Free will, confirmation bias and miracles

The importance which Judaism attaches to the notion of human free will is the focus of several chapters of Judaism Reclaimed. We note how Rambam describes it as

“a great foundation and a pillar of the Torah…Were God to decree on any person to be righteous or wicked, or were there to be a matter that pulled a person’s heart…towards one of these paths…with what justice could God punish the wicked and reward the righteous?”

Yet at the same time we examine several challenges to this doctrine, both in terms of how to reconcile it with God’s foreknowledge, and from various passages of the Torah itself. One such challenge presents itself at the start of this week’s portion, with God declaring that he has “hardened Pharaoh’s heart” in order to arrange for him to be subject to miraculous punishments. What has happened to Pharaoh’s free will?

Rambam responds that sometimes God can withhold free will from a person as a punishment for an earlier sin. Pharaoh in this instance is being punished for refusing to obey God’s prior commands to release the Israelites. Ramban proposes a very different solution, suggesting that Pharaoh’s decision-making had already been skewed by the miraculous intervention of prior plagues. God’s hardening of his heart merely restored his ability to choose freely whether or not to obey.

In this guest post, Yael Shahar presents a fascinating alternative answer based on the psychological realities of the path taken by Pharaoh. In the process she also engages a fundamental question of how we can sense the miraculous within apparently natural causation – particularly with regard to the Torah’s miracles.

FREE WILL, CONFIRMATION BIAS AND MIRACLES

By Yael Shahar

One of the more perplexing aspects of the Exodus story is the repeated “hardening” of Pharaoh’s heart. This phrase—together with another that is equally mysterious—is the key to understanding the true miracle of the Exodus.

Variations on this enigmatic phrase appear nine times in the story of the Exodus; at times, Pharaoh is said to harden his own heart, while at others, God is the one “strengthening” the monarch’s resolve. Does this mean that Pharaoh has no free will? And if he does not, then why is he, his household, and the entire Egyptian society punished by plague after plague?

When Moshe and Aaron first approached Pharaoh, they didn’t request an end to the enslavement of the Israelites. Instead, they requested that the slaves be given time off for a religious festival—a seemingly modest request. Pharaoh’s answer was a firm “no”: “Pharaoh’s heart was hardened, and he did not listen to them.”

Pharaoh compounded this first mistake by becoming further entrenched in his determination not to let the slaves go free, even for a brief holiday. Each escalation led him to harden his resolve; his mindset had become his own prison. The fact that Aharon and Moshe started out with easily replicated tricks played into this entrenchment: once assured that his own magicians could reproduce their “signs and wonders”, Pharaoh had no reason to believe that anything unusual was afoot. The challenge to the status quo could be reasoned away.

Even when things escalated to a plague of lice, which Pharaoh’s court wizards were unable to reproduce, Pharaoh continued to “strengthen his heart”—habits of thought are hard to break. Only when a plague struck which the court wizards not only couldn’t reproduce, but from which they couldn’t even save themselves are we told that God strengthened Pharaoh’s heart.

"And the necromancers could not stand before Moses because of the boils, for the boils were upon the necromancers and upon all Egypt.But God strengthened the heart of Pharaoh, and he would not heed them, just as God had told Moses."

Midrash Rabbah, noting the change of language, says:

When God saw that Pharaoh did not relent after the first five plagues, He said: Even if Pharaoh now wished to repent, I shall harden his heart, in order to exact full punishment from him.

Pharaoh’s problem is known as confirmation bias: once a way of thinking becomes habituated, each time we resist change we further lose our ability to see contradictory facts. Or, in the words of our sages: “In the way that a person wants to walk, he is led.” (Makkot 12a)

Pharaoh’s dismissal of the evidence at hand, at first a conscious act, was now out of his hands; he had become a slave of his own stubbornness and could no longer see what was obvious to everyone else. There is a lesson here about how those in power can rationalize their decisions—even disastrous decisions—in order to avoid acknowledging past mistakes. Pharaoh continues to resist even to the extent where, with the court magicians themselves suffering from the plagues, his servants implore him:

"How long will this be a stumbling block to us? Let the people go and they will worship their God. Don't you yet know that Egypt is lost?"

So, returning to our initial question of whether Pharaoh did or did not have free will, we find that the answer is both “yes” and “no”. Pharaoh and his society were caught up in a process in which each ill-conceived decision bred another calamity, and yet they could find no way out of the cycle. Again and again, God “strengthens the hearts” of the Egyptians—first, so that they would refuse to free the slaves, and later so that they would pursue them to bring them back. The impression throughout is that no one was really acting from free will.

But how do we reconcile this seeming lack of free will with the Torah’s usual insistence that humans are free to choose? I think an answer is to be found in the Torah’s depiction of miraculous events. Consider how the Torah describes the splitting of the Reed Sea in next week’s parashah: Even though the text pictures the waters standing on either side like a wall, we are also told that God performed the miracle via a strong east wind that blew all night. The miracle might easily be ascribed to a natural—if freakish—occurrence.

So too, with the stiffening of the hearts of Pharaoh; had we not been told that God is “stiffening his heart”, we would see his disastrous decisions simply as spectacularly bad leadership brought about by confirmation bias and an arrogant nature incapable of admitting mistakes. However if we choose to see God’s hand in causality, including within the laws of psychology, then we can appreciate that confirmation bias was God’s method of actively leading Pharaoh.

In giving us the “inside scoop” the Torah is teaching us another way of seeing things: the same event can be viewed through more than one lens. We can see it as a natural phenomenon, which of course it is working within. Or we can see it “from the inside” as part of a larger plan. Both views are true; they each represent one aspect of a world whose Creator names Himself as “I will be as I will be”.

Yael Shahar has spent most of her career working in counter-terrorism and intelligence, with brief forays into teaching physics and astronomy. She now divides her time between writing, off-road trekking, and learning Talmud with anyone who will sit still long enough. She is the author of Returning, a haunting exploration of Jewish memory, betrayal, and redemption. You can find more of her writings at www.yaelshahar.com.

First posted on Facebook 21 January 2021, here.