Dvar Torah on Parshat Va'eira

I recently saw Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", and was just blown away. Actually, in my case, he was preaching to the converted, as I have long believed that global warming is real (hey, I'm old enough to remember what a real winter is supposed to feel like, and believe me, this is not it).  Al's presentation was powerful, compelling, and, essentially irrefutable - though I know there are some dunderheads out there who are, unbelievably, pretending to refute it. I can only hope that we come to our collective senses, throw off the shackles of fossil fuel dependency, and save our planet - I have real live grandchildren, and I do not want them living on the moon, or underwater.

Which brings us to this week's parsha, Va'era. It is in this portion that the ten plagues begin, starting with the plague of blood. One can imagine the impact that this first catastrophe had on the Egyptians. The Nile, source of life, the center around which the Egyptian economy and Egyptian society is based, is transformed from life-giving water into blood. The Egyptians, who, in their racist, xenophobic, and self-serving hatred of the foreigners among them had been carrying Jewish babies to the river and drowning them, must now face the consequences of those actions: a Nile which runs blood - symbolically the blood of the very children they had murdered. God's choice of this plague to begin the series of calamities which would ultimately force the Egyptians to free their Israelite slaves is remarkably eloquent, and, for us, profoundly timely.

With the plague of blood, the Egyptians are being taught that their actions have consequences on the world in which they live - you throw babies into the Nile, the Nile becomes bloody. Of course, the results here are symbolic, rather than ecological, but the message for us is essentially the same: our actions affect our world, they impact upon it, they do not simply fade away. They will come back to haunt us. If, on this symbolic level of divine retribution for their sins, the Egyptians are punished with a lifeless river of blood, and must somehow manage to survive with the waters of the Nile turned suddenly and miraculously undrinkable and unusable, how much more inexorable will the physics of our own destruction be, as we poison the very air we breathe, flood the continents on which we live, and destroy the life-sustaining climate that embraces and sustains us. Will we need to suffer through ten plagues before we learn this lesson?

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix