Vaera D'var Torah

Vaera Summary

God sent Moses to talk to Pharaoh, and he sent Aaron with him because Moses had impeded speech. When they got there, they used God’s powers to prove that God had sent them, by turning Aaron’s staff into a snake. Then, God told Moses and Aaron to go and ask Pharaoh to free the Israelites, and if he didn’t listen they should use the staff to turn all of the water in the Nile into blood. They asked Pharaoh, he said no, and they turned the water to blood. The same process happened with the following plagues of frogs, lice, insects, cattle disease, boils, and hail. After the hail, Pharaoh finally said that the Israelites could leave, so Moses made the hail and thunder stop. However, since it stopped, Pharaoh changed his mind and made the Israelites stay.

Commentary:

One lesser-known part about the story of the ten plagues is that Pharaoh didn’t let the Israelites go not just because he wanted to keep them as slaves, but he also didn’t believe that they really had the power of God- because he had magicians! When Moses and Aaron first went to Pharaoh to free the Israelites, Aaron changed his rod into a serpent as a demonstration of God’s power. But, “Then Pharaoh, for his part, summoned the wise men and the sorcerers; and the Egyptian magicians, in turn, did the same with their spells; each cast down his rod, and they turned into serpents. But Aaron’s rod swallowed their rods” (Exodus 7:11-12). The same thing happened with the following plagues: Pharaoh’s magicians turned water to blood and conjured frogs. However, by the third plague, Pharaoh’s magicians couldn’t create lice, so they told Pharaoh “This is the finger of God!” (Exodus 8:15). Even that couldn’t change Pharaoh’s mind, and his heart “stiffened” every time as he refused to let the Israelites go. The last mention of the magicians is after the plague of boils, where Pharaoh wanted them to fix it, but they couldn’t since they were also affected. I wanted to write about these magicians just because I think that it’s really cool that they existed in the Torah, and it’s interesting how they were actually a major character in the Exodus story.