Hello everyone and welcome once again to the Temple Institute Parsha class. My name is
Gedalia Meyer and I am podcasting from Maale Adumim in Israel. One of the age-old questions
on life is whether the things that happen to us are pure accidents and have no ultimate
significance, or were they meant to happen for some reason and are therefore of profound
significance. Of course there are middle positions on this debate, namely that certain things
were meant to happen and others are just coincidences. This issue is of great importance, for upon
it hinges any sense of meaning in life.
We all go through various moments on one side or the other of this debate. Even the most
cynical among us about these sorts of things, sometimes find themselves wondering if it
was really just a coincidence that such and such happened, or if it was a result of some
great plan. Correspondingly, even the biggest of believers sometimes wonders if there really
is some power making sure things go according to plan or if it is all just a haphazard series
of events strung together by the mere fact that one came after another.
It is almost certainly true that this question has been with us about as long as we were
capable of thinking such things. What really is the meaning behind all the things that
happen in life? It is almost impossible to imagine a time when human beings did not have
this question. Did they all believe without question that everything was meaningful in
some way? Or did they all believe without question that nothing was meaningful? Either
way is a tough call, since it seems all too natural that people should waver on this very
question.
It is also true, however, that the most recent centuries have seen a trend towards the cynical
side of this debate. There is little question that the scientific worldview has greatly
fostered this trend, with its natural explanations for almost everything. Nobody really puts
too much stock in the idea that some change in the weather happens for some divine reason.
Similarly, nobody really believes that natural events like eclipses or earthquakes or volcanoes
are somehow linked to some force of fate or to a divine power. If all that could easily
be explained away as nothing more than the blind force of nature, then who's to say that
everything is really any different? Even purely human events are brushed off as nothing more
than a coincidence. The person who did whatever they did may have exercised a free will choice,
whatever that really means, but as far as the effects of that choice on others are concerned,
its all a matter of luck or chance or whatever.
It s not that easy to remain committed today to the old view that everything happens for
a reason. We can tell ourselves this till from here to tomorrow, but that doesn t necessarily
mean that we really believe it. Taking such a leap requires a great deal of buying in
to a belief system, one that flies in the face of much of what is considered rational
today. Nevertheless, the belief persists, probably because there is this nagging feeling,
that despite all evidence to the contrary, there just has to be some meaning behind it
all. Otherwise, we all know, there is no real purpose to our existence.
There is no question that the Bible is one of the prime representatives of the it all
happens for a reason point of view. There is just so much there that points in this
direction, that it is pretty senseless to pretend otherwise. It happens that this week
s Parsha, along with last week s, serve as some of the prime examples from the Torah
of this very worldview. It really spells things out in such great detail and with such absolute
confidence that this is the way things work, that it seems impossible that anybody could
have thought otherwise.
The Parsha is called Bo. It s a short word that simply means come . It is one of the
words in one of the opening verses, and by either fate or chance, a Parsha got named
after it. It is used as part of an instruction from God to Moshe to come to Pharaoh and to
tell him that God has hardened his mind to stubbornly refuse to submit to the crushing
power of the previous seven plagues and to finally allow the Israelites to leave. The
reason for this counter intuitive coercion, is, as the Torah states, in order to place
My miraculous designs in his midst. And that you will relate this to your children and
grandchildren that I played with the Egyptians through these miraculous signs that I placed
among them, and they will know that I am God.
From this dramatic introduction the Parsha then goes into the remaining three plagues
- locusts, darkness, and the killing of the first born. This makes the grand total of
plagues into the famous number of ten. At that point, we find later in the Parsha, Pharaoh
finally has had enough and overcomes whatever personal or divinely ordained stubbornness
he may have had, and releases the Israelites to go on their fated Exodus.
But much happens before everything hits that grand crescendo. First there is the plague
of locusts, which devastated the remaining crops. Then there is the mysterious plague
of darkness, which seems to paralyze everyone so that they couldn t budge from their houses,
while the Isrealites had light in their part of Egypt. Finally it all comes down to the
killing of the first born. That plague, unlike most of the others, is introduced with great
fanfare and religious significance. It is not just the tenth plague out of ten. It is
not even more important than the others by the sheer fact that it worked. All of that
is true, but the introduction to this plague would have ramifications for the Israelites
that would last as long as their religion remained relevant. The leadup to this plague
was the detailed instructions for the central holiday of Passover.
