12. First Sign: Staff into Snake

So now, as we continue going backwards through the signs, we finally reach the first of the three. What was that first sign all about? This is the one about the staff turning into a snake, then going back to a staff again. Well, if we are right about the pattern we’ve been seeing, it too, would seem to have signified an Egyptian lie. But a lie about what? 

Well, it seems like, as we’ve been moving backward through the signs, we’ve also been moving backwards in time. Because that last sign, the one about the water and the blood – that signified Egypt’s final attempt at genocide. And the sign before that, the one about the hand with tzara’at – that signified Egypt’s earlier, more subtle attempt at killing. So could the first of the signs signify something that was even earlier, something that was even more subtle? 

But what could it have been? And what would it have to do with, of all things… a staff turning into a snake? Let’s try and figure that out.

13. The Very First Lie

To find the earliest, most subtle lie, let’s look at the earliest verses in Exodus that begin to describe Israel’s descent into Egyptian servitude. That’s where we’ll find our answer. The story of that descent into slavery begins with words that describe a kind of population explosion. Interestingly, the story of the multiplying of the children of Israel seems to be told by the Torah from the Egyptian perspective. 

וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל פָּרוּ וַיִּשְׁרְצוּ וַיִּרְבּוּ וַיַּעַצְמוּ בִּמְאֹד מְאֹד וַתִּמָּלֵא הָאָרֶץ אֹתָם׃

The children of Israel were fruitful, they swarmed, and they were very great in number, and they were mighty, very, very much. And the earth was filled with them. (Exodus 1:7)

Those words, they describe a population explosion, but not all of those words are such nice words, especially the וַיִּשְׁרְצוּ one. It's a word used for insects in the Torah. שרץ – those are these creepy-crawly things. The Torah seems to be saying that the people multiplied like creepy-crawly things, וַיִּשְׁרְצוּ. And that characterization gets compounded with something else. וַיַּעַצְמוּ – they were mighty. And that's a word with dangerous overtones, particularly when you combine it with the sense of creepy-crawly things on the other hand. And, as later verses show, this is exactly how Egyptians interpreted events.

The king of Egypt gathers his people and starts talking to them, using some of these verbs that the Torah just talked about. 

וַיֹּאמֶר אֶל עַמּוֹ הִנֵּה עַם בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל רַב וְעָצוּם מִמֶּנּוּ׃

The king says: These people, the children of Israel, they are greater, more mighty than we are (Exodus 1:9). These words – רַב וְעָצוּם – are playing off of וַיִּרְבּוּ וַיַּעַצְמוּ – they became great in number and mighty. So the king looks at that reality and says: Folks, we got a national security problem here! These people, they’re great, they’re mighty, they are mightier than us. 

הָבָה נִתְחַכְּמָה לוֹ פֶּן יִרְבֶּה

Let's deal wisely with them, lest they increase even more (Exodus 1:10). You know, they might be benevolent now, folks, but look what might happen in the future. 

 וְהָיָה כִּי תִקְרֶאנָה מִלְחָמָה וְנוֹסַף גַּם הוּא עַל שֹׂנְאֵינוּ וְנִלְחַם בָּנוּ וְעָלָה מִן הָאָרֶץ׃

And when war might come in the future, maybe they will gather themselves and add themselves to our enemies. And they’ll fight against us, and they’ll emigrate from the land (Exodus 1:10).

Now if you pay close attention here you'll notice something. Yes, there was a population explosion, yes, the children of Israel were very mighty – but where did that sense of threat come from? There was nothing actually about the Israelites thus far that was threatening. That was manufactured by Pharaoh. Look what might happen, Pharaoh says, they'll join our enemies, they'll war against us. That’s the stuff of Pharaoh’s imagination talking. 

Based on those imaginings, the Egyptians begin to oppress the Israelites. It starts with וַיָּשִׂימוּ עָלָיו שָׂרֵי מִסִּים – they placed officers over them to collect taxes. But it progresses from there: וַיִּבֶן עָרֵי מִסְכְּנוֹת לְפַרְעֹה – the Israelites were pressed into service building storehouses for grain for Pharaoh (Exodus 1:11).

And then the Torah says: וְכַאֲשֶׁר יְעַנּוּ אֹתוֹ כֵּן יִרְבֶּה – As the Egyptians oppressed them, so the Israelites multiplied (Exodus 1:12). It seems, from that language, like the early attempt at slavery wasn’t just for slavery’s sake; it was slavery as a means of population control. But it didn't work. The text says that the more they oppressed them, the more they multiplied. So when it didn’t work, when the Egyptians realized it didn’t work, we again hear language that’s jarring: וַיָּקֻצוּ מִפְּנֵי בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל (Exodus 1:12). וַיָּקֻצוּ in Hebrew has a connotation of disgust. Almost as if the Egyptians recoiled in horror and disgust from the children of Israel. 

