Friday, January 4, 2008

Va'era: Connecting the Dots

Va'era, Exodus 6:2-9:35. Seven plagues, ranging from the weird (e.g., frogs) to the destructive and life threatening (blood and hail) and the worst is still to come, but we're so used to the count every Passover that we're dulled to the terror the Egyptians were going through. Can this be the working of the God of Israel? "So that you will know that there is none like our God (Ex. 8:6, 18; 9:14,16, 29)." It all comes to teach Pharaoh a lesson, an exercise in public relations. He's willing to let them go into the desert to pray, but God hardens Pharaoh's heart, because He's not finished showing his might. Count me out.

I must have read these chapters through half a dozen times, slowly, carefully, trying to no avail to pick up on something clever or meaningful variation in the storytelling or phraseology. Beginning with last night, and then this Friday morning, relevance crept up on me, gently, without flashing lights. I'll start from the end: on a Palestinian minibus at the southwestern checkpoint into Jerusalem, a woman behind me unsuccessfully pleaded with an Israeli female soldier perhaps one third her age: "I'm over fifty, and I want to pray [at al-Aksa mosque in the Old City of Jerusalem]". The reply: "Even if you're eighty you'll need a permit: get off the bus." Here it is: liberation theology comes (back!) to the Middle East.

I connected the dots last night in a passage that I thought was only of interest to biblical criticism: the discussion of God's name in chapter 6, in which Moses' question from last week's reading still echoes (Ex. 3:13): "When I say to them, 'The God of your ancestors sent me to you', and they ask me, 'What is his name?' what shall I tell them?" The story is also about finding meaning in chaos; in my particular predicament, close relatives have just had a baby and have chosen for him what seems to some of us to be an outrageous name, one that could only come via direct inspiration from a cruel god. Can I sit by and let them ruin this child's life? God forbid I should go out like Moses of chapter 2 and strike down the delusional parents; there must another way to tend this flock and bring back the lost sheep!

Some people change their mezuzah parchments when disaster strikes; the Egyptians were quicker to connect the dots of Israel's liberation than Pharaoh was (9:20; and even more clearly in next week's reading, 10:7). Midrash comforts us by telling us that slow learning is more the rule than the exception: 26 years ago this week, while driving in the Galilee, I heard a radio broadcast of a lecture by Yeshayahu Leibowitz that shook me so much it forced me to pull off the road. In reference to the propensity of some folks to add a fifth cup to the Seder, for the fifth verb of redemption, v'heveti (I will bring) (Ex. 6:8), he quoted R. Simai's teaching in the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 111a): "It says, 'I will take you' and 'I will bring you': learn about the exodus from Egypt from the entrance into the Land; just as in the latter case, only 2 out of 600,000 entered, so, too, in the former, only 2 out of 600,000 [really] left."

posted for
Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom

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