Vaerah: Discovery

Vaerah: Discovery

In our world, discovery means a step toward understanding  We believe that so much is understood: The Physics of Newton and Einstein; the chemistry of Dalton and Mendeleev, the biology of Watson and Crick and Darwin.  These ideas are the paradigms into which we fit our understanding of the world. 

Pharaoh lived before these ideas  demonstrated their power.  He also fit his world into paradigms. His world consisted of the usual and the magical.  But unlike most other people in his time, he had technologists of magic in his employ. He had the worlds greatest  technical capabilities at his disposal.  He did not exactly understand how these geniuses did things, but their ability to reproduce the first few actions of Moshe and Aaron made those wonders normal.   They were not uniquely special

Gd wants discovery.  Gd chose Moshe because he turned to the burning bush, He turned to investigate the unusual  He knew a wonder when he saw one!


Pharaoh is in the business of control.  He wants to deny the specialness of the events.  His technicians can also make snakes out of sticks, turn bodies of water  red and generate swarming frogs.  He can write off lice, marauding beasts, zoonoses, hail  to natural phenomona.-  perhaps they are exaggerated and their geographic distribution unusual, but these things happen.  They are not a revelation.  One need not look beyond the event and the damage it does.  These events  come from the extreme of random variation.  These are the black swans.


  there is a well known error: calculating the probability of an event that transpired This leads to an anti-Baysian reasoning, post hoc wonder at the coincidences.  How likely was it that  a jet plane  crashed it into the World Trade Center would cause the tower to collapse?  Before it happened: a vanishingly small probability.  Once it happened: it was a certainty.

Pharaoh was told, before hand, what he had to do to prevent the destruction of his land... but he did not listen.  The explanation was too wild and too threatening to his power.

Discovery is always a threat to the prevailing order