It’s almost like… what’s the Egyptian view of the Israelites, again? Remember that earlier word, וַיִּשְׁרְצוּ – they were swarming. Oh yeah, right, the Egyptians were relating to the Israelites as if they're these creepy crawling things. So of course, as they continue to multiply, they're like something you’d recoil from in horror and disgust. What’s it like to come home and find your home infested by little swarming critters? It isn’t any fun at all. 

So let’s just go back and kind of deconstruct what happened here in slow motion. What happened is that the Egyptian king expertly laid the propaganda groundwork for a genocide that’s about to follow. 

Because, think about it – it's not easy to get a nation as a whole to engage in genocide. After all, these Egyptians we're talking about, they're human beings, and all things being equal, ordinary people don't like to murder their fellow human beings. Human beings don’t like being accessories to brutal, mass murder. So how do you convince them to start? 

Egypt provides a great case study. 

14. Pharaoh’s Propaganda Program

The first thing your populace must come to believe is that the people that you are targeting are a threat to them. And if they're not a threat yet, you at least have to convince your people that they could become a threat. That's what Pharaoh is talking about when he says, and in the future these people can make war against us, they can join our enemies, they can become a fifth column.

But that alone is not enough to allow your rank-and-file population to commit atrocities against their neighbors. They need to believe something more too. They need to believe that these people who supposedly are a threat to them, they’re also more cunning than they are. In line with this, Pharaoh says הָבָה נִתְחַכְּמָה לוֹ – we’ve got to act cleverly in dealing with the Israelites, we’ve got to outsmart them. 

Why do you need this element? Because the business of killing is difficult… and when you take a defenseless people and you commit atrocities against them, and you rationalize to yourself that you're doing it all in the name of national security – still, you’ve got to contend with something: the nagging possibility that your victims are going to cry out to you, their countrymen, for help. They are going to appeal to your humanity. They are going to plead for mercy, for compassion. 

And how is your populace going to resist that? How do you get them not to respond to those cries for help? 

The way you do it is, you convince your populace that the victims are actually smarter than they are. Therefore, a cry for help could always be a trick, could always be a ruse. No matter what, you just can't trust these people. They're too cunning, they can outsmart you, and therefore they're too dangerous. 

Those are two of the three necessary elements, dangerous and cunning. But then there's one final thing that you need to get your populace to believe. Because at the end of the day, it's not just enough to believe that your target population is a threat, not even just enough to believe that they're smarter than you are and that they could use their cunning to deceive you. You also have to believe that they're… not really human the same way that you and I are. 

Yeah, they walk, they talk just like you, they may have two cars in the driveway, they may go to their jobs, but in some deep, essential, hidden way, they're just impostors. They are impersonating humans; they’re not really human like the rest of us. 

And so the language that we find in the text that describes the multiplying of the people kind of makes sense now. It's not human language, it's creepy-crawly language. וַיִּשְׁרְצוּ - they swarmed;  וַיָּקֻצוּ מִפְּנֵי בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל – the people of Egypt recoiled in horror, or in shock, in disgust, from the children of Israel, the way people instinctively recoil from creepy-crawly things.

So that’s Pharaoh's propaganda argument, the argument that, in total, forms the necessary rationale for killing: (a) they are malevolent; (b) they are cunning, they can outsmart us; (c) they aren’t really so human anyway. 

So let’s say you were God, the author of the Torah, and you wanted to summarize that entire propaganda argument in a single word. Better yet, in a single image, a single symbol. What symbol or image would you use? 

The answer, I want to speculate with you, is an image that readers of the Torah might be familiar with for a malevolent, cunning, not-quite-human being. The image is that of a snake, a serpent. Or better yet… a staff turning into a fake snake. 

15. What Do We Know About Snakes?

Let’s go back to the lexicon of the Torah. What creature stands out as an impostor human? As someone who might walk and talk and be possessed of human-like intelligence… but somehow still wasn’t really human? That, of course, is our ancient nemesis all the way back in the Garden of Eden, the primal serpent. The snake talked. It seems to have walked – remember, in the curse of Eden, the snake is condemned to crawl on his belly, which sounds like before that, the creature walked around on its feet. The snake was an animal, but at some level, it was also impersonating a human. It pretended to Adam and Eve to be… their pal, to have good advice to dispense to them; it pretended to be just like one of them. 

What a cunning, deceptive thing to do? Yes, it was, and that’s the second of the great defining elements of the primal snake: It is described as עָרוּם מִכֹּל חַיַּת הַשָּׂדֶה – more cunning than all the beasts of the field (Genesis 3:1). The snake may represent himself as being your pal, but he’s got ulterior motives. He can outsmart you. And because he’s not just smart but also malevolent, you can’t trust the snake. He’s quite dangerous indeed.

