Parashat Vaera

This week’s Torah portion contains the first seven of the ten plagues that struck Egypt after Pharaoh refused to let the Israelite slaves go free. The second one, the plague of frogs, is my favorite to talk about at the Passover Seder – not only because there’s a great children’s song that goes with it, but also because of the oddly clever (or cleverly odd) interpretation of Rabbi Akiva. He pointed out in the Talmud that the Hebrew word for the plague, tzfardeya, means a frog – singular, not plural – and therefore argued that the plague was of one single frog that filled the entire land of Egypt. Picture a giant Godzilla-sized toad, wreaking destruction on the pyramids. But another scholar, Rabbi Elazar, disagreed; he said that the plague started with one frog, hence the Hebrew singular, but then that frog let out a whistle, and the rest of the frogs emerged from the water. 

Why was this bizarre rabbinic amphibian argument recorded and preserved for nearly 2,000 years? Writing in the 1980s, Rabbi Abraham Besdin argued that this was actually a coded debate about how societies devolve into tyranny and begin to persecute minorities. After all, in just a few generations, Egypt went from welcoming and celebrating Israelites like Joseph to enslaving and killing their descendants.  

In Rabbi Akiva’s model, all it takes for a destructive plague is a single actor, a lone powerful person – a pharaoh or a president – who can poison a society with charismatic bigotry. But Rabbi Elazar points out that even a powerful leader cannot do harm without followers willing to listen to his dog-whistle (or frog-whistle) and act upon it.  

As we proceed through a new year and a new era, may we strive to be aware of who and what we are listening to, and remember that if groups can destroy, groups can also build and heal. 

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