Welcome to The Morning Scroll! I'm Rabbi Deena Cowans from Mishkan Chicago and you're listening to what will be a quick dive into this week's parsha. If you’ve been meaning to brush up on your Jewish literacy, or you’re looking for some inspiration, you’ve come to the right place. This week, we read Parashat Va’era, “And God appeared”, to, guess who? We’ll start with a brief recap:
God heard Moshe’s complaint last week that things had gotten worse for the Israelites, so God says, “ok, real talk Moshe, let’s get to know each other- I’m YHVH, I had a relationship with your ancestors, now I’m going to redeem the Israelites and it’s gonna be awesome.” The Torah then lets us know Moshe’s lineage, so we know how he fits into the family tree, then God continues telling Moshe how to put the big plan into action. God warns Moshe that Pharaoh is going to refuse some more but eventually God will do wondrous things and the Israelites will be free. So Moshe and Aaron head back to the palace, where they exchange magic tricks with Pharaoh people, then God turns the water to blood, then makes frogs appear. Pharaoh is not happy and says, “If you make it stop I’ll let you go” so Moses does but then Pharaoh changes his mind. So Aaron brings about plague 3, lice, and the magicians of Egypt are seriously impressed, but Pharaoh isn’t so onto plague 4, wild beasts, which destroy everything except the area where the Israelites live. Pharaoh then tries to make a compromise, saying “Ok you have to be slaves but you can go do stuff for God temporaily” but that’s a no go. Plague 5 then kills off all the cattle, then plague 6 gives the Egyptians horrible boils, at which point God sort of taunts Pharaoh, saying “Those dead cows? Coulda been you.” Immediately we get plague 7, horrible hail, which is filled with fire and kills all the trees. At which point, Pharaoh says, “I have sinned, God is great, get out of here, just make this fiery ice ball doom stop!” So Moses does and Pharaoh changes his mind again..
This parsha has a real sense of foreboding in it, where like we know it’s bad but we also know the worst is yet to come… but it also has some humor. Which I think is intentional- the first few plagues especially are things that none of us want to deal with but fundamentally are just kind of uncomfortable, like having frogs everywhere or everyone getting lice. To which the ancient sage Rabbi Akiva says, I see your ridiculous plagues and I raise you one even more ridiculous midrash. He looks at the verse describing the infestation of frogs, and notices that actually, the Torah doesn’t say Frogs in the plural… it just says frog, in the singular. Not a typo, he says, but actually what happened is that there was just one, MASSIVE frog, and it plopped it’s huge, squishy frog body down over ALL of Egypt and sat there until Moses sent it hopping off. I share this with you in part because it makes me laugh every time I think about it, and I think part of Rabbi Akiva’s lesson is to look for the absurd in moments of challenge. But I also think he’s making a deeper point, that the absurdity of the plagues is not some random retribution, but a commentary on the absurdity of slavery. In education, we talk about “appropriate consequences” instead of punishments- so if a kid causes a mess, for example, they shouldn’t be given a time out as punishment, they should be asked to clean up as an appropriate consequence. I see Rabbi Akiva’s midrash as a commentary on the plagues as appropriate consequences for Pharaoh and the Egyptians participating in the enslavement of the Israelites. They tried to do something absurd, oppressing another people out of an imagined fear, so they will be beset with absurd, imaginative things like giant frogs and uncontrollable lice. And then, as the plagues progress, they will begin to experience fear and suffering, appropriate to the fear and suffering they imposed upon the Israelites. Next week, when we read about the final plagues, we might want to question Rabbi Akiva’s paradigm of appropriate consequences, but for now, I want to offer Rabbi Akiva a blessing of gratitude for his reminder that we should be proportional in our responses, unafraid of a little silliness, and, of course, reminded that oppressing another person or peoples is an absurdly unfair, unjust thing to do.