The snake: Malevolent, smart, and not quite human. Once Adam and Eve come to realize the truth about the snake, look at their attitude towards him. The Torah is quite categorical about it:

וְאֵיבָה אָשִׁית בֵּינְךָ וּבֵין הָאִשָּׁה וּבֵין זַרְעֲךָ וּבֵין זַרְעָהּ הוּא יְשׁוּפְךָ רֹאשׁ וְאַתָּה תְּשׁוּפֶנּוּ עָקֵב׃

And I will set hatred between you and the woman and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike at your head, and you will strike at his heel. (Genesis 3:15)

Who do we fear most? The ones who look most like us on the outside but we're convinced on the inside are so different from us. Those are the ones who really get us nervous. 

Look at the great wars in human history: Shiite vs. Sunni, Protestant vs. Catholic, Judah vs. the Tribes of Israel. They all look so close on the outside. Sure, Protestants and Catholics may look pretty much the same to Jews and to Muslims, but you know, it doesn’t look that way if you are Protestant, if you are Catholic. You may look like me, you may talk like me – but maybe that only makes me more anxious. Everybody thinks you're me, but you're not. And sometimes that anxiety, that fear we have of the great impostor… it becomes part of the genesis of hate.

Impostor hatred goes back a long time in human history. It goes back to the primal serpent in the garden. When somebody is not only malevolent but cunning, not only malevolent and cunning but also an impostor human – well, now you’re a snake. Now I can crush your head with the heel of my boot and consider that a job well done. 

In the first sign, God uses the snake symbol as a single, powerful metaphor to express the entirety of how the Egyptians were relating to the Israelites: they were treating them as snakes. Just add up the three elements of Pharaoh’s propaganda campaign about the Israelites – they’re malevolent, they’re cunning, they’re not quite human like you – and you get one basic lie that speaks to some of our greatest fears. You get the snake. 

16. A Lie About Snakes

So let’s go back to that first sign. Let’s try to interpret it carefully. Because remember, it's not just that God shows Moses a snake. He shows him a staff that changes into a snake, then back again into a staff. The truth of the thing is a staff, but it can shape-shift into an illusory snake. 

What could the meaning of that be? 

Well, let's play it out in slow motion: God says to Moses, what's in your hand? It's a staff, but what's the Hebrew for that staff? מטה (mateh). But mateh actually means something else besides staff. Throughout the Torah, what is a mateh? A mateh is a tribe. So what’s God saying to Moses? What’s in your hand? It's as if you're holding the tribes in your hand. The tribes of Israel.

Egypt is the place that held the tribes; it’s the place that we grew from as a family into tribes in the first place. But now look at what Egypt went and did. Take that mateh, the tribes, in your hand, and now do what? Do what Egypt did: Cast it down to the ground. What did Egypt really do? They took the tribes of Israel and enslaved them, cast them down to the ground. When Moses takes that mateh, when it hits the ground, it assumes another identity – a fake identity. It turns into a serpent, because that's what the Egyptians did: They cast you, tribes of Israel, to the ground, and in so doing, they transformed you, by means of their imagination, into something other than them. They transformed you into snakes in their own minds. 

It was all fake of course, all just imagination. But imagination can be powerful. Look at what Moshe does when he sees the fake snake: וַיָּנָס מֹשֶׁה מִפָּנָיו (Exodus 4:3) – he ran away from it, he recoiled in horror. Boy, that’s familiar, right? That’s what the Egyptians did to us after their imaginations transformed us into impostors: וַיָּקֻצוּ מִפְּנֵי בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל – they recoiled, aghast, just looking at the Israelites.

And that’s why God tells Moses to expose the lie. Show that it’s all just a mind game. Summon the courage to relate to the staff as it truly is, not as you might imagine it to be. Have the courage to grab it by its tail – something you’d never dare to do with a real snake, right? – and all of a sudden, guess what happens? It's going to be a staff again, because that’s all it ever was. The illusion evaporates. Treat the snake like a staff… and it will be a staff.

What, then, is the first sign? It's God's way of saying: All of this killing, all of this slavery… I know how it all began. They made you into snakes. 

These signs, all three of these signs, they show you that I, God, I understand, I get it, I understand the lies. The lies culminated with the shimmering waters of the Nile covering up the great sin of the bodies that they hide. But the lies didn't start there. There was a more subtle lie before that, the lie of the midwives. And before that, there was the most subtle lie of all: That you, the family that grew up in our midst into what seemed to be like tribes – that you had no right to a true national identity; no right to be called a people. No… you’re actually snakes: Malevolent, smart, impostor humans. 

