Hevre,
Please forgive the irreverence of the subject line: afraid as I am of irrelevance, and in a desperate attempt to improve the ratings of this column, I've decided to do a Solomon Schechter and appeal to the sport fan in all (ok, most...some...a few?) of us. Perhaps we could launch a Netivoteha Shalom ratings of parashot in which humanism, love, inclusion, non-violence, universalism etc., would be at one end of the scale, and brutality, exclusion, fear, violence, particularism, etc., would be at the other end...
So, here are a few of the challenges, and occasional sighs of relief, I find in Parashat Bo:
1. God's hardening of Pharaoh's heart, which appears in Sh'mot and Va'era as well, continues justify the punishment of the Egyptians. Thus, the plague of locusts is justified "in order that I may display these My signs among them and that you may recount in the hearing of your sons and of your sons' sons how I made a mockery of the Egyptians and how I displayed My signs among them -- in order that you may know that I am the Lord (Ex. 10 1-2, NJPS translation)".
2. As philosophically and morally difficult as this is, we have an added element of Moses' ego (aggrandized already in 11:3 -- גם האיש משה גדול מאד בארץ מצרים בעיני עבדי פרעה ובעיני העם gam ha'ish Moshe gadol m'od b'eretz mitzrayim b'einey avdey Par'oh uv'einey ha'am) and temperment in the rationalization of the tenth plague: "Then all these courtiers of yours [of Pharoh] shall come down to me and bow low to me, saying, 'Depart, you and all the people who follow you!' After that I will depart. And he left Pharaoh's presence in hot anger (11:8)"
3. Israel was not allowed to venture outside of their houses when the destroyer struck down the first born of Egypt (12:22). In a famous homily by Ehad Harabanim Hamargishim, Aharon Shmuel Tamaret ( http://www.shalomctr.org/node/136 ) the one-time protection of the Israelites from the destroyer was interpreted as the general distancing of violence from Israel.
4. In the rules pertaining to the Pascal lamb, uncircumcised men, and non-Israelites in general, are not allowed to participate in the ritual. Volumes could be written on the implications of this prohibition, then and now, but what is astonishing to me is that the passage (12:43-50) imagines slaves taking part in the ritual. Not even one commentary that I could find points out the incongruity of celebrating freedom while keeping slaves...did the authors of the Haggadah have slaves in attendance in mind when they included the line: "Hashata avdey, l'shana haba'ah b'nai horin -- this year we are slaves, may we be free next year ?"
5. The text (11: 2-3, 12:35-36, embellished by rabbinic legend) wants us to know that the Israelites departed from slavery with significant amounts of Egyptian wealth. As I mentioned a while ago, medieval commentators go to exteme lengths to show that the Israelites did not steal this wealth, but rather it was bequeathed to them as gifts. I particularly like the way Rabbenu Hananel introduces the issue: חס ושלום שיתיר הקב"ה לגנוב דעת הבריות שישאלו מהם כלי כסף וכלי זהב ולא ישיבו להם (has V'shalom sheyatir hakodesh baruch hu lignov da'at habriyot sheyish'alu meyhem chley chesef uchley zahav v'lo yashivu lahem -- perish the thought that God would allow them to behave fraudulently and borrow silver and gold and then not return it). Hizkuni, Sforno and Ha'amek Davar, going against the trend, say that it was davka a loan, so that Egypt would run after them to get it back when they left and then be drowned in the Red Sea. In his comment on "Let each man and woman borry from their רע (re-ah, neighbor/friend, 11:2), Rabbenu Bahya points out (wistfully?) that the fraternity that prevailed among human beings was lost after the Torah was given to Israel.
ומה שהזכיר לשון רעהו ורעותה, יראה לי שקודם מתן תורה היו כל הבריות חברים כאחד אבל לאחר מתן תורה שהחזיר הקב"ה את התורה על כל אומה ולשון ולא קבלוה עד שקבלוה ישראל יצאו כל האומות מן האחוה והריעות ונשאר השם הזה בעם ישראל בלבד
Uma shehizkir l'shon re'ehu ur'uta, yera'eh li shekodem matan torah hayu kol habriyot haverim ke'ehad aval l'ahar matan torah shehehezir hakodesh baruch hu et hatorah al kol uma v'lashon v'lo kibluha ad shekkibluha yisrael yatz'u kol ha'umot min ha'ahvah v'hare'ut v'nish'ar hashem hazeh b'am yisrael bilvad
7. We (and most of the traditional commentators!) are so used to reading מה זאת (ma zot, what is this? 13:14) out of context, as one of the lines of the four sons in the Haggadah, that we don't realize, as did Sforno, and much later, Hebrew University Prof. Israel Knohl, that the child has witnessed, and is simply reacting to the destruction of the unredeemed firstborn donkey. Sforno uses traditional legend to tell the rise and fall of the donkey, which, aside from bearing great resemblence to both the Egyptians and the Israelites, was used by the latter to carry out the silver and gold of the former; the donkey was therefore sanctified, but did not rise high enough to become "eligible" to be sacrificial animals, and therefore must be destroyed if not redeemed.
Knohl uses this scene of horror, scene of woe, rising from the shades below, adding new terror to the night (listen to "Scenes of horror", from Handel's Jephtha, I'm happy to send the aria upon request) to teach that the God of the Exodus story is not the God of justice, but rather the God of might; the essence of the story is the demonstration of God's terrible power, which is why בחוזק יד (b'hozek yad, with a strong arm) is repeated throughout the story. This is not a god to be loved but rather a god to be feared, and everything that can be said about that was recently summed up by Terry Eagleton: "A theologian friend of mine maintains that the opposite of love is not hate, it is fear. The image of Jesus in the Gospels is of someone who is fearless. People clutching on to their region [sic] or sect are very fearful of what lies beyond, and therefore very dangerous." http://observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,2228092,00.html
Posted for Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom
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