Dvar Torah on Parshat Va'eira

The Nile River figures prominently in the Exodus story. Last week, we read how Moshe was placed in a small ark and put on the river in an attempt to save him from the Egyptians; it was from there that he was taken by Pharaoh's daughter and brought into the royal household. This week, as we begin the story of the ten plagues, the action opens on the banks of the Nile:

"And God said to Moshe...go to Pharaoh in the morning, behold, he goes out to the water, and stand before him on the banks of the river, and take in your hand the staff which changes into a snake."

It is at this meeting with Pharaoh, on the shores of the Nile, that Moshe threatens him with the first of the plagues - the river itself, the life-blood of Egypt, will be turned into blood.

Although I would have thought that standing by the river lends the appropriate dramatic touch to Moshe's threat about this first plague, and that is the reason why God instructs him to meet Pharaoh there, the Rabbis seem to look for more of a message in the fact that the Torah specifically notes that Moshe met Pharaoh at the Nile the first thing in the morning.

One of the things they say is that Pharaoh always went to the river in the morning for a very particular reason. He claimed that he was a god, and snuck away to the river every day in order to go to the bathroom, something gods are not supposed to do. This idea may be prompted by the Torah's initial use of the word "water" rather than "river". Another, related, idea, based on a verse in Ezekiel, is that Pharaoh would go out to the river daily and stake his claim as a God over it, saying "this is my river, and I created it". The idea is that if you claim to be the God of Egypt, you have to lord it over the other obvious candidate for the job - the life-giving Nile. In both explanations of Pharaoh's early-morning visits, he is expressing his 'divinity'. In the one, he uses the Nile, physically, as a toilet, in order to keep up the pretence of his divine nature. In the other, he claims the Nile, the most important thing in Egypt, as his creation, his subject, as a way to assert his own divinity.

If we juxtapose these two stories, and posit that he did both - went to the bathroom in the Nile in order to hide his humanity, and, at the same time, claimed the Nile - the most powerful thing in Egypt - as his, in order to emphasize his divinity - we have a pretty interesting dynamic: at the same time that he claims the Nile as his subject, he abuses it, and fouls it.

I would argue that this behavior is typical of a certain kind of leadership, a leadership which actually destroys that which it claims to rule, and, in fact, to have created. For Pharaoh to be a God, he must be a God not only over something ("this is my river and I created it"), but also at its expense - he literally pisses on that which he rules; that is how he proves he is its ruler. Paradoxically, and tellingly, it is precisely this act of abuse which reveals to us that he is not actually a god, not really the creator and ruler of the Nile, because, after all, he has to go to the bathroom. His abuse of the Nile, and the fact that he must keep his very humanity a secret,  actually reveals Pharaoh's weakness, and failure as a god.

Pharaoh's behavior here at the Nile is, in fact, a model of his leadership all through the Exodus story. His need, as a new king, to subjugate the Jewish people; the way that, in order to prove that he is greater than the God of the Israelites, he allows his own people to go through the ten plagues, causing them endless suffering, is all part of an ongoing attempt to assert his primacy by harming, rather than helping, those he claims to rule.

This stands in sharp contradistinction to a leadership model which respects, and empowers, those who are led, which does not need to abuse those who are ruled in order to prove who's in charge. The Exodus story, in which God frees the Jewish people from slavery, gives them an independent homeland, with instructions how to run it (the Torah), along with the freedom to succeed or fail on their own, is the archetypal example of an empowering, enabling leadership, the leadership of a God who respects and enables, rather than abuses and subjugates.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix