Vaerah: slavery and plagues

Vaerah: slaves and the plagues

 

As Barack Obama was inaugurated as president of the US, by way of identification with his constituency I realized that my father had actually been a slave (when he was in death camp Treblinka).  Thus, I was closer to the experience of slavery than any African American!

 

Slavery is a victimization and slavery is a punishment. There is  a voluntary aspect to slavery, perhaps a destruction of will, but perhaps a bending of a pre-existing distortion of the will. The adoption of new values may be the introduction to slavery. A nation enslaves its own people. ( blaming the victim?)

 

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Plagues

 The signs and wonders and plagues are all a challenge to modern credibility.  We live in a world where any wonder can represented on the stage or screen and no one believes that it is magic.  We live in an age in which forces that are more powerful than ordinary nature ( nuclear and fusion) can be unleashed by people who do not understand those forces.  A stick that turns into a snake and a few frogs are not very impressive anymore.

 

It is not the tricks that are important anymore.  It is what the tricks mean.

The snake is the symbol of dangerous bad advice ( thus it is on the Caduceus ?)

The blood of the Nile was a reminder of the drowned Hebrew boys.

The frogs and lice  and mixed multitude are all reminders of the annoyance of having a rapidly reproducing underclass population in your mist.

       frogs are just a lot of bodies

    lice, even more bodies and a problem that poor people can inflict on  others 

    The mixed multitudes is bigger bodies and conveys the idea of miscegenation.

The dever ( animal plague) demonstrates the distinctness of the Hebrews and reminds one of contagion

The boils are the embodiment of the creepy feelings the Egyptians  must have had toward the Hebrews ( and may have been the human manifestation of the animal disease) [ In fact the  story suggests the idea of vaccination in that a disease that is fatal in one species ( e.g. small pox) may be less severe in another ( cow pox) ]

The hail is a demonstration of the benignity of nature and how it could be different.  Instead of gentle rain, chunks of ice with fire inside could fall from the sky.