What was the Purpose?
Before the Ten Plagues commenced, Moses demonstrated G-d’s power to Pharaoh by having Aaron’s staff turn into a snake. When Pharaoh’s sorcerers replicated that feat, and produced many snakes from their staffs, Aaron’s snake turned back into a staff and swallowed all of their snakes.
Did this incredible feat convince Pharaoh to let the children of Israel go? The answer is given immediately after the swallowing of the snakes:
“Pharaoh’s heart became hardened and he did not heed them, as G-d has spoken.”
The fact that this amazing event did not change Pharaoh’s attitude begs a question. Why was it necessary to perform this miracle in the first place?
It is axiomatic in Judaism that G-d does not perform miracles without a reason. A miracle, we are taught, must have a utilitarian purpose. A miracle occurs when G-d wishes to save someone from danger or to prove a point about His power to a doubting monarch or the like. To G-d, nature is precious. After all, it is His handiwork. He will only allow nature to be overridden when there is a pressing need to do so. In this narrative of the swallowing of the snakes it seems that none of these factors were in play. Pharaoh’s heart was hardened. The miracle did not bring the children of Israel any closer to their freedom. Why then did G-d alter nature for no obvious benefit?
Modern Pharaoh’s
It is therefore obvious that while this miracle did not affect Pharaoh and his cohorts at that moment, it was not for naught. In every generation there is a Pharaoh dynamic that stands in the way of our liberation from our external or internal Galus-exile. Pharaoh was more than just an ancient historical figure. He was a symbol of resistance to truth. Pharaoh resists recognizing and acknowledging even demonstrable Divine intervention in our lives.
The Pharaoh in us is the hardened heart we may feel which puts up resistance to our desire to get out of the modern day Mitzraim: the confining and spiritually stifling existence we are in.
It’s the Environment!
Rabbi Meir Shapiro (famed founder of the illustrious Chachmei Lublin Yeshivah, institutor of the Daf Yomi of Talmud and pre-Holocaust leader of Polish Jewry) explained that G=d’s message to Pharaoh then and to us today is that even a holy staff can turn into a vicious snake in the company of Pharaoh. On the other hand, a “snake” in the company of Moses and Aaron can transform itself into a holy staff.
The underlying message from this distinction is that our environment plays a crucial role in our behavior and attitude. And this message was intended to refute Pharaoh’s unspoken contention that the Jewish people, as they existed then, were not worthy of redemption because they had fallen into the morass of Egyptian pagan culture. G-d therefore demonstrated through Moses and Aaron that while the redeeming qualities of the children of Israel were real, their spiritual shortcomings were not truly theirs but rather what they absorbed from Pharaoh and his ilk.
Response to Anti-Semites
This lesson can serve as a rebuke to the anti-Semites of the world who highlight the transgressions of the Jewish people to justify their hatred.
While we cannot deny the fact that there are morally deficient Jews the blame for that is our existence in Galus where we picked up negative traits and behaviors from our environment, influenced by modern day Pharaohs, in whose company even holy staffs turn into snakes.
If the Jewish people have contributed immensely to the spiritual climate of the world, it is predominately or perhaps exclusively their contribution, with little or no assistance from the nations that surrounded them and continuously tried to destroy them one way or another.
So our message to the Pharaohs of today is that, while we own our positive qualities and contributions, our faults and moral failings can be ascribed to the pressures of the outside world.
Honest Introspection
To be sure, when we engage in honest introspection, as we should from time to time, we must not deflect all blame for our shortcomings onto others, no matter how true it may be, for ultimately we were given the wherewithal to resist outside pressures.
The Alter Rebbe (Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, whose Yahrzeit we observed earlier this week on the 24th of Teves) in his work, the Tanya, exhorts us to never judge others for their moral shortcomings because we do not know how that person may have been adversely influenced by his environment. “Don’t judge a person until you are in his place,” our Sages have admonished us. Yet the person who is so bitterly afflicted by his environment should never try to use it as an excuse for not trying to elicit the inner strength that derives from our G-dly soul to resist negative societal pressures.
Transforming Snakes into Moshiach
There is another way of understanding the futility of the staffs and snakes miracle that ostensibly left Pharaoh unmoved and the children of Israel languishing in Egypt under back-breaking slavery.
Whenever we undertake a project, the first step should be to imagine what the finished product will look like. For example, if we desire a new house, the first thought is to imagine a completed house. After that initial inspirational flash of the vision of a house, we then take incremental steps to take our initial desire through to fruition. This is the meaning of the words we recite in the Lecha Dodi prayer every Friday evening: “The end of action is first in thought.” The finished product is the first thing in our minds.
Similarly, this was true with regard to the liberation of the Jewish people from Egyptian bondage. The end result of this process will be our ultimate Redemption from the exile we presently must endure. As long as we are in exile we have never really fully left Egypt.
The fact that the miracle of the staff swallowing the snakes was the first miracle Moses performed before Pharaoh indicates that this was G-d’s way of describing what He wanted the end result to be like. The end result of the entire process of Galus is to transform the “snakes” into holy staffs.
The Hebrew word for snake, nachash, has the same numerical value as the word Moshiach. Whenever two words have the same numerical value it indicates that the two are related. How can we relate the word snake, with its Biblical connotation of unmitigated evil, with Moshiach, the person with unmitigated goodness and holiness?
The answer is that our ultimate goal is, through the influence and inspiration of Moshiach, to ultimately transform the “snakes” of the world into “staffs,” forces that support and strengthen our Judaism, our relationship with G-d and with one another.
Thus, at the very beginning of the liberation process, G-d showed us what He wanted the end result to be: the transformation of the negatives in our lives, all of our drives, desires, stamina and enthusiasm, into goodness and holiness.