We can crush you without even feeling guilty about it.

17. A God Who Knows the Past

So the three signs, taken together, seem to indicate a kind of understanding on the part of God, an empathetic understanding, of a terrible evil – of three terrible evils, really – that happened to Israel during the course of their enslavement. It wasn't just what happened to us, it was the lies being told about us: the hiding of our children’s blood in the water, the lie of the stillborns, and the great implicit lie that we were mere snakes.  The signs showed us that the God of Compassion knows about these hidden things, and that’s what helps the people believe. They believe that God understands what they’ve been through. God knows about the blood in the water. That's the most obvious sign. But once the people grasp the meaning behind that, they'll come to understand the other signs, too. Yes, the white hand – God understands about the fake stillborns. God understands about the fake snakes, all these secret things that were done to us. The Egyptians dehumanized us. They took tribes and they cast us down as if we were snakes. God understands all of this, all of our experience.

The symbolism of the signs expresses God's knowledge of what really happened to us, and the people respond to that display of Divine empathy with belief: וַיַּאֲמֵן הָעָם… כִּי פָקַד יְקוָה אֶת־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל וְכִי רָאָה אֶת עָנְיָם. The people believed. They believed not just that God would ultimately set us free, but that God had truly seen their suffering. God knows what we've been through. And that makes all the difference in the world.

So maybe that's it. Maybe we can all go home. We've deciphered the signs; there’s nothing more to speak about. But I want to argue it’s actually only half of what the signs have to teach Israel. The signs seem to have another element too. You begin to see it with the last one, the one about the blood on the water. It didn't just have an expression in the past, right? It also had an expression in the future, that sign. 

18. The Past and the Future

Yes, the cup of water from the Nile that turns into blood when it hits the ground… remember, after that happens, we see a plague that looks like that. The first plague is when that sign seems to manifest itself in the world again in a grand and terrible way; it’s when the entire Nile turns into blood. It's when God says, in effect, I know the lie, and now I'm going to uncover the truth. The aggressor can’t escape their crime anymore. It's the beginning of justice. It’s the beginning of redemption.

So could it be that the rest of the signs continue that path of redemption? In other words, that they, too, don't just reflect God’s knowledge of our experiences in the past, but the signs also foretell something in the future – they foretell things that will redeem these events in the past? In other words, in the signs, maybe God wasn't just expressing that He was seeing the great lies, but the Almighty was also committing to redeem those very lies as well. 

To see this clearly, let’s engage in a little thought experiment. Let’s put ourselves in time when those three signs happen, and let’s look forward towards the future, and let’s ask ourselves: As the plagues unfold, as the Sea splits, as the whole Exodus process happens… Do we hear echoes of the signs?

Let's explore that.

19. The First Plague and the Lie of the Nile

As we’ve seen, the beginning of the truth comes with the first plague, when the whole Nile turns to blood. No longer would water assist Egypt in pretending. So that’s one truth-telling moment in the process of redemption. But there is more truth to tell also. The plagues, I want to suggest, whatever else they were – punishments to the Egyptians for their menace and oppression – they were also truth-telling devices. The first one starts things off… and the climactic tenth plague picks up the truth-telling theme.  To use the language of the signs, the process of the plagues might start with water turning into blood, but it ends with the sign of the white leprous hand. 

But one second, what does that even mean? What would the tzara’at of the white hand have to do with the death of the firstborn, of all things? The Egyptian firstborn didn’t get tzara’at, right? And even if we associate tzara’at, leprosy, with the death of a stillborn, based upon those verses in Numbers that we saw, still, the firstborn of Egypt didn’t die as infants. They perished when they were young children or whether they were old people; it wasn’t like they became stillborns, right?

But here’s the thing: the Torah itself, with its language, seems to suggest that this tenth, final plague did have something to do with tzara’at. Listen to the language of the text, when God tells Moses about the last, climactic plague yet to come:

וַיֹּאמֶר יְקוָה אֶל מֹשֶׁה עוֹד נֶגַע אֶחָד אָבִיא עַל פַּרְעֹה וְעַל מִצְרַיִם אַחֲרֵי כֵן יְשַׁלַּח אֶתְכֶם מִזֶּה 

And God said to Moses, “One more nega, one more plague, will I bring on Pharaoh and upon Egypt; after that they will finally send you free” (Exodus 11:1)

Listen to that word in Hebrew, עוֹד נֶגַע אֶחָד אָבִיא עַל פַּרְעֹה וְעַל מִצְרַיִם – one more plague I will bring on Pharaoh and on Egypt. That particular word for plague – nega – this is actually the only time during these ten plagues that that particular Hebrew word is used. The plagues are actually מכות, they’re “attacks” against Egypt. But this last plague, it is called a plague, it’s called a nega. But it’s not just that nega, that word, only appears once in the final plague. It only appears once in the entire Five Books of Moses. You never again have that term, nega. With one exception. 

