January 22, 2009
One of the complexities of Jewish tradition is the tendency of later generations to read the documents of the earliest generations through the lens of interpretations offered by intermediate generations.
As one example: Exodus clearly states that Moses, Aaron, and the elders saw the God of Israel (24:10). For medieval Jewish commentators, the idea that a) God could have a tangible, hence visible, “body” and b) that human beings could possibly apprehend such a body was an offense to their philosophical sophistication. So they refract the story into something like a “mystical vision” or a “symbolic representation” — anything but what the text itself in Exodus clearly states.
Many generations later, modern Jews reading Exodus 24:10 receive the text with the mediating minimalism of the medievalists and so, as one example, the popular Hertz Chumash comments: “It is supposed that they fell into a trance in which this mystic vision was seen by them.”
Other familiar biblical stories reach many Jews through secondary sources, such as the siddur (prayerbook) or the Pesach Haggada, where biblical texts are lifted out of context, sometimes emended, and other times edited by dint of where the quotation begins and ends.
This week’s portion, Va’era, introduces the narrative of what Jews know from the Haggada as “the Ten Plagues.” The Haggada distills the Torah narrative down to 11 words (the 10th plague is two words, makat behorot — the killing of the firstborn) and omits the narrative in which the plagues are embedded. Consequently, more Jews know “the story of the plagues” from the Haggada than from the Torah, which presents an impoverished reading.
Read in the context of the Torah and the Hebrew Bible, the narratives of the plagues take on more complex meaning. While we focus on the story as told in Exodus, Psalms 78 and 105 narrate the plagues as well — with the notable difference that in each case only seven plagues are mentioned. The dissonance in detail is significant, pointing to an underlying shared tradition among ancient Israelites of a mythic narrative of “the plagues” but an absence of agreement as to the number and sequence.
In contrast, the narrative in Exodus is a carefully edited literary accomplishment whose architecture is not evident if we focus only on the actual plagues and their sequence. As noted by many scholars — most accessibly Dr. Jeffry Tigay in his commentary on Exodus in The Jewish Study Bible — the writers and editors of the plague narrative created an elaborate structure.
Tigay teaches: The plagues as narrated in Exodus appear in sets of three, with the 10th plague being an emphatic ending. In each of the sets of three, the first and second plagues are announced in advance; the third is not. In each of the sets of three, the first is announced by Moses to Pharaoh in the morning at the Nile (“station yourself before Pharaoh”); the second is announced without specifying the time of day (“go to Pharaoh”). Aaron is the inciter of the first three plagues. In the second triad, Moses brings on the first two, God the third. In the third set, all the plagues are brought on by Moses. The final plague, significantly, is brought on either directly by God (Exodus 11:4) or by “The Destroyer” sent by God (Exodus 12:23).
The careful construction of the narrative suggests more than an attempt to record or recreate actual history. (In any event, the historicity of the story in Exodus would conflict with the parallel recensions in Psalms 78 and 105). Dr. Carol Meyers in her New Cambridge Bible Commentary to Exodus notes that the word “plague” is attached only to the hail (Exodus 9:14) and the killing of the firstborn. The other “plagues” are denoted as “signs” or as “wonders.” Because we so often encounter the story in the Haggada alone, we have subsumed the discrete and deliberate biblical Hebrew under the collective term “plagues,” again yielding an impoverished reading.
There are a number of ways to interpret the editorial architecture of the “signs, wonders, and plagues” as they appear in this week and next week’s portions. One that seems appropriate to the week when a new American president has been inaugurated is to see in the construction of the narrative an implicit message that whatever affliction challenges human dignity, decency and life itself results from a series of interconnected factors rather than from a single root cause. Rather than grouping all social ills under one heading, it may be more helpful to define which are “signs” of warning, which are “wonders” that make us pause and take notice, and which are “plagues” that immediately threaten life itself.
Some will come with warning; some will appear unannounced. One thing we do know: We do not have the luxury of allowing our “hearts to become hardened” because of the many challenges we face.
Richard Hirsh is executive director of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association, Wyncote, Pa.
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