Moses
Maimonides raises a fair question about this week’s Torah portion in “The
Eights Chapters” in his Commentary on the
Mishnah. In Parashat Bo’, God hardens Pharaoh’s heart, rendering it
impossible for Pharaoh to liberate the Israelites with the coming of locusts,
darkness, and warning of the death of the first born. With each plague’s
occurrence, Pharaoh appears willing to free the Israelites, but God prevents
him from choosing to do so, ensuring that the Egyptians will know the futility
of their gods and the might of Adonai. Maimonides, though, questions how God
could justly punish Pharaoh in the absence of free will. It raises the overall
question of our existence, our relationship to suffering, and the overall
arbitrary nature of life.
Now, my
thoughts on this matter are still developing. On some days, I find myself
bombarded with bursts of existential crises, questioning what it means to be
alive and cope with hardship amidst glimpses of joy or long periods of
distraction, and although this idea sounds bleak, my process this week has been
to imagine how to make the most of a possibly futile life. In this case, we
must accept that our existence is limited and that due to this mortal character
coupled with our ability to live freely, we will always compete with one
another for survival, inadvertently or purposefully causing human suffering. In
contrast, dealing with this relationship paradoxically produces what is most
special about human existence; life would almost certainly be devoid of purpose
unless we exercise our humanity as a response to man-made cruelty, creating
music, art, literature, and community. God, in whatever sense – abstract or
literal – watches over a most perfect universe, but the way to make this universe
most perfect was to constrain it in a way that creates imperfection.
Every human
deals with our swarms of locusts (for college students, like myself,
locusts=exams), our periods of darkness, and loss of other human life. Unlike Pharaoh, though, we exist in a way
that allows for choice in the midst of hardship. Why live at all if we are
connected in a web of suffering and mortality? The third predominant strand in
this web, free will, allows us to react to one another’s actions, as much as it
causes them. If life has no quintessential meaning or if suffering is fixed in
the universe’s design, then choosing to serve one another creates purpose. Developing
communities empowers us to find meaning in a place where meaning may not
certainly exist, and Judaism teaches us that we are always continuing the work
of creation. We may not know why we are
here, but God does not harden our hearts so that we can accomplish and formulate
anything in the midst of this
discovery, even among locusts or other adverse conditions.