The laws of tzara’at. 

Yup. In the Book of Leviticus, throughout the entire laws of tzara’at, that word nega appears over and over again. It is the descriptor the Torah uses for tzara’at:

אָדָם כִּי יִהְיֶה בְעוֹר בְּשָׂרוֹ שְׂאֵת אוֹ סַפַּחַת אוֹ בַהֶרֶת – A person who has all these very different forms of tzara’at, וְהָיָה בְעוֹר בְּשָׂרוֹ לְנֶגַע צָרָעַת – Look at how it’s described. It will be on the skin of his flesh לְנֶגַע צָרָעַת, a plague of tzara’at. And then later, וְרָאָה הַכֹּהֵן אֶת הַנֶּגַע, the kohen (priest) will see the nega, the plague (Leviticus 13:2-3). Consistently, over and over again, tzara’at is called a נגע, a plague.

20. The Tenth Plague and the Lie of the Stillborns

Seemingly, back in Exodus, in the warning that God gives for the coming of the tenth plague, the Torah is tipping its hand to you, the reader. It’s telling you that there is something about this final plague to come that is… tzara’at-like. The sign of the white hand, the hand that became afflicted with tzara’at back at the burning bush – that sign is actually about to come into fruition. Some kind of payback for the lie of the stillborn children is about to happen. Back with the midwives, the Egyptians lied about the death of children in the womb. Now, their own children would die too. In a womb, of sorts.

And here I refer you to a mysterious possibility: The language of the text, when the firstborn die, is:

 אֵין בַּיִת אֲשֶׁר אֵין שָׁם מֵת

There was no house where there wasn’t someone who died. (Exodus 12:30)

There was something womb-like about the houses, that night when Israel left Egypt. Both the houses of the Israelites and the houses of the Egyptians. 

There’s a course we did here once at Aleph Beta, a while back, on the Haggadah. If you haven't seen it, go take a look. But I want to re-introduce you to one of the central arguments I made there.

You see, the Israelites, in order to be saved from the effects of this climactic tenth plague, they had to do something. They had to offer the Pesach offering. God tells Moses that every household needs to sacrifice a lamb and consume it on that very night. They had to roast the lamb in a certain way, bunched up with its head over its knees. Then they had to take the blood of the animal, they had to put it on their doorways – according to the text, they actually had to put it on both sides of the door and on top of the door, and on the bottom of the door, so that the entire doorway had blood on it. Then all night long the people remain inside, 

לֹא תֵצְאוּ אִישׁ מִפֶּתַח בֵּיתוֹ עַד־בֹּקֶר

No one can come out of the house until the morning finally comes. (Exodus 12:22)

And ִִin the morning, when the word comes that Pharaoh is sending the people out of Egypt, you rush through through the bloody doorway.  בְּחִפָּזוֹן – in haste, as it says in the Book of Deuteronomy (Deuteronomy 16:3). 

What does all this remind you of? I don’t know about you, but it reminds me of… birth. The korban pesach, that lamb they sacrificed, according to the Torah, it had to be all curled up, רֹאשׁוֹ עַל-כְּרָעָיו וְעַל-קִרְבּוֹ (Exodus 12:9) – with its head over its knees. Head over its knees? That's the fetal position. You're in this dark house all night long. It's like the womb. Then suddenly, you rush out through this bloody doorway… you're being born. It’s as if the words God had said to Moses, back at the burning bush – right after the three signs, even before the plagues had even started – those words were coming true now that the plagues are finally ending: 

בְּנִי בְכֹרִי יִשְׂרָאֵל…וַתְּמָאֵן לְשַׁלְּחוֹ הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי הֹרֵג אֶת בִּנְךָ בְּכֹרֶךָ׃

Say to Pharaoh, My firstborn is Israel. And if you don’t let My firstborn go, I will kill your firstborn. 

(Exodus 4:22-23)

That was the prophecy that God told Moses at the beginning of the plagues. And now at the end of the plagues, it is happening. There’s a nation that’s being born, God’s firstborn nation. They’re coming into existence; God is a parent, as it were. That night, a process of birth had started, live birth. But there were others who did not make it out of their house that night. In a parallel experience to that successful birth of a nation, there were others who experienced a birth-like event that night…  who didn’t make it. 

Chillingly, look at how the text characterizes where the Egyptian firstborn died.  אֵין בַּיִת אֲשֶׁר אֵין שָׁם מֵת - there was no house among the Egyptians that didn't have someone dead in it. The house. It’s almost as if there is an equivalency here: The Israelites, they were shut up in their houses all night and then went through the bloody doorway. The house is like the womb, as we said a moment ago. Well, continuing that analogy, we might ask, when the Egyptians died in their houses… where were they? In a womb-like space, too. The lie about the stillborns… it was now coming true, for the aggressor. You said the children of the Israelites, you said they were stillborns, that they died in the womb, that's how you lied about them, so it will come true that way for you. As the plagues come to a conclusion, the lie of the stillborn becomes a reality.

