A dvar Torah for Parshat Bo.
A dream: I am walking through a sliding glass door to someone’s backyard pool. The pool is so poorly maintained that it can only be called a backyard pond. At the pond’s farthest edge, murky water barely covers layers of brown silt. One slimy rock pokes out through the water, and on it sits a leaf, folded over. Gradually, my eyes adjust and I begin to see the reality beneath the silt. The rock is really a giant bullfrog and the leaf is a pair of wings attached to a grasshopper the size of a toothpaste tube.
Dreams mean many different things. This could be a dream reminding me that I really need help cleaning my house. Or encouraging me to reach into the depths of my unconscious and let hidden talents take shape. Interpreting a dream is like interpreting a Tarot card: you ask a question, then use the image to spark a creative process of ideas and insight. The day before the dream I had wondered, “What shall I talk about for Parshat Bo?” And the next morning I knew: frogs and locusts, animal plagues.
Torah describes ten plagues wielded by God against Pharaoh in the battle for freedom. As Torah tells it, every single plague includes animals. In the plague of blood, fish die. Frogs, lice, wild beasts and cattle disease are self-explanatory. Boils affect people and their livestock. By the time hail pelts down, Egyptians who are convinced of God’s power by the first six plagues take care to protect their animals. Locusts swarm. During the plague of darkness, Pharaoh and Moshe discuss who owns the Israelites’ livestock. And, as the moment of the death of the firstborn arrives, not even a dog barks.
Torah does not necessarily have to give animals starring roles, but it does. Why?
Perhaps, in Egypt, people simply lived close to the land.
Perhaps the narrator was especially attuned to animals.
Perhaps the intent is to write a great children’s story. Just before and just after the tenth plague, Torah says, when your children ask about your spring rituals, tell them about the killing of the firstborn, about what God did for me, about God’s might.
Perhaps the point is to contrast God’s cosmic power with Pharaoh’s political power. God commands the hosts of heaven and earth in ways no earthly ruler can.
Perhaps there’s an ecological message. Pharaoh believes he can exploit natural and human resources. Perhaps this kind of exploitation leads to devastation of crops, animals and humans.
Perhaps each animal carries a symbolic message and should be examined separately. Midrash Shemot Rabbah (10:6) suggests that frogs remind the Egyptians of their exploitive economy: because they could not use or sell frog parts for profit, no one took responsibility for cleanup. They simply left the carcasses to pile up and stink. I’ve suggested that the locusts, which are solitary grasshoppers transformed by scarcity into a fierce flying tribe, represent the transformation of the Israelites from individual slaves to an organized resistance group. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggests that the silent dogs recognize the humanity of the Israelites in a way that Pharaoh never did.
Perhaps animals star in the story because the miraculous plagues are a kind of magic. To be sure, God’s magic is greater than the magic of the Egyptian conjurers. The Egyptian wizards conjure a dragon, but Aharon backed up by God, conjures a more powerful dragon. Perhaps Egyptian magic relies on a super-keen human understanding of the laws of physics, while Divine magic simply drives or overturns the laws of physics at will.
How do animals help effect magic? Perhaps traditions of “spirit animals” in shamanism can help answer. But “spirit animals” are, in fact, spirits: images of animals that appear in trances, visualizations or dreams, bringing metaphorical messages and insights. Animals in the plague story are spirit animals to us readers, but in the story they are flesh and blood. Perhaps traditions of a witch’s “familiar” can help answer. But transcripts of rural witch trials from sixteenth century England show that animal familiars were not actually helpful to witches. Usually they were stray cats who showed up, demanded food, bit the witch, and then engaged in obnoxious, destructive antics against the witch’s wishes.
Perhaps modern biology can help answer. Our perception of the world comes to us through our bodies. We have sense organs that collect particular kinds of information, and neural systems that interpret them in certain ways. We have particular food and reproductive requirements that determine what we pay attention to. All this helps create our felt sense of the world around us, and who we are in it. Each species (or at least genus) of animal has a different felt sense of the world, how it works, and the mission it demands. If I could see the world as a fly sees it, for even an instant, I would be transported into a magical reality where space, gravity, and time appear quite different. In this reality, the laws that I previously thought constrained me might not even hold.
Somehow this seems to me a little glimpse into Divine consciousness. Perhaps there is only one physical world, holding a myriad of creatures and their perceptions. And perhaps there is a perspective from which one can be aware of all these possible perspectives. I imagine this is the consciousness of Divine energy, the source and shared material of all created forms. Any glimpse I get into another creature’s perspective brings me closer to this knowledge of God.
It’s exactly this broadening of consciousness that is demanded of the Israelites and the Egyptians in the Exodus story. On a social and political level, the Israelites are pushed to see themselves as a free people who can dream, organize, and act. The Egyptians are called to recognize the human needs of an enslaved group that they previously ignored or exploited. On a spiritual level, members of both groups are pushed to know God. The great modern teacher Nechama Leibowitz herself points to the Torah’s explicit refrain that the plagues are meant to bring people to know God.
My dream makes more sense now. So much of reality is hidden, under dirt, and under water. Creatures who live in these environments know parts of God’s world that I don’t know. And even if I cannot and will not try their lifestyle, I can start more simply in my own life. I can try to wipe away the dust of old experiences and beliefs that stop me from seeing as others see. And thus, by empathetically shifting my perspective and perception, I can begin to know God more deeply.
Image: Main Street, Sedona, Arizona. Photo by Laura Duhan Kaplan
