Netvort Parshas Vaeira 5770 (Revised): I Can Do Anything Better Than You

By Rabbi Joshua (Superfluously known as the Hoffer) Hoffman

My thanks to Rabbi Levi Mostofsky of Yeshiva University's Center for the Jewish future for suggesting this week's topic.

We here at Netvort stand in solidarity with the people of Haiti who have undergone horrific suffering as a result of this week’s earthquake. Our hearts go out to them.

Before one of Moshe's early encounters with Pharaoh as part of his mission to take the Jews out of Egypt, God tells him that if Pharaoh asks for a sign, he should take Aharon's staff and cast it to the ground where it will turn into a tanin. According to Rashi the word 'tanin' should be translated as 'snake,' although others translate it to mean 'crocodile.' Pharaoh's magicians then do the same with their staffs and according to the midrash Pharaoh's wife and some young children, aged 4 and 5, do the same. The midrash also tells us that Pharaoh asked Moshe why he was bringing magic to a land that was the home of magic. The Torah tells us that Aharon's staff swallowed up the staffs of the magicians after they had turned back into their original state, but Pharaoh hardened his heart and did not hearken to the words of Moshe and Aharon, just as God had said that he wouldn't (Shemos 8-13).

Many commentators ask why God told Moshe to perform a miracle that could easily be duplicated by Pharaoh's magicians, albeit, perhaps, by slight of hand, when He could, for the same price, have Moshe and Aharon do something more spectacular and unrepeatable. Rabbeinu Bachya suggests that the follow-up of having Aharon's staff, after it turned back to its original state, swallow up the magicians' staffs after they had also turned back to their original state was indeed something that the magicians could not replicate, and this contrast between the two different signs was meant to carry the message that despite the fact that Pharaoh's magicians had certain abilities, God's power exceeded theirs. Rabbi Yosef Salant, in his Be'er Yosef, offers a different answer which explores the symbolic meaning of the sign that Moshe performed and which I believe carries a deeper message to Pharaoh which goes beyond the message of God's control of the forces of nature.

Rabbi Salant cites the Ra'avad and Ramban who say that the reason the Egyptians were punished for afflicting the Israelite slaves, even though God had told Avraham that this would happen to the people, is that they afflicted them more than God's decree had called for. The role of the Egyptians was to act as God's staff in hitting the slaves but instead they overstepped their boundary and acted like snakes. The midrash tells us that a snake bites its victim even though it gains nothing as a result. In a similar way, the Egyptians had the slaves do work that had no benefit to them, such as building the cities of Pisom and Ra'amses, which sunk into the ground as soon as they were built.

Carrying his explanation further, Rabbi Salant says that when Aharon's staff-turned-snake returned to its original state and swallowed up the staffs of the Egyptian which had undergone a similar process, the message was that the blows that the Egyptian dealt the slaves would be forgotten once the Egyptians would be punished with the plagues. This imagery, says Rabbi Salant, is similar to the imagery of Pharaoh's dream of the lean cows swallowing up the fat cows, as interpreted by Yosef. Yosef told Pharaoh that the message of that part of the dream was that the years of plenty would be swallowed up by the years of famine, and the years of plenty would be forgotten due to the severity of the famine, as symbolized by the fact that the lean cows would remain skinny even after swallowing the fat cows. We may add that the same word for 'and they swallowed' – ‘vativlana,' is used in both Parshas Mikeitz, in connection with Pharaoh's dream, and in Parshas Vaeira, in connection with the staffs of Aharon and the magicians.

Based on Rabbi Salant's explanation of the message of Aharon's staff swallowing up the other staffs as an allusion to the cows in Pharaoh's dream, we can suggest that a further message was being sent to the Egyptians through the use of the staff. In parshas Shemos we are told that a new king arose who did not know Yosef. According to one explanation in the midrash, this was not literally a new king, but the same king who now acted as if he did not know Yosef, meaning that he acted as if he didn't know about all of the good that Yosef had done for Egypt, particularly in saving the nation from death through famine. Pharaoh was thus guilty of ingratitude to Yosef, and this led to his refusal to recognize God, which is also a demonstration of ingratitude. By turning Aharon's staff into a snake, then, Moshe was trying to teach Pharaoh and the Egyptians the importance of gratitude and the consequences they would suffer if they continued with their ingratitude to Yosef's descendants.

In addition, when Yosef interpreted Pharaoh's dream, he also gave him advice on how to prepare for the years of famine and escape the natural consequence of such a phenomenon. Why did Yosef give Pharaoh advice, when all he asked for was an interpretation of his dream? Ramban says that the advice was actually part of the dream. However, the Rambam's son, Rabbi Avraham, in his Torah commentary to Parshas Mikeitz, writes that Yosef cared about the Egyptian people, and was afraid that Pharaoh would not take the necessary measures to avoid the consequences of the famine. If we combine this approach with that of the Ramban we can say that God incorporated in the dream interpretation that he taught Yosef by means of prophesy a means of escaping the normal consequences of famine.  The  upshot would then be that God loved the Egyptian people and wanted to provide them with a means to avoid suffering from the famine, even though the famine was a part of the divine plan to bring the Israelite nation down to Egypt. Moreover, the rest of the world would also benefit as a result of these preparations because Egypt would provide other nations with food during the famine as well. In a similar way, the imagery of the snake swallowing up the staffs of the Egyptians as an allusion to the dream about the cows, was meant to teach them that God's demand to release the slaves was meant not only for the good of the slaves themselves but for the good of Egypt and indeed for the good of the entire world, as well.

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