21. Where’s the Snake?

So we've talked now about the third and the second sign: how these signs uncover the lies of the past; how they point to moments in the future, moments of redemption, that will recall and set straight those lies. So now it's time to talk about the first sign, the sign involving the staff and the snakes. And remember, the pattern we've seen thus far suggests that each of the three signs reaches back towards the past, to this moment of pain in Israel's experience of Egypt. But each of the signs also foreshadows a moment in the future, a moment in which that pain is somehow redeemed, in which the lie is somehow set straight. Now the question is, does that pattern hold for the first sign as well? 

The first sign – in the past, it refers to this moment of pain, a moment when Israel was lied about, was seen as just a bunch of snakes to be trampled on. Okay, that’s the past. But what of the future? Is there ever a moment when the truth is revealed in the world at large, and the aggressor has no choice but to confront it. How is that first lie, the lie about the staff and the snakes, how is that ever redeemed?

So let's use some basic pattern recognition to try to piece this together. The third sign, looking towards the future – that seemed to presage the first plague. The second sign – that seemed to presage the tenth plague. So what’s the pattern? As you go backwards through the signs, you seem to be going forwards through the future… which means that the first sign – that would foretell something farthest ahead in the future. There must have been some climactic moment of redemption at the end of the whole process of redemption. And that moment had something to do with staffs and snakes.

To find that future moment, consider carefully the language of the first sign and look for its echoes in the future. There Moses is at the burning bush. He’s got his staff, and God tells him to throw down that staff and it will become a snake… and then Moses recoils. The language for his recoiling is וַיָּנָס מֹשֶׁה מִפָּנָיו - and Moses ran away, or better, Moses sought to escape from it (Exodus 4:3). It turns out that if you take that verb וינס (vayanas) and you throw it together with the word that accompanies it, מפניו (mipanav) – that Moses ran away from the face of the snake – and you ask yourself, Well, how many times in the Bible do we have that language… there's really only one other time that we do have that language, vayanas paired with mipanav. And wouldn’t you know it… it's after the first plague and it's after the tenth plague. It’s at the very end of the redemption process; it's at what is arguably the most climactic moment in Israel's redemption from Egypt. 

What is that moment? Well, if you haven’t guessed it yet, just to make it abundantly clear, let’s look for one more language parallel. Go back at the burning bush, back to the first sign. God, when talking to Moses about the purpose of this first sign, says: לְמַעַן יַאֲמִינוּ כִּי־נִרְאָה אֵלֶיךָ יְקוָה - this sign, it's in order that they believe, have faith that God, that Yod-Heh and Vav-Heh, this empathetic God, has in fact appeared to you (Exodus 4:5). Well, look at that word יַאֲמִינוּ (ya’aminu). Outside of the context of the signs, when is the next time that word יַאֲמִינוּ appears? Oh, look at that, it just happens to appear in that same climactic event that I’ve been talking about. The one that happens at the end of everything. The event with וינס and מפניו in it also.

The event I’m talking about is the splitting of the Sea, the moment of triumph. It's the moment you know that Israel is never going to see Egypt again, that they actually have nothing to fear from their oppressors anymore. The entire Egyptian army, horsemen, chariots, archers and all, are destroyed in the great miracle that we know of as the Splitting of the Sea of Reeds.

At that event, someone seeks to escape – and the word, it’s the very same word וינס. This time, though, it isn’t Moses who shrinks away from a serpent; it’s Pharaoh who shrinks away from Israel, the people he castigated as snakes. The very last thing that happens with the Egyptian armies, just before they're destroyed, is that they look towards Israel crossing the sea and they say:

אָנוּסָה מִפְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל כִּי יְקוָה נִלְחָם לָהֶם בְּמִצְרָיִם

Let me run away, let me escape from Israel, because God is fighting on their behalf in Egypt. (ibid. 14:25)

There are those two words, one more time: וינס מפניו – Moses’ reaction in the face of the snake – that וינס מפניו becomes אנוסה מפני ישראל – let me escape from the face of Israel, at the splitting of the Sea. And למען יאמינו – so that they believe, God’s language from the first sign – that becomes, at the Sea of Reeds: ויאמינו ביקוה ובמשה עבדו. When Israel sees the destruction of the Egyptian armies, the language that expresses their trust in God in that moment is ויאמינו ביקוה ובמשה עבדו – they had faith in God and in Moses His servant.

