Modern technology attempts to convince us that its manipulation of nature is independent of our subjective conscious connection with the Almighty. Over time, we begin to lose our conscious agency, believing that the solution to all of humanity’s problems will come with enough scientific effort.
However, without subjective conscious effort and faith, we lose our ability to differentiate between good and evil and ultimately, we weaken our power of free will.
In this excerpt taken from a class given on the 26th of Tevet, 5786, HaRav Ginsburgh traces these issues back to the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh. The full class was published in Hebrew in the Bo 5786 issue of Nifla’ot.
Consciousness and Choosing What is Good
The Torah addresses the age-long struggle between faith (Divine wisdom) and science (mundane wisdom) through its description of the confrontation between Moses and Pharaoh—particularly in parashat Bo. There are many theological questions that this confrontation raises, one of which is God taking away Pharaoh’s free will and coercing him to resist Moses’ calls to free the Israelites after the first five plagues. Why would God possibly cancel an individual’s free will, even if he is an evil person?[1]
Free will is dependent on one’s faculty of da’at. Da’at is usually translated as “knowledge,” but it can also mean consciousness.[2] To da’at we attribute the ability to differentiate between good and evil, and without the subjective ability to tell the difference between them, there can be no free will. That is why the Torah tells us that, “Behold, I have set before you today, life and the good, death and evil…. And you shall choose life.”[3] Being able to choose depends on being able to subjectively identify the difference between good and evil.[4]
This is also why the child, who does not yet possess the faculty of consciousness of good and evil cannot yet exercise free will and consequently is also not held responsible for his actions—which is why children are not punished from Above. The Zohar[5] teaches that the verse, “You are my son, today I have given birth to you”[6] refers to a child on his Bar-mitzvah day, the day on which he is granted the faculty of knowledge.
Consciousness is innately aligned with good. In other words, the moment that an individual is conscious of the difference between good and evil, he or she is inclined to choose the good. Kabbalah associates one of the Names of God with each of the sefirot: Kel with loving-kindness (chesed), Elokim with might (gevurah), etc. The Name associated with the sefirah of knowledge (da’at) and with consciousness is אהוה,[7] whose value is 17, which is also the value of “good” (טוֹב), providing another demonstration of the inherent connection between consciousness and choosing good over evil. There is also a verse that hints at this connection, “Without knowledge, the psyche lacks goodness”[8] (גַּם בְּלֹא דַעַת נֶפֶשׁ לֹא טוֹב).
Egyptian Scientific Consciousness
During the Egyptian exile, our consciousness was in exile and therefore our ability to exercise free will was limited.[9] Only upon leaving Egypt did the faculty of knowledge, consciousness, and our free will gradually appear, until it was fully revealed at the Giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, allowing us to freely choose to accept the Torah with the foundational declaration, “We shall do and we shall hear” (נַעֲשֶׂה וְנִשְׁמַע). Accordingly, it is not that free will was taken from Pharaoh but rather that free will was still absent. For all of Pharaoh’s human capacity for reasoning,[10] without the capacity for free will, his decisions were closer to those of a brute that follows its nature and is bound by it.
Despite the Israelites in Egypt having descended from the Patriarchs who were fully conscious of God, and even though consciousness (da’at) is passed down from father to son, it can only persist for three generations. The grandfather is not limited to sharing knowledge with his grandchildren, he can share the true consciousness and the experience of knowing God. But by the fourth generation, the consciousness of God is forgotten, and the live tradition becomes an empty routine description. Once the consciousness had been lost to the Israelites, it was all the more so absent from Pharaoh, who is likened to the foreskin that conceals the covenant of circumcision. That is why Pharaoh boasted before Moses, “Who is Havayah that I should heed Him and let Israel go? I do not know Havayah….”[11]
With what did Pharaoh replace subjective knowledge of God? He himself was a great magician as were his magi, the so-called chartumim of Egypt. Witchcraft is based on the negation of Divine consciousness. If it is clear that God is the Creator and that “All is God and God is all” then the power of witchcraft is nullified. In our modern times, it is science and particularly technology that has succeeded witchcraft[12] in negating consciousness of God as the sole ruler of reality. There are scientists who completely reject God because they have succeeded in manipulating reality in important (albeit, limited) ways and are convinced that given enough time, technology will have no limits. Similarly, Pharaoh was not impressed by the fact that his magi could not duplicate the plague of lice, ostensibly because witchcraft could not manipulate any creature smaller than a grain of barley,[13] for Pharaoh believed like today’s scientists, that given enough time, his magi would figure out a way to manipulate these smaller creatures as well. Indeed, today we see that technology can control even sub-atomic particles.
Science and especially technology, because they purport to be objective, negate consciousness, which is sensitive to the human subjective experience. In the language of Talmudic reasoning, consciousness adds the gavra (subject) dimension to the cheftza (object) dimension.[14] In that generation, the Israelites together with consciousness were exiled to Egypt, the center of culture and science of the ancient world. In our generation, the major exiles of the Jewish people have been to the countries and cultural centers where belief in science is strongest and has become an addiction to science and technology. Success in manipulating and controlling nature leads to “extracting God from the equation.” But when God reappears, His reemergence undermines the seemingly consistent scientific understanding, making it irrelevant and forcing us to reunite Torah and science and introduce the supernatural into the natural. Indeed, we see that science is becoming more open to the notion that the human subjective perspective affects reality.
[1]. The question itself is one that can only be asked by Jews who possess free-will to a greater degree than all others. For more on the unique state of free will in Jews see Likkutei Torah, Emor 38b and the essay Kevod Malchutcha 5660.
[2]. The modern Hebrew word for “consciousness” (מוּדָעוּת) is cognate with da’at.
[3]. Deuteronomy 30:15 and v. 19.
[4]. Ma’or Einayim on parashat Bo.
[5]. 2:98a.
[6]. Psalms 2:7.
[7]. Pri Eitz Chaim, Sha’ar Keriyat Shema, ch. 25.
[8]. Proverbs 19:2.
[9]. In Kabbalah the state of exile is known as “three within three” (תְּלַת גּוֹ תְּלַת), the three emotive sefirot (and the three intellectual sefirot, including knowledge) were curled within the three habitual sefirot.
[10]. As is known, in the Tanya (ch. 2), the psychological tension in a Jew is between his animal soul and his Divine soul, so the equivalent tension in a non-Jew is between his animal soul and his intellectual (thinking) soul.
[11]. Exodus 5:2.
[12]. [Editor’s note: to understand this deep connection, see Lynn Thorndike’s monumental work, A History of Magic and Experimental Science.]
[13]. Sanhedrin 67b. This measure is about 1cm by 0.7cm.
[14]. See more in the class from the 20th of Tishrei, 5785, published in the Hebrew issue of Niflaot for parashat Noach 5785, pp. 10ff.
