Reflections from Rabbi Ellis

Vaiera is the second Parsha in the book of Shmote. Last week, Israel was enslaved, Moshe was born, met G!d at the burning bush and unsuccessfully lobbied Pharaoh to set the Jews free. At the end of last week’s Parsha Moshe had succeeded in making things worse for the Israelite slaves and protested to G!d that he had delivered the Israelites greater suffering not freedom. This week G!d orders Moshe to start demonstrating the power of G!d. It starts with a magic trick in Pharaoh's palace, Aharon’s staff turns into a snake and progresses, in our Parsha, into seven plagues that affect the whole nation of Egypt.

The main topic of this week’s Parsha is the plagues, yet they don’t all occur in this week’s Parsha. There are ten plagues in total, seven are in this week’s Parsha and three in next week’s Parsha. These three numbers: ten, seven and three are all laden with meaning that can give us a better understanding of the purpose of the plagues. After all G!d could have freed the Israelites without a single plague, so why ten and why does the Torah break it into seven and three?

Seven is the ultimate Jewish number. The first thing we learn in the Torah is that it took six days to create the world, but seven days to complete it. G!d rested and enjoyed what he created during the six days on the seventh day and so too commanded us to rest on the seventh day. The reason that there are seven plagues in this week’s Parsha is to show us that by the end of the Parsha the Israelites had already ceased to be slaves in Egypt. They had acquired Shabbat, the ability to rest. This was an amazing change and achievement, after two hundred and ten years of back breaking slavery it took just seven plagues to liberate the Israelites. By the end of the Parsha Israel is in a strange limbo, they are no longer forced to work, but they are not yet free neither physically nor spiritually.

The partial freedom that we receive at the end of this week’s Parsha is a grave danger to our national mission. Once the Israelites were not enslaved, Egypt started being a good place to live or at least a bad place to leave. Now that Egypt wasn’t a toxic environment for us, why would we want to leave? The three of next week’s Parsha is a reference to our three patriarchs: Avraham, Yitzak and Yakov. G!d promised each of them that their children would inherit the land of Israel. The reason that G!d brought an end to our slavery in Egypt was not so that we should live comfortably in Israel. It was in order to fulfill the promise that G!d made to our forefathers. The first seven plagues were to stop the Egyptians from oppressing us, the later three were to make the Egyptians force us out of Egypt, otherwise we would still be there to this day.

We now understand the message behind the division of the plagues into seven and three, but why ten? True seven plus three is ten but that is not the message behind the ten plagues. It says in the Mishne “With ten utterances the world was created.” (Pirkei Avot 5:1) The ten plagues correspond to the ten sayings that G!d used to create the world. After more than two thousand years the world and its people had grown corrupt and oppressive. The ten plagues came to undo the unjust order that had taken shape after creation. The ten plagues tore apart the fabric of Egyptian society so that ten new statements - the Ten Commandments that G!d would give us at Sinai - could be used to create a new world. A world founded on justice and the knowledge of G!d.

Shabbat Shalom!

Yehoshua