So the language cues relating to the first sign seem to take you forward in history to the splitting of the Sea. The very first sign foreshadows the very last moment of redemption. Except, the problem is that something seems to be missing. The event of the splitting of the Sea doesn’t seem to have anything to do, really, with the first sign. 

22. A Missing Snake

I mean, look, with all the other signs, the theory seems to work. When you take some water and you pour it on the ground and it's blood, that seems like the plague of blood that happens in the future. When you see the hand becoming white as snow, that's a symbolic version of still-born-like death; it's a little version of the tenth plague. But how is the story of the staff being thrown down, becoming a snake, a little version of the splitting of the Sea? Yes, the language connections are there – vayanas at the sign of the staff connects with anusa at the splitting of the Sea, and vaya’aminu in both places solidifies the connection. These phrases do lead you to believe that we’ve arrived, at the Sea, at some great “Staff-and-Snake” event. But the mind struggles to see why that’s true. Yes, Moses does use his staff to split the sea – but where’s the snake?

The answer seems to be: Israel is the snake. Israel, clever and dangerous, but sub-human; Israel, a snake. Right at the very beginning, just as the Torah first seems to describe Israel by using the snake-like terms of Pharaoh's imagination (וישרצו – and they swarmed; ויקצו – and the Egyptians recoiled in horror and disgust, as if from some creepy-crawly thing) – it was right then that Pharaoh counseled his people to be clever and ruthless. If we don’t act cleverly with them, Pharaoh said – they’ll ultimately war against us, these Israelites,  ונלחם בנו.

Now it's all coming back to bite Pharaoh, you’ll pardon the pun. The Egyptians had recoiled from Israel in mock horror. But now it's not so mock anymore: אנוסה מפני ישראל – I will seek desperately to escape from Israel. Why? Because יקוה נלחם להם במצרים – because God is fighting with them against Egypt. The paranoia of Pharaoh was that a war would come. He took a benevolent, benign nation and through his unremitting abuse, he made the nightmare of war a self-fulfilling prophecy. Now, thanks to Divine assistance, Israel is truly dangerous to its enemy: יקוה נלחם להם. The Egyptians cannot destroy the Israelites at the Sea, because God is fighting for them. This time, it is the Egyptian army that will be destroyed.

God is redeeming the lie of the snake. The imagined serpent is actually rising up against Egypt. 

23. Redeeming the Lie of the Snake

This is just a suggestion, just speculative really, but look at that moment, the moment that Israel goes through that parted sea. Imagine you’re a drone way above the splitting of the Sea. What does it actually look like as Israel marches to freedom? There were walls of water on each side, the hundreds of thousands of children of Israel, and they would have had to form… a snaking column through the sea. That's what it would have looked like from 50,000 feet: a great snake slithering on the ground to freedom. One snake composed of all of those hundreds of thousands of children of Israel that Pharaoh had treated like a whole bunch of little snakes. Indeed, they've become a nation now, the many have become one. What Egypt confronts at that moment is their worst nightmare, a great big serpent that fights against them. 

So the final culmination of Israel's redemption took place when Pharaoh's own nightmares came true for him. The snakes that he conjured out of the stuff of his own mind came back to bite him. In the end, the snake and the staff – that sign points to both the beginning and end of Egypt’s oppression of Israel. It points to the very first of Pharaoh's lies, and the redemption of that first lie in the final destruction of Pharaoh's army.

24. Pharaoh’s Last Chance

Strangely, this sign of the snake actually suggests a possible way out that Pharaoh could have used if only he was brave enough to do it.

The way that Pharaoh could have avoided being destroyed by the snake of Israel would have been to somehow admit the lie and face up to that terrible truth. Remember, when Moses saw the snake, when he shrank from it in horror, God said: Grab hold of it. In effect, God was saying: There is an antidote to your perilous situation. When confronted by the snake, don’t run away from it, grab hold of it. That’s what you’re supposed to do with fake snakes.

That’s such a crazy thing! Grab hold of a snake, are you out of your mind? 

Well, think about what God was saying: The reason why you could grab hold of this particular snake is because it wasn't really a snake. It was all an illusion. 

The signs were about exposing an illusion. I’m showing you that what you see as a snake was just a staff that was cast down. What you fear… is really just a staff. 

Remember that Hebrew word for staff, מטה (mateh), that fascinating word that means “tribe.” You're a tribe that has been turned into a snake by Egypt, because someone cast it down and treated it that way. So what's the way out? The way out is just to embrace it, to hold onto it as if it were human again… which is actually the truth. 

Egypt's treatment of Israel was essentially just a self-fulfilling prophecy. They portrayed Israel as a snake-like people and then they shrank away from them in fear. They decided it was so. So finally at the Sea, it became so. The Egyptians really were attacked, just as they feared.

