Rabbi Chaim Goldberg is the head of Brit Olam, the worldwide organization for Noahides founded by Rabbi Oury Cherki.
When a Leader Stops Choosing: From Pharaoh to Tehran
How does the most sophisticated military force of the ancient world - the army of Egypt, the greatest empire on earth - march deliberately into a split sea and drown?
Think about what had just happened. Ten plagues had systematically dismantled Egyptian civilization. The Nile turned to blood. Crops were destroyed. Livestock died. And just days before that final march, death had visited every Egyptian household in a single night - the firstborn of every family, from Pharaoh's palace to the lowest servant. Egypt was on its knees.
And yet - Pharaoh's army charged into the parted waters. Willingly. With full force.
Where was their free will? Where was the most basic human instinct - survival?
The answer the biblical text offers is not mystical. It is architectural. And it turns out to be one of the most precise frameworks ever written for understanding why certain leaders, certain regimes, and certain civilizations choose destruction over surrender - even when every rational calculation screams otherwise.
Free Will Is Not a Permanent Asset. It Is a Structure.
Here is the theological problem that most readers quietly skip over: the Bible states explicitly that God hardened Pharaoh's heart. Which raises an uncomfortable question - if God himself prevented Pharaoh from releasing the Israelites, how is Pharaoh responsible? Where is the justice? Where is free choice?
The traditional answer reframes the entire question. In the first five plagues, the text is precise: "Pharaoh hardened his own heart." He was not coerced. He chose, repeatedly, to dig in. But each choice added another layer to his internal architecture - until the architecture became a prison. Only later, when the plagues exceeded anything humanly bearable, did God "harden his heart" - not as punishment, but to prevent a false surrender. A capitulation born purely from pain, with no genuine internal shift, would have left the toxic infrastructure intact - and produced the next enslavement under a different name.
The message is not mystical. It is structural: there is a point of no return. Beyond it, a leader does not choose - he operates from within a vessel he himself constructed, brick by brick, until its walls closed around him from the inside.
1945: When History Repeated the Bible
In the spring of 1945, every German officer with functioning reason knew the answer. The war was over. The Soviets stood on the banks of the Oder. The Luftwaffe was gone. German cities were ash. And yet - Hitler did not surrender.
More than that: in those final months, Germany actually accelerated the deportation of Jews to extermination camps - prioritizing those trains over ammunition supply to the front. Military logic had surrendered to the logic of an ideological structure that could no longer be stopped from within. In March 1945, Hitler issued the Nero Decree - ordering the total destruction of Germany's own infrastructure rather than let it fall to the Allies. Burn the house down so no one else can live in it. This is the architecture of institutional self-destruction.
Japan offers a parallel and even more disturbing case study. After the Battle of Midway in June 1942 - where Japan lost four aircraft carriers in a single day - its trained aviation corps never recovered. By 1944, American naval and air supremacy was unassailable. Japan's response was the creation of the Kamikaze Corps: 3,800 pilots explicitly trained to die. Not as a temporary tactic - as national doctrine. The "shinpū" - divine wind - became an official institution. Militarily, it changed nothing. The American fleet kept advancing. Okinawa fell. The home islands were next. Still, Japan refused to surrender - until Hiroshima and Nagasaki fractured the Bushido structure itself, and Emperor Hirohito spoke publicly for the first time in Japanese history.
What these two cases share is precise: the leadership was no longer calculating in categories of victory and defeat. It was operating from within a closed structure - one in which surrender had become existentially inconceivable, not merely politically unacceptable.
And here lies the deepest layer: neither Germany nor Japan surrendered when pressure increased. They surrendered only when the structure itself collapsed completely - an unconditional surrender that allowed an entirely new paradigm to be built from the ground up. This was not accidental.
The armistice of 1918 had left the toxic infrastructure intact, and Germany grew back twenty years later as something even more destructive. This time, the plagues ran to the end.
2025: A Structure Whose Walls Stand on Inertia Alone
The current strategic reality in the Middle East is a disturbing mirror image of both cases above.
Between September 2024 and today, Hezbollah has lost most of its senior commanders, including Nasrallah himself. Hamas's infrastructure in Gaza was nearly completely destroyed. The Houthis have absorbed repeated American and Israeli strikes. The Iranian economy bleeds under sanctions, and targeted energy infrastructure hits. The nuclear program stands under a sustained, publicly declared threat.
And yet, the Iranian leadership shows no willingness to reach a new arrangement.
Why? Because "the Resistance" is not a strategy Iran chose - it is the load-bearing wall of the regime. The moment the Ayatollahs yield on the principle of Israel's negation, they are not losing a war. They are demolishing the existential identity of the entire system. Like Pharaoh asking, "Who is He that I should obey His voice?" - Khamenei continues to operate in the language of erasure and confrontation even as the military architecture that once supported that language crumbles around him.
The paradox is structurally familiar: precisely when pressure increases, willingness to change decreases. This is not psychological stubbornness. It is a structural failure. A building from which the load-bearing frame has been removed - but whose walls continue standing through inertia alone, waiting to fall.
But Wait - Who Said They Lost Their Choice?
Here we must stop and ask the uncomfortable question. Perhaps a Japanese kamikaze pilot, or a member of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, is exercising the highest degree of free will? While Western man is enslaved to the rationality of biological survival and economic comfort, the radical believer actively chooses to sacrifice everything - body, state, economy - for an abstract ideal. The claim that they have been "hardened" by external forces is somewhat patronizing. It assumes that survival logic is the only legitimate logic, and that anyone who operates against it must have been stripped of volition.
The traditional interpretation accepts this challenge - and answers it sharply. This is not about the strength of the will. It is about the structure through which the will attempts to operate. A powerful will can be imprisoned inside a vessel it built itself. The kamikaze does not refute the diagnosis - he confirms it. The vessel had hardened to the point where self-sacrifice appeared more logical than concession.
What History Is Telling Anyone Willing to Listen
Three cases - Pharaoh, Nazi Germany, and Imperial Japan, Iran today - teach one structural lesson: genuine surrender is not a political act. It is an ontological event. It requires a leader to dismantle the identity he constructed - not merely adjust his tactics.
Germany and Japan did eventually fall. But not when pressure increased - only when the structure collapsed simultaneously from every direction. The end was not a calculated political compromise. It was a total structural collapse. For anyone managing policy toward Tehran today, this is a data point that cannot be ignored.
A closing note worth sitting with:
Precisely as Donald Trump's ultimatum to Iran reaches its deadline, Jews around the world will gather to observe the last day(s) of Passover - marking the moment Pharaoh's army entered the sea and disappeared into the sands of history. It is a remarkable convergence. The most powerful military force of the ancient world, days after suffering the death of every firstborn in the land, charged into split waters and drowned. Not one nation that has ever set itself against the people of Israel has ultimately prevailed.
Which brings us back to where we began: How does the greatest army of the ancient world march into a split sea?
Now you have the answer. It is not about military capability. It is not about intelligence failure. It is about a vessel that hardened itself, choice by choice, until the walls closed from the inside - and the only direction left was forward, into the water.
The Bible did not promise the price would be low. It only described it. And collected it in full.
The sea split once. It is splitting again.
Come stand on the right side of the water.
Blessings from renewal Hebrew JERUSALEM 🙂