vaera: one plague two plague rich plague poor plague
hello friends,
The last week has been quite chaotic for all the reasons you can guess. My New Year's plans are now officially postponed, so I'm going to finish this newsletter, clean for shabbos, and prepare to welcome 2022 the same as 2021.
To be honest, I don't really want to write a newsletter about plagues right now, which is another reason this newsletter is going out quite late in the week. But there's one biblical plague that I have been thinking about quite a bit the last couple weeks, which is the plague of frogs. There's lots of different understandings of what this plague really was, of what it meant that frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt. In Sefer HaYashar, we learn that the frogs actually infected the Egyptian people through their water:
And the Lord sent again, and he caused all the waters to produce frogs, so that the frogs came into the houses of the Egyptians, and when the Egyptians drank the water, their stomachs were filled with frogs, and they leaped within them like in the river. And all the water they used for cooking and drinking turned into frogs, and when they lay upon their beds, they perspired frogs from their body.
As with the other plagues, Paroh tells Moshe and Aharon that he will let the Israelites go if they remove the plague, and so
Moses cried out to the LORD in the matter of the frogs which He had inflicted upon Pharaoh. And the LORD did as Moses asked; the frogs died out in the houses, the courtyards, and the fields. And they piled them up in heaps, till the land stank.
The plague ended, and yet at the same time it didn't. From a modern perspective, we can imagine the new infections that would result from these piles of rotting frogs, the challenges that even the end of this plague would bring to the people. But what happens next is that Paroh actually sees respite:
וַיַּרְא פַּרְעֹה כִּי הָיְתָה הָרְוָחָה וְהַכְבֵּד אֶת־לִבּוֹ וְלֹא שָׁמַע אֲלֵהֶם
and Paroh saw that there was respite, and he hardened his heart, and he did not listen to them
What does it mean that Paroh saw that there was respite? While certainly the people might have felt relief to not be bodily infected with frogs, for the people the next plague -- the plague of piles of dead and rotting frogs -- occurred immediately upon the end of the plague of live frogs. This isn't listed as a plague in the Torah, of course, because it wasn't a plague to Paroh. Paroh saw respite, because the people were no longer lying on their beds perspiring frogs. The plague of a lack of workers, the plague of a stuttering economic system -- all the plagues directly impacting Paroh's rule were ended (at least temporarily.)
In the prior plagues, Paroh's heart was strengthened (in Hebrew יחזק) upon their end, but after this plague Paroh must harden it (הכבד) himself. Why? In order to "not listen to them". Who is "them"? Moshe and Aharon, perhaps, but the last referent of the third person plural is (I believe) the Egyptian people, from the prior verse:
וַיִּצְבְּרוּ אֹתָם חֳמָרִם חֳמָרִם וַתִּבְאַשׁ הָאָרֶץ
And they [the Egyptian people] piled [the frogs] up in heaps, till the land stank.
There was no respite for the Egyptian people: immediately after recovering from the frogs in their bodies they had to pile the rotting corpses up in heaps. And they cried out to Paroh, but he saw respite for himself and for his power in his people's renewed ability to work and so he hardened his heart and ignored their cries.
I've been embarrassingly heavy-handed in my drashing here, so I assume you know what I've been obsessing over this past week. And that is this: the truth is that a plague for ordinary people is the illness and its aftermath but the plague for the rich and powerful is the disruption to the system that benefits them, to the ability of people to work for them (what if the new Black Death ends serfdom again?) The plagues end for Paroh, but they never end for his people, because they are two different plagues.
This phenomenon is vastly exacerbated with COVID. One of the impacts of modern medicine is the increased ability for the rich to save themselves from the actual plague. Certainly, rich people can still die of COVID. But they can insulate themselves much more than they could in the past, and until all their fancy hospitals and private doctors are overrun like all the others, they can still get top quality care. The plague for them -- at least for now -- is the inability to find workers to work at starvation wages, the increasing challenges to extracting resources as efficiently as possible, the supply chain issues stopping them from being able to get everything they want. Their main fear right now is that a lack of workers combined with increased supply chain issues will cause enough of a societal breakdown that they could actually experience what we are experiencing now (as in past newsletters, I must acknowledge that in a global picture even poor and middle-class Americans are in this same position). We cannot trust the rich and powerful to manage plagues because the plague they are managing is not the one we are suffering.
To a better and more revolutionary year,
ada