Torah Portions Va'era/Bo
The Hebrew Bible features three accounts of the plagues, which vary in the sequence, number, and content. In the narrative in our portion of the week, there is a sophisticated literary structure with a pattern of three groups each comprising three plagues. The climactic tenth plague possesses a character all its own.
The first two afflictions in each triad are forewarned; the last always strikes suddenly, unannounced. Furthermore, in the case of the first, fourth, and seventh plagues, Pharoah is informed in the morning and Moses is told to "station" himself before the king, whereas in the second of each series Moses is told to "come in before Pharaoh," that is, to confront him in the palace. Finally, in the first triad of plagues, it is always Aaron who is the effective agent; in the third it is always Moses.
The controlling purpose behind this literary architecture is to emphasize the idea that the nine plagues are not random vicissitudes of nature; although they are natural disasters, they are the deliberate and purposeful acts of divine will--their intent being retributive, coercive, and educative. As God's judgments on Egypt for the enslavement of the Israelites, they are meant to crush Pharaoh's resistance to their liberation. They are to demonstrate to Egypt the impotence of its gods, and, by contrast, the incompatibility of YHVH, God of Israel, as the one supreme sovereign God of Creation, who uses the phenomena of the natural order for his own purposes.
(from Nahum Sarna's commentary on Exodus, JPS 1991)
Q.
In preparing a d'var Torah (Torah lesson) on Parashat Va-era, I found myself paralyzed by a reawakened sensitivity to the harshness of the pedagogy of the Exodus from Egypt. It seems that the whole story is there just "to teach us a lesson", a phrase so redolent with memories of classroom oppression that it strikes a deep chord of unease...
A.
You have reached a very special, albeit painful place - that of solidarity. By not accepting the suffering of the Egyptians as inevitable and well-deserved, you have avoided falling into the trap of sectarian cheerleading. We walk in the footsteps of generations of caring, sensitive interpreters when we shrug off the triumphalist reading.
Biblical commentators from late antiquity to modern times, in Midrash and philosopy, have repeatedly searched for the deeper meaning in the revelation of the various names of God ("I was revealed to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob as El Shaddai; as YHWH I was not known to them..." Ex. 6:3). An aspect of God not prominent in Bereshit (Genesis) is revealed in Shemot (Exodus), the commentators conclude: the immanent and compassionate (to Israel, at least) Liberator, rather than the omnnipotent and transcendant Creator.
Midrash Rabba already struck the solidarity theme in the burning bush episode in last week's parasha:
"Why does the divine revelation use a lowly bush and not a glorious tree as its base? It is as if God quotes from the morning prayers: Imo anochi b'tsara -- I am right there with him in the thick of the trouble (Psalms 91); if Israel is caught in oppression, the very least I can do is reside in a thorny bush!"
With Abraham Joshua Heschel, the 20th-century philospher whose 25th jahrzeit was recently commemorated in the Jewish (and interfaith) community throughout the world, the idea of solidarity reaches its full development as an essential, pervasive and limitless element in two inseparable realms, those of universal morality and universal spirituality:
Man's most precious thought is God, but God's most
precious thought is man.[*] A religious man is a person
who holds God and man in one thought at one time,
at all times, who suffers in himself harm done to others,
whose greatest passion is compassion,
whose greatest strength is love and defiance of despair.
(Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity,
Noonday Press, New York, 1996)
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[*] Egyptian as well as Israelite -- jm. [back]
Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. He is founder and director of Clergy for Peace, an interfaith institute for peace and justice in the Middle East. Rabbi Milgrom lives in Jerusalem with his three children.
