TORAH SPARKS
Parshat Vaera
January 21, 2023 | 28 Tevet 5783
Torah: Exodus 6:2-9:35 Triennial: Exodus 6:2-7:7
Haftarah: Ezekiel 28:25-29:21
Voices and Lips
Bex Stern-Rosenblatt
Smack in the middle of an otherwise very exciting parashah, we get a long list of names. Before God continues telling Moses what to say to Pharaoh, the parashah presents us with something that looks like a genealogy, taking us for a 14-verse detour down the generations. The story would still make sense, perhaps even more sense if the genealogy were not there.
Without the intervening genealogy, the story would read like this: God tells Moses to tell Pharaoh to send away the Israelites. Moses demurs saying, Look, the Israelites did not heed me, and how will Pharaoh heed me, and I am uncircumcised of lips? And God doubles down, commanding Moses and Aaron about getting Pharoah to let the people go. We skip the genealogy and continue: And it happened on the day the LORD spoke to Moses in the land of Egypt, that the LORD spoke to Moses, saying, I am the LORD. Speak to Pharaoh king of Egypt all that I speak to you. And Moses said before the LORD, Look, I am uncircumcised of lips, and how will Pharaoh heed me?
Both before and after the genealogy, Moses protests, saying he has uncircumcised lips. The genealogy seems to have no effect on him. His fear is the same after as it was before. It is strikingly similar to another story of a prophet having second thoughts. In the story of Elijah, in 1 Kings 19, God commands Elijah to appear before kings and to step outside his comfort zone. Elijah defines himself to God, saying, kanno kaneti l haShem, I have been zealously zealous to God. God then causes a number of miracles to occur, a great wind, an earthquake, a fire. These are followed finally by a kol demama daka a still small voice which Elijah seems to recognize as the presence of God. Yet still, even having encountered God, Elijah is unchanged. Once again, Elijah defines himself, using identical language, saying I have been zealously zealous to God. God s response to Elijah is to have Elijah anoint someone to succeed him, to prepare to take his place.
Reading our parashah in light of the Elijah story, we find Moses also not changing his mind, not deviating from his declaration that he is unfit to lead. We find God providing a successor or helpmate to Moses, just as God will do for Elijah. If Moses and Elijah are too stuck in their ways to succeed in God s mission, God finds other human agents to assist them, to unstick them.
Reading these stories together also brings an interesting comparison of the genealogy with the display of miracles in front of Elijah. The genealogy does not follow the usual format of genealogies in the Tanakh. We trace only Reuben, Shimon, and Levi out of all of Jacob s sons. Furthermore, most of the expected names are excluded – only Levi has his grandchildren named and not all of them are mentioned. We detail Aarons s children, and Korach and his brothers, but no mention is made of the children of Moses. Maimonides suggests that the names mentioned are to set up the stories to come. These names belong to the big stories of the Torah – the rebellion of Korach, swallowed by the earth, and the killing of Aaron s sons, consumed by fire. These are the moments of God displaying awesome and terrible power. These moments correspond precisely to Elijah s earthquake and his fire. And perhaps, they invite Moses to listen for a still, small voice instead. Perhaps, that still, small voice is Moses s own voice, coming even from uncircumcised lips.
But for the moment, just as Elijah was unable to change, Moses too doubles down on his stuckness after the genealogy. He says once again that he has uncircumcised lips, that he is unfit. The idea of being stuck, of being fixed in outlook and unable to change one s mind, features most prominently in our parashah in the character of Pharaoh and his heavy, hardened heart. Even as he seems to approach a change of heart, even when he can temporarily entertain the idea of changing his mind, Pharaoh always comes back to his initial position of refusal to let the Israelites go. The story told by the plagues is the story of how that fixedness breaks Pharaoh and Egypt with him. The story told by the Exodus is how Moses will learn to change, and will learn to find his own still, small voice.
God vs god
Vered Hollander-Goldfarb
Haftarah
The story of the Exodus would have been lackluster without the ten plagues, especially since we did not suffer from them. Some of the plagues invite art and evoke imagery. Images of frogs jumping everywhere (whether in picture or song) makes the story accessible to children of all ages.
To some commentators (see Ibn Ezra and Abarbanel on 7:27) the second plague is not about innocent frogs leaping around but rather about crocodiles. Reading the haftarah from Ezekiel it seems that those who chose this section indeed considered them crocodiles, monsters that controlled the Nile.
In this haftarah Ezekiel speaks of Pharaoh the king of Egypt as the great crocodile who lies in the midst of his rivers, Who has said, My Nile is mine; And I have made me. (Ezekiel 29:3) Pharaoh considers himself not merely a monarch but a god, a creator. No wonder he responds to Moshe s message from the LORD with derision who is the LORD that I shall hearken to His voice?! (Shmot 5:2).
The choice of the image of the crocodile by Ezekiel is not incidental. In his book Teva VaEretz BaTanakh (Nature and Land in the Tanakh) the botanist Yehuda Feliks writes about the crocodiles in ancient Egypt. These reptiles were considered holy in Egypt; they believed that the crocodile could foretell the future water level of the Nile and would lay its eggs at that line. As the Nile was the source of life in Egypt, this was a crucial part of the economy. There were many crocodiles in the Nile in ancient times. Interestingly, of all the pictures of hunting scenes that have been recovered from ancient Egypt, none include hunting of crocodiles. This, presumably, has to do with the reverence that the Egyptians had for this animal.
