As I write, the long-awaited cease-fire is in effect and the first hostages have come home. A new American president has been inaugurated, bringing trepidation to many. In parallel to these momentous events, Parashat Bo brings us a moment of high drama and a clarion call for the ages.
This week, we read the climactic end of the narrative of the plagues, including the terrible story of the killing of the Egyptian firstborn. Pharaoh had already decreed the death of firstborn male Israelite babies. Now, God executes the same fate on every Egyptian firstborn male.
The plague is described in evocative detail. One can hardly read this without feeling the pathos of this terrible punishment: “In the middle of the night God struck down all the [male] firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle. And Pharaoh arose in the night, with all his courtiers and all the Egyptians — because there was a loud cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead.” (Exodus 12:29-30)
Pharoah then summoned Moses and Aaron and told them to depart, with all their people, flocks and herds, and asked for a blessing for himself to boot. Strikingly, the text tells us that ordinary Egyptians urged the Israelites to leave quickly, saying, “We shall all be dead!” (Exodus 12:33)
A little-noticed detail that this most terrible plague took place “in the middle of the night” (Exodus 12:29) caught the attention of Rabbi Aaron David Tamares of Lithuania (1869-1931), a remarkable commentator, writer, philosopher and pacifist. Tamares wrote that God could surely have given the Israelites the opportunity to avenge themselves directly upon the Egyptians, but God did not want to sanction the use of violence, even for justifiable reasons.
“For, while at that moment they might merely have defended themselves against evildoers, by such means the way of the fist spreads through the world, and in the end defenders become aggressors. Therefore the Holy One, blessed be God, took great pains to remove Israel completely from any participation in the vengeance upon the evildoers, to such an extent that they were not permitted even to see the events. For that reason midnight, the darkest hour, was designated as the time for the deeds of vengeance….” (Tamares, “Liberty,” cited in Rabbi Sheldon Lewis’ “Torah of Reconciliation,” 2012, p. 124).
This stunningly creative piece of commentary imagines God conducting the plagues with clear-eyed attention to how the sight of their enemies being humiliated and destroyed might tarnish the Israelites’ souls, even as (from the Torah’s perspective) the plagues were needed for the Israelites to go free. The idea is that very act of violence strengthens “the way of the fist” in the world and makes it more likely that today’s “defenders will become aggressors.”
Imagine the wide-ranging implications. The parallel to the war in Gaza is obvious. Although the initial attack was one of self-defense, Israelites have spent many months engaged in killing and destruction. If the Divine would have been concerned about the Israelites witnessing a single night of violence in ancient Egypt, how powerful would be the traumatic impact of directly causing (and experiencing) so much death and devastation over 15 months. Remember, the text acknowledges that there is such a thing as violence committed in the service of self-defense. But for Tamares, one must be keenly aware of the risk of such activity to a person, a soldier, a society.
Of course, the current war is not remotely our first war. We (the early Zionists and then Israeli forces) have killed and been killed in unimaginable numbers over the past 100 years. Tamares said: Even if your cause is just, you must beware the impact of your use of military might. It will impact you negatively, even as it carries forward your goals on the ground.
More metaphorically, many of us believe that the new American administration is again conducting itself in “the way of the fist,” regularly reaching for bullying, humiliation and machismo as a standard mode of response. The steady stream of name-calling and hateful rhetoric has long since penetrated the public life of America. Who knows what impact it has on children and on vulnerable adults? If aggression is the “go-to” response all around us, how are we likely to respond when our own desires are not met?
I don’t want my grandchildren to watch this master bully on television because I don’t want them to absorb the message that this is how we relate to other people. Thankfully, my children protect their children from the coarseness of political culture and intentionally surround them with messages of kindness and respect, constantly placing them in spaces where love and tenderness flow freely.
There are many things we will have to do to resist the descent of this country more fully into “the way of the fist,” the way of othering, dehumanization, disdain and cruelty for anyone thought to be unlike ourselves. But let us also protect our own souls from being influenced by the violence expressed every day, all around us. Only if we turn away from the ugliness present in American public life today will we be able to stay whole and free.
This column first appeared at https://jweekly.com/2025/01/30/the-torah-is-worried-about-the-effects-of-violence-even-on-the-perpetrators/
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