Dvar Torah on Parshat Bo

This week we read about the last of the plagues in Egypt. The ultimate plague, the one which finally convinces Pharaoh and the Egyptians to let the Israelites go, is the death of the firstborn sons. This plague stands out, in contrast to the first nine, as especially tragic. Whereas the earlier plagues certainly hurt, and may well have caused fatalities, they also had something humorous about them - the frogs swarming all over Egypt, Pharaoh and his advisors itching with lice and then boils - it seemed as if the Egyptians were being toyed with by God, for our sake. With the plague of the firstborn sons, however, everything changes. We are presented with a situation almost too horrible to imagine. The entire population was effected - "from the first born son of Pharaoh, who sits on his throne, to the first born son of the captive in the dungeon, and every firstborn of beast...there was no house in which there was not a dead person." It is this horror which moved the Egyptians to finally free the Israelites, but whose ferocity, if we think about it, should be a bit hard for us to readily accept.

I would like to take a look at the message implied by the choice of this last, horrible plague, and try to see if we can understand what is communicated to us by the killing of the firstborn sons. After all, God certainly could have killed in a more just fashion - all those who had actually thrown Jewish babies into the Nile, or Pharaoh and his fellow members of the ruling class, or those task masters who were particularly oppressive to the Jewish people. Why the choice of the firstborn son of every family?

I would like to begin our investigation of this question by pointing something out about firstborns in general. The Torah seems to not like them. Starting from the first firstborn, the murderously jealous Cain, continuing to Ishmael, the firstborn whom Abraham rejects, to Esav, the firstborn who is bested by Yaakov, to Reuven, Yaakov's firstborn, who is overshadowed by a number of his younger brothers and is criticized by his father on his deathbed, the firstborn just about never reaps the supposed benefits of his position. The Torah's sympathy for the younger child is obvious. It would seem, therefore, that the killing of the Egyptian firstborns is, in a way, in keeping with the Torah's antipathy to this position - in Egypt, the Torah seems to be taking its negative opinion of firstborns to a deadly extreme.

We must understand the root of the Torah's dislike of the firstborn. The obvious explanation is that the Torah, as part of its basic monotheistic message, wants to undermine the practice of classifying individuals in any way other than by their individual merit. The system of privileging firstborns is, by definition, the opposite of a meritocracy. It does not matter what you do, how you behave, what you accomplish; what matters is the immutable fact of when you were born. This kind of thinking is symptomatic of a society which sees human beings as locked into their fate from birth, as being classified and categorizing within a specific socio/religious role not as a result of any act that they have done, but simply by an accident of birth. This mind-set stands in direct contradistinction to the monotheistic world view, in which everyone of us is judged before God by our behavior. It is this lesson, I believe, that the Torah is trying to teach us with all of the rejected-first-born stories I mentioned above. Every single one of those firstborns forfeited whatever advantage the accident of their birth had given them by their negative behavior. Their younger brothers, on the other hand, achieved greatness in spite of their disadvantaged position within the family, through the merit of their actions.

In Jewish tradition, ancient Egypt is seen as representing precisely the pagan world view which sees each of us as locked into his or her fate from birth. Victims of the decree of the stars and the will of the Gods, locked into highly ritualized attempts to navigate those stars and appease those Gods, human beings do not have the individuality they are granted in Judaism. This is why Egypt is presented in the Jewish tradition as a nation which enslaves, a nation which refuses to see every human being as posessing intrinsic, independent value. Rather, people are defined by their utility, their pre-ordained role within the hierarchy of society, and are limited and dehumanized by it.

This is true not only of the Jewish victims of the Egyptian will to dominate and enslave, but also of the Egyptians themselves, turned into murderers by Pharaoh's oppression of the Israelites, and forced to relate to their king as a God, as someone whose power is absolute. It is for this reason that God chooses to kill the Egyptian firstborns. The privileged, pre-ordained position of the firstborn is a perfect example of what Jewish ethical monotheism is meant to combat.

It is important to also note that the exodus story begins with God telling Moshe, just as he is about to go for the first time to speak to Pharaoh about freeing the Jews, to tell Pharaoh that "My son, my firstborn, is Israel. I say to you: send free my son, that he may worship me, and if you refuse to free him, behold I will kill your firstborn son." This, besides prefiguring the final plague, redefines the term firstborn. The Egyptians, a civilization which at this time was already thousands of years old, are being told that God has chosen to call this younger, weaker people his firstborn. Firstborn, therefore, is not an absolute, static role, but rather a dynamic choice, a title which one earns, which one comes to deserve: God made the Israelites His firstborn, after they earned it - they were not automatically born into it. 

Interestingly, Rashi on this verse refers us to Yaakov's taking the firstborn's rights away from his older brother Esav; God, by calling Israel his firstborn is recognizing Yaakov as he who became the firstborn, through his actions, rather than by an accident of birth. That is how the Jewish people, as a nation, are His firstborn. It is the assumption that Egypt makes about its natural primacy that God, through Moshe, is attacking here.

Similarly, at the end of our parsha, we are given the laws of the firstborn: "...and every firstborn among your sons you shall redeem...and it was, that when Pharaoh refused to free us, God killed all of the firstborn in the Land of Egypt...therefore...every firstborn of my sons I will redeem". The redemption of every firstborn son seems to me to stand in opposition to the "firstborn-ness" of Egypt; we, as Jews, strive to unmake every firstborn, to redeem him, release him, free him from the constraints of his birth, in order to allow him to be the person that he, through his own actions, will ultimately create. Firstborn-ness, the cult of the firstborn, goes hand and hand with the Egyptian refusal to free, with the need to dominate and control. The killing of the Egyptian firstborns was a blow for freedom; not just the freedom of the Israelites from their specific slavery, but freedom for all mankind from the chains of birth, rank, and circumstance.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix