parsha bit: Va'eira

[cellio]

When God sent the plague of blood, it affected not just the Nile but all Egyptian water. Rabbi Avun ha-Levi said that if a Jew and an Egyptian sat together, drinking from the same jug, the Jew drank water while for the Egyptian it was blood. Even if the Egyptian had the Jew pour the water for him, it turned to blood in his hands. Only if the Egyptian paid money for the water did it remain water. (Exodus Rabbah 9:10)

I think this is a sad midrash in one way. If, in the midst of oppression and plagues, a Jew and an Egyptian were able to sit down together as peers (which would be pretty remarkable), wouldn't a better teaching be that for that Egyptian, the water stayed water? But perhaps my modern thinking informs this; such a thing would certainly have undermined some of the power of the plagues. The p'shat (plain reading) of the torah account does not seem to allow for innocent Egyptians, which troubles me. I think we're supposed to read it at the grand, national level, not at the level of individual participants. I have trouble doing that sometimes.

Comments

[dmnsqrl.livejournal.com]

Weren't most of the Jews slaves? Wasn't that why they had to be set free? Maybe the divide isn't between friendly interaction and commerce so much as between ordering a slave and paying a free person?

[cellio]

By that point I think all Jews in Egypt were either slaves or Moses. I agree that ordering and paying are different; I wonder if that's what the author had in mind. I read it as happening this way even if (somehow) the situation was benign (asking rather than ordering). Maybe members of the majority are held to automatically intimidate -- there's no such thing as a benign request from an Egyptian to a Jew becuse of the power imbalance? Dunno.

[zevabe.livejournal.com]

"majority"? Who said Egyptians were the majority?

1) Minorities have oppressed majorities before (apartheid)

2) Sinai had 600,000 men of military age. I've heard that expanded out to 2 million. (1,200,000 with women, and then the rest children I guess, but there were probably more than 1.5 children per couple). Say it was 2 million. Then add in the midrash that 1 in 5, 50 or 500 people wanted to leave and were not killed in the plague of darkness. So that means as many as 1 billion Jews (or 100 million, or 10 million) were in Egypt. And they weren't the majority?

[cellio]

Sorry, sloppiness on my part -- majority of power, not necessarily numbers. I meant dominance. That the Egyptians were so concerned about the numbers of Jews suggests that there were a lot of them -- whether they were a majority or a sizable minority I can't say, but significant in numbers. The Egyptians, though, had all the (earthly) power.

I also hadn't heard that midrash before. I've heard that only 1 in 5 returned from the Babylonian exile, but not that only 1 in {5, 50, 500} left Egypt. (To be nit-picky, though, this midrash talks about spectacular numbers of Jews in Egypt but doesn't actually give us data on Egyptians; for all we know there could have been spectacular numbers of them, too. That's just a side point, a curiosity, though.)