes, but because that’s how brains and souls respond to that pattern. God’s “hardening” of Pharaoh may describe a consequence built into reality rather than a discrete supernatural intervention.
The Rambam’s closed gate and the neurologist’s damaged prefrontal cortex describe the same phenomenon from different vantage points. Agency is a “use it or lose it” resource. Free choices, accumulated over time, produce unfree outcomes.
3. Cognitive Dissonance and the Refusal to See
By the eighth plague, something strange happens. Pharaoh’s own servants turn to him and plead: “Do you not know that Egypt is lost?” The advisors see clearly what Pharaoh cannot. The country is being systematically destroyed. The cause is obvious. The solution is simple: let the Israelites go. Yet Pharaoh refuses. Two people look at the same disaster unfolding, and one has become blind to what the other sees without effort.
The 19th-century commentator Malbim notes this discrepancy. The servants perceive reality accurately while Pharaoh remains blinded by previous commitments. Each time Pharaoh refuses to relent, he invests more of himself in that refusal—his pride, his identity as a powerful ruler, his conviction that he knows better. To admit error now would mean admitting that all the previous suffering had been for nothing, caused by his stubbornness rather than necessity. The psychological cost of that admission grows with every plague until it becomes almost impossible to pay.
Leon Festinger formalized this in A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance. When we invest heavily in a position and encounter evidence against it, we experience genuine psychological pain. The obvious solution—updating our beliefs—is often the most costly because it requires admitting we were wrong. Far easier to double down, reinterpret the evidence, attack the messenger. Pharaoh watches his entire country devastated rather than concede. Conceding now would mean admitting all that devastation was his fault. His mind protects him by refusing to process what his servants could see clearly.
Psychologist David DeSteno’s research on trust explores how confidence in our own judgments can become pathological when it blinds us to contrary evidence. The line between healthy confidence and destructive self-deception is thinner than we like to think.
Hardening operates intellectually as well as emotionally, affecting how we think, not just how we feel. The mechanism protects the ego from the shattering pain of admitting “I was wrong all along.” The longer you’ve been wrong, the more shattering the admission. Eventually, the mind finds it easier to believe everyone else is wrong—the servants, the evidence, reality itself—than to face its own mistake.
4. The Idolatry of the Ego
Pharaoh’s first response to Moshe, before any plagues have struck, reveals the root of everything that follows. He declares that he does not recognize the Lord’s authority and sees no reason to heed Him (Exodus 5:2). The words function as a declaration of supremacy rather than a genuine inquiry. Pharaoh isn’t saying he doesn’t know who this God is; he’s saying it doesn’t matter. There is no authority he recognizes above himself.
Rabbinic literature diagnoses this with remarkable psychological acuity. Drawing on Yechezkel’s prophecy about a later Egyptian king who declared “the Nile is mine, and I created it,” the Midrashic tradition reads this same grandiosity back into the Exodus Pharaoh. The Nile made Egypt fertile—without its annual floods, there would be no agriculture, no surplus, no empire. Everything depended on that river. Pharaoh claims ownership of it, and from there the logic extends: if he controls the source of all life in Egypt, then in some sense he is the source. The delusion of self-sufficiency represents the ultimate narcissism, the endpoint of ego that has never been checked by reality.
Rashi on Exodus 7:15 notices a small detail. Pharaoh goes to the Nile early in the morning to relieve himself in private. Why the secrecy? Because he claimed to be divine, and gods don’t have bodily needs. So he hides his humanity to maintain the lie, sneaking out before anyone is awake. The detail is almost comic: the most powerful man in the known world creeping down to the river at dawn so no one would see him do what every human must do. The ego constructs elaborate deceptions to maintain supremacy, and the more elaborate the deception, the more fragile the self it protects.
Dacher Keltner’s research on power, described in an interview about his book The Power Paradox, reveals what unchecked authority does to the brain. Extended power produces changes resembling traumatic brain injury. Powerful people show reduced activity in the mirror system—the neural network responsible for empathy. They become worse at reading facial expressions, less able to consider viewpoints other than their own. Power literally makes people less capable of understanding others, which is precisely the capacity they most need to wield power wisely.
Rabbi YY Jacobson discusses the Chassidic concept of “yeshus“—a coarse, inflated selfhood that blocks the flow of anything beyond itself. The “hard heart” is simply a heart so full of “me” that there’s no room for anything else. When the ego expands to fill all available space, nothing can get in—not truth, not change, not God, not even the suffering of others.
Pharaoh’s declaration becomes comprehensible in this light. When the self becomes absolute, there is no room for anything higher. The ego becomes the ultimate hardening agent, transforming a heart into a closed system. And the great tragedy of unchallenged power is that it produces the blindness that will eventually bring it down.
5. The Possibility of Softening
Pharaoh’s story could easily be read as pure determinism—once you start down the path of hardening, your fate is sealed. But the text offers a crucial counter-narrative.
“He among Pharaoh’s servants who feared the word of the Lord brought his servants and livestock indoors; but he who did not take the word of the Lord to heart left his servants and livestock in the field.” Even in doomed Egypt, surrounded by a culture of denial and led by a king who had lost the capacity to see clearly, individuals retained the ability to perceive reality accurately and respond. The system wasn’t totally closed. Some Egyptians could still hear the warning, still feel appropriate fear, still act on what they knew.
The Netziv, in his commentary Haamek Davar, emphasizes this point. Even within a corrupt society, under a hardened tyrant, the individual is not simply determined by the environment. The capacity to “fear the word of God” remained available to anyone who hadn’t closed themselves off. Determinism applies to those who have surrendered their agency through repeated choices—people like Pharaoh who have crossed the threshold. For those who haven’t, the door remains open.
Carol Dweck’s research on mindset shows that people with a “fixed mindset” believe their traits are permanent. People with a “growth mindset” believe they can develop through effort. What makes this research striking is that the belief itself affects outcomes. Those who believe they can change are more likely to change. The “soft heart” begins with the conviction that softening is possible.
Jonah 3:6-10 provides perhaps the most stunning contrast to Pharaoh. The king of Nineveh was a pagan ruler of a notoriously wicked city. He hears Jonah’s prophecy and immediately repents—no bargaining, no excuses. He puts on sackcloth, calls for a citywide fast, and commands everyone to turn from evil. And God responds by withholding destruction. A wicked king can repent. A hardened culture can soften. Pharaoh serves as warning, not universal rule.
The hardening of the heart is a tragedy that can be avoided. We preserve our agency by practicing softness before the concrete sets—admitting error rather than defending it, listening to criticism rather than dismissing the critic, updating beliefs based on evidence rather than explaining evidence away. These small acts, accumulated over time, keep the heart pliable. They maintain the capacity to choose that Pharaoh lost.
Questions for Reflection:
- If hardening is a cumulative process of small choices, what is one small “softening” choice you can make today?
- Where in your life do you attribute your “stuckness” to “how I am wired” rather than “choices I have made”?
- Is there a relationship or opinion where you have stopped listening to new information because it threatens your identity?
- When was the last time you admitted you were wrong about something significant? What did that feel like?
This project is made possible with support from the Simchat Torah Challenge and UJA-Federation of New York. Learn more about the Simchat Torah Challenge and get involved at their website.