It’s as if Egypt never learned. They came to believe their own propaganda. They regarded Israel, to the end,  as a snake, as an animal to be stamped on. But if you take people who you fear, who are different than you, who are scary, and you resist the lies that you yourself have told about them, you treat them like humans – then guess what? They're humans. The flaw of Egypt is to run away, to shrink away in disgust… and ultimately that flaw destroys them. What if they hadn’t run away? What if, even at the Sea, they had turned to embrace the foe that they were so afraid of? Maybe the story would have ended differently. 

25. A Final Look at Belief

I want to come back to one final curiosity and consider it with you. It's about the people’s reaction to the signs. As I talked about with you before, it says that when Moses performs the signs at the burning bush, ויאמן העם – the people believed that God had redeemed them and had seen their pain. And it says almost the same thing when the redemption is all over, after Egypt’s armies were destroyed at the sea: ויאמינו ביקוה ובמשה עבדו – the people believed in God and in Moses His servant.

How exactly do these two moments of belief relate to each other? 

You know, these two moments of belief, I don't think they're separate moments. I think they play off of each other remarkably. The second moment is magnified because of the first one.  

The three signs that God gave to Moses… when the people saw them for the first time, they were deep in the misery of slavery. When they first saw those signs, they realized that God at least knew their suffering, even if no one else did, and they were able to muster a belief in that God who cared about them. And that gave them a little glimmer of hope. Maybe the future could be different, if in fact there is this caring God in the world.

The hope that they felt then would eventually blossom into redemption. At the Sea, the three great lies weren’t just recognized by God. No, the aggressor, bitter and defiant to the end, had finally been made to confront those lies, to experience the terrible fruits of his own falsehoods. Israel could finally heal now and try to build a new national life, emerging from the trauma of the slavery, of the genocide, of the falsehoods that covered it all up. The hope had finally blossomed into redemption, a redemption that is all the more precious because it contains memories of those first wistful moments of fragile hope. One ויאמינו is meant to echo another. When you read the ויאמינו at the very end of the story, you’re meant to remember ויאמן העם when the signs first appeared. Israel came to first believe in a compassionate God when they saw the signs. But now that the signs had been realized, their belief was realized, too: They understood now, they knew with unparalleled clarity כי־פקד יקוה את־בני ישראל וכי ראה את־ענים – that God had seen their pain… and that God had redeemed His people. 

But redemption doesn’t mean just outward redemption. It doesn’t mean just flying free from Egypt. The outward redemption of Israel, its freedom, came simultaneously with an inner redemption, a redemption of Israel’s trauma through the compassionate truth-telling of a God who knows all. 

[Imu] Thanks so much for listening to that incredible presentation of The Three Great Lies of the Exodus. When it comes to the meaning and the takeaway portion of any of our pieces, we find that they can be very personal. People take different things from different pieces of Torah. But I want to share with you what moved me about this piece, and if it resonates with you, great; if something else meant something to you, that’s okay too. And I’ll try and do that with you each week, kind of share my personal reflections.

You know, most of the time when I learn here at Aleph Beta, or you’ll see in some of the pieces we do on Into the Verse, I expect that they’ll teach me to be a better person, help me keep my neighbors in mind more, help me be a better father, a better husband. Or maybe I’ll learn the meaning behind a mitzvah: why do we shake lulav, what is the meaning behind tzitzit. 

But when I listen to a piece like that, I don’t really get too much of that. It’s not so much that a piece like the one we just heard teaches me to be a better person. I don’t learn the nuances of morality, how to be a better neighbor or anything. I’m mostly sort of in awe of God’s relationship with His people. I grew up with the notion of a powerful God intervening in human affairs to free His people from the immoral oppression of the Egyptians. What I think this piece conveys is that our God isn’t just all-powerful, but that He’s all-knowing – and not in the omniscient, omni-science sense that He knows all the laws of physics, but that He knows all of our suffering, He knows all of our pain, He knows all of the injustice that oppressors may torment us with. 

And there’s something really powerful about knowing that you have a Parent in the sky, a Creator who loves you, who sees the ways in which we are in pain, the ways in which we suffer. That knowing and that seeing itself has a healing effect. But it’s more than that. When God chose to intervene, He didn’t just save us; He made our suffering known, and He made it known not just to the world, but to the very perpetrators of that suffering. Our redemption from Egypt wasn’t just an escape-from-Entebbe raid to get the Israelites out of there as fast as we can. It had an, almost, elegance to it, an acknowledgement of victimhood, justice for the perpetrators… but also a deep, deep sense of healing. And so what I’m meditating on after a piece like that, what I’m coming into my Seder with, is just a little bit more awe, reverence, respect, appreciation, even love for our Creator, the author of our Exodus and this great Book.

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