The Passover meal, with its ritual lamb accompanied by matzah and bitter herbs, was to commemorate
both the miraculous final Exodus from Egypt, and all the suffering the Israelites had endured
for a couple of centuries. This combined celebration and recollection would become the defining
feature of Judaism. This first Passover was unique in that it wasn t really a commemoration
at all. It was the real thing that was to be commemorated all through the centuries.
The killing of the first born was the final event to which that meal was directed. It
was to be at midnight, when the meal was still in session, that the killing would take place.
As horrible and as traumatic as it may have been, the Israelites were safe because they
were under some sort of divine protection.
All of this is foretold in the Parsha and then it all happens according to plan. The
Exodus itself actually takes place towards the end of the Parsha, complete with matzah
and all the rest. The Israelites finally leave their land of servitude and head out into
the great unknown desert. The Parsha ends with a couple of paragraphs of recap which
are meant to serve for future generations to remember exactly what it was that really
happened at that unique crossroads of destiny and divine guidance. This, more than anything
else in the Torah, would serve as the founding moment in Israelite and Jewish history.
But we are going to focus on the beginning of the Parsha. That idea quoted from the very
first verses in the Parsha, that all of this was so that God could place the miraculous
signs in the midst of Egypt, so that future generations of Israelites would know that
I am God , needs to be explained. Was this the way to demonstrate that important theological
point? Did it have to come through these catastrophic plagues? Furthermore, there is a basic question
on the entire series of plagues. God had told Moshe before it all started that Pharaoh would
refuse to buckle under, either by his own obstinance or by divine influence on his will.
In other words, none of the plagues would work. There is really no reason that this
same obstinance couldn t have happened after the final plague also. It didn t, but it certainly
could have. What was the point of all those plagues if they were just set up to fail in
what they were intended to do? It seems like we could have simply gone straight to the
tenth plague, if that was the only one that was fated to work, and not bothered with all
the rest.
In truth this question was addressed, in a sense, in last week s Parsha, there God explains
to Moshe that all of these plagues and Pharaoh s refusal to submit after each one, didn t
really have to happen. Things could have worked out so that a simple deadly disease struck
the Egyptians and they would have been wiped out. That would have made things a lot simpler.
But that option wasn t taken because of this same underlying rationale - that everyone
should know of the awesome power of God and that God s name be known all over the world.
This is really the reason for all those earlier plagues. It wasn t to soften Pharaoh or anything
like that. On the contrary, if anything they hardened him. It was to drag things out so
that the divine power of God would be known everywhere.
So why were so many plagues necessary? Why not just one big one that really hit the spot?
Perhaps the answer to that question is that if there was only one, people would eventually
write it all off as a fluke of nature. Just like any disease or natural catastrophe could
be dismissed as a random act of nature or chance, so even something like the first born
dying could somehow be explained as a coincidence. It was only in combination with all the others
that this simplistic way of looking at things became untenable. There was just too much
there to write off as chance or nature or anything else other than the hand of God.
Sometimes the pendulum just swings too much in one direction of this great debate, and
people simply have to realize that there was no way this was all due to chance.
Perhaps this is why Passover is such a big deal in Judaism. It is to solidify this belief,
in spite of whatever counter arguments may arise in the future, that there was no question
that all this happened because no less than the power of God intervened in the workings
of the world. In a sense there can be nothing more important for the Jewish religion to
emphasize than this. It is such a vital idea that an entire holiday was set up right in
the middle of it all to pound it home. The first nine plagues were meant to fail in changing
Pharaoh's mind. But they were essential links in the ultimate goal of ensuring that the
true significance of what happened during the Exodus not be relegated to one more chance
event.
We all have to go through this debate many times over the course of our lives. We go
back and forth, wavering and fortifying, questioning and resolving. This is because it is not an
obvious choice one way or the other. But there are events that always remind us, that, no
matter how much the world seems to be thrown to the whims of chance, there is always something
behind it all steering it in a certain direction. That undeniable suspicion, that we all sense
at one time or another, is the foundation of Judaism. Shabbat Shalom!