Light And Life: The Eternal Lessons of the Exodus

Light And Life: The Eternal Lessons of the Exodus

D’var Torah for Parashat Bo

By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman

This week’s Torah portion, Bo (“Come In”, Exodus 10:1—13:16), recounts the last three plagues inflicted on Egypt.  It also includes instructions for celebrating the Passover, both the first one and for all subsequent generations.

The Ten Plagues are pivotal in the awakening of Jewish thinking.  They are majestic and universal; they are as much visual as visceral.  Together with the Parting of the Red Sea, they form bookends to the dramatic emergence of the Jewish People into history. No longer subjugated to other peoples and their cultures, from this point and into the unforeseeable future, the Jews would play a prominent role in the evolution of civilization.

There have been many attempts to explain the process and logic of the Ten Plagues. Interpretations range from a natural progression of cataclysmic events, to the plagues as proof of the superiority of the one Jewish God—The One Who Was, Is And Shall Be—over all Egyptian deities.  At the top of their hierarchy of gods, Egyptians worshipped Ra, the sun god.  But there ancient Egypt’s theology stopped. Egyptian thought could not conceive of anything greater than the power of the sun.

Jewish thinking goes beyond the limits placed by physical perception.  For Jews, the sun is definitely not the epitome of the God’s presence. Beyond the sun is God. God, in fact, is the very Creator of the sun, the One who gave it its place in the eternal spinning of the galaxies, the One who gave it a role: to bring light, warmth and fruition to the earth and all its being.

Through the first eight plagues inflicted on Egypt, one can perceive God’s work through nature and the natural realm.  All eight are enormous ecological disasters; they affect the environment, they wreak havoc on human health as well as the wellbeing of animals. The last two plagues, however, represent God’s power as coming from somewhere beyond nature. No explanation based on natural order can account for Darkness and for the Death of the Firstborn. 

It wasn’t only that the darkness was so thick that you couldn’t see a fellow human being standing right next to you.  Rather, it was the fact that, unlike Egypt, for Israel there was light.  A distinguishable boundary existed between the two, a clear line drawn between darkness and light. 

This was no magic trick or fantastic illusion.  On one side of the line there was absolute absence of light, darkness as complete as it was thick.  On the other, the sunlight was as brilliant and vivid as ever. 

With the tenth and final plague, a similar boundary was drawn between Egyptian and Jewish first-born males. A thick line of blood separated between the two peoples.  In one, there was death; in the other, there was life.  This was no arbitrary division.  Every first-born—from Pharaoh’s own son down to the lowliest slave—was either killed or redeemed, depending on which side of that line that person happened to be.

The symbolic meaning of the death of Egypt’s first-born males isn’t hard to understand.  It’s the cutting off of the possibility of future existence.  Pharaoh knew that.  He had tried to do exactly the same thing to the Jews when he ordered that all Jewish newborn males be thrown into the Nile.  Now he saw it happening to his own people, on a scale he didn’t even begin to imagine.  The first-born represents stability, continuity of family, legacy and tradition.  Too late, Pharaoh realized the consequence of his folly.  Without a future, he now understood, Egypt was doomed.  A new age had begun, and Egypt would never again play a major part in it.  Ra, Egypt’s sun, sank below the horizon, buried forever in desert dunes.

For the nascent Israelite people, however, the door to the future was thrown wide open.  It isn’t only that all Jewish first-born males were spared.  That in itself would have been sufficient—“dayeinu,” in the words of the Haggadah.  But along with this redemption came a mission and a purpose.  No fewer than three times in this portion does God instruct the Israelites to teach their children, for all eternity, the lessons of this redemption.

This message seems to be key to our survival, the reason and purpose of our continued existence.

There are two parts to this teaching.  First is the understanding that God’s existence cannot be explained merely through laws of physics and nature.  God’s power comes from somewhere above and beyond nature.  Second is our obligation to teach this lesson to each successive generation that follows us.

 Our existence, some three thousand years after the Exodus, is proof both of God’s power and of our resolve to play the vital role God had intended for us.

Not long ago, a child in our religious school asked me a pertinent question.  “Rabbi,” he asked, “how do we know that God hears our prayers?”

I looked into the child’s inquisitive eyes, I saw his pure soul, and I answered him: “Because you are here today.”

There can be no better proof than this.

© 2016 by Boaz D. Heilman