In response to the divine picture the Pharaoh has of himself, God mocks him I will put hooks in your jaw (29:4) as a fisherman may do to a hapless fish to pull it out of the water. Attaching the Nile fish to his cheeks would mock the very image of the well-manicured Egyptian kings we are familiar with from Egyptian drawings. God will prove to Pharaoh who is truly in power. It is God who will control both the Nile that Pharaoh claimed to be his own, and the image of the Nile – the crocodile.
When we consider Ezekiel s prophecy as a comment on our parashah we understand a bigger picture. The purpose of the plagues is to undermine the Egyptian deities. The revered Nile with its crocodiles, a visual symbol of the horrifying Pharaoh and all that the Egyptian State stood for (remember babies being thrown into the Nile?) will be struck by the LORD, the God of Israel. Ezekiel himself explains this in 29:6: And all the dwellers of Egypt will know that I am the LORD This haftarah is not merely a diatribe against Pharaoh, it highlights the purpose of the plagues: educating Egypt and its sphere of influence about the LORD as the supreme God. It is a God vs. god battle. The ancient Jews probably understood this very well.
Abra Cadabra
Joshua Kulp
The Halakhah in the Parashah
Our parashah introduces us to one of everyone s favorite topics magic. When Moses and Aaron first appear in front of Pharaoh, God tells them to perform the impressive sign of turning the staff into a serpent. Moses and Aaron produce the miracle, assumedly expecting Pharaoh to be amazed by the marvel. Pharaoh however calls his own magicians and sages and they produce the same results. This part is well-known from movies and popular culture. Perhaps a little less known is that Pharaoh s magicians also turn the Nile into blood (7:22) and are also able to produce frogs (8:3). Only at the third plague, lice (8:14) do we learn that there are powers that God has (or perhaps our God has) that the Egyptian magicians do not It is the finger of God, the magicians exclaim. Overall this framework leads to the conclusion that magic is effective, but that the really good tricks are reserved for God.
Classical rabbis were deeply ambivalent about magic. This is a topic I addressed in the first volume of Reconstructing the Talmud, where my co-author and I discuss a passage in which the rabbis exhibit awareness that magic is effective, and yet at the same time insist that God is the only true power in the world — there is no [power] but God. Jewish tradition and history is full of magicians, demons and spirits and one does not have to look far in sources to find rabbis acknowledging such forces, engaging with them and from time to time manipulating them (see here for an excellent treatment of the subject).
The question I want to briefly look at here is the permissibility of a Jew who wishes to practice magic. Exodus 22:17 dictates that a sorceress must not be allowed to live. Deuteronomy 18:10 warns, Let no one be found among you who consigns a son or daughter to the fire, or who is an augur, a soothsayer, a diviner, a sorcerer,one who casts spells, or one who consults ghosts or familiar spirits, or one who inquires of the dead. Clearly, the Torah strongly prohibits magic workers. But what exactly is a magic worker?
Mishnah Sanhedrin 7:11 notes that a mekhashef (a sorcerer the Mishnah reverses the gender) whom the Torah mandates be executed is one whose magic is not an illusion but is effective. R. Yehoshua refers to people who pick cucumbers using magic if it’s real magic, the punishment is strict (stoning), but if it is just an illusion, the practitioner is exempt. The Mishnah recognizes that most magic is not really magic it is only an illusion and pretending that one has the power to pull a rabbit out of a hat, cut a woman in half, or pick cucumbers is not a threat to God s sovereignty. Abaye (Sanhedrin 67b) compares the laws of magic with the laws of Shabbat, creating a tripartite system: Real magic, meaning effective magic, is punishable by the death penalty. Creating illusions is forbidden but is not punishable by death. But there is a type of magic that is permitted, as in the following remarkable story: Rav Ḥanina and Rav Oshaya: Every Shabbat eve they would engage in the study of the halakhot of creation, and a third-born calf would be created for them, and they would eat it. Rashi explains that Rav Hanina and Rav Oshaya s creation of their Friday night dinner was permitted because it was not they who created the calf but rather God.
This story encapsulates well the threat the rabbis felt from certain forms of magic. As R. Yohanan says on the same page of Talmud, magic contradicts God s entourage. Paradoxically, magic would be more problematic for those who believe in its efficacy. Again, on that same page of Talmud we read a story of a woman who was trying to take dust from under the feet of R. Hanina (in our book, we suggest that this was a love potion type of act). R. Hanina is completely unconcerned If you succeed, go and do it. [I am not concerned about it], as it is written: There is none else besides Him. As long as the act does not contradict God s sole power in the world, the notion that the world is structured in a unified matter, and each person cannot manipulate the world against the rules through which the world was created, then there is no problem with practicing magic and enjoying the performance of others practicing it. But when our acts assume Godly powers, bending the unified forces of the world to behave according to our interests, we must begin to question their legitimacy. It is a question to be asked about ancient science, which we today call magic, and perhaps about the type of magic we practice as well, which we today call science.