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the cost of plagues
I want to amplify something I saw on Twitter today by AvBronstein:
A congregant shared an insight: immediately following the final plague, the killing of the first-born, the text tells us that "Pharaoh arose that night."
In other words, he had gone to sleep.
Pharaoh couldn't have gone to sleep on the assumption that the plague wasn't going to happen. This was the tenth time around. He knew. His advisers knew, the people knew. The Midrash says that the Egyptian first-born actually rebelled, taking up arms, because they knew.
Rather, Pharaoh was prepared to bear the cost of the final plague. For him, it was worth it. So much so, that he was even able to sleep that night, knowing what was coming.
I'm going to interrupt for a moment here. Paro knew by now what the consequences of his stubborn refusal to give up personal power would be. He'd seen his people be afflicted by nine previous plagues. Some of them even affected the elite in the palace, though they had more power than "regular folks" to evade some of the effects. They could bring all their animals safely inside before the hail, could source drinking water elsewhere, could afford to replace animals lost to the pestilence, could get top-notch medical care not available to others. But some plagues affected even them, safely in their palaces. They knew. Paro knew.
And Moshe had just told him that God was going to kill all the first-born, from the palace on down to the slaves, even down to the animals. Paro knew this was a credible threat.
And he was ok with that. Maybe he had some magical thinking that his own family would be protected; more likely his son was an acceptable loss. Certainly the first-born of all the people he ruled, the people he was nominally responsible for, were acceptable losses. He was their ruler and "god", after all; he couldn't be weak by giving in to Moshe and the true God. These afflictions would pass and the deserving would survive.
And it wasn't just Paro thousands of years ago, now was it? This happens with power-hungry leaders, ones who've lost touch with whom they serve, all the time. It happened in our day, with a deadly plague that our leaders concealed the severity of, because they were safe. A few hundred thousand old folks are an acceptable loss to preserve the illusion of strength, right?
Avraham continues on Twitter:
I can't help but think of all those people ready to launch a civil war in America, so grimly sure that they are prepared to pay whatever price needs to be paid. And how many of them, like Pharaoh, woke up later that night and realized just what they had done to themselves.
I'm also thinking of a President calmly watching the insurrection he stoked on television, only to realize the costs he will be paying for the rest of his life out of what remains of his fortune, reputation, and legacy.
Me again. And I'm also thinking of all the people who were, and even still are, fine with plague deaths, and murders and reckless killings, and treating human beings like animals even down to the cages, and justice systems that depend on who the accused is, and ruining people's lives on mere accusations and presumptions, because they, personally, are safe. But nobody's safe, and we can't sleep through the unrest our society has fallen into.
Paro's people had no power to effect change; Paro held all the cards. We might not have much power to effect change, but I think we have a little more (voting, for example), and I pray it's enough to avert Egypt's fate, despite bad decisions made by those who rule us.
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Paro chose not to believe. Over and over and over, Paro scoffed at the warning and felt the punishment, and instead of saying, "Gee, maybe I should listen next time", he went right back to not believing. Not because he was poorly informed. Not because he was stupid. And, crucially, not because he reckoned the cost and thought it acceptable: indeed, every time he scoffed and then paid the price, he was chastened and upset by the cost.
And we saw this through the pandemic. People, including ones with little power, scoffed that the warnings were true, they scoffed at the instructions at what to do to keep themselves safe, and they scoffed at the instructions at what to do to keep their families safe.
The Torah was documenting something important about human psychology: that knowing isn't enough. That people can chose not to believe in what they know, and will do so for appalling reasons. And to appalling consequences.
Paro going to sleep the night of the last plague is exactly like those Qultists who thought they could assault Congress and then fly back home like nothing happened. They hadn't reckoned on paying any price at all. They thought there would be no price. They hadn't accepted the consequences, they thought there would be no consequences. Paro didn't go to sleep thinking that it would be find for him if his son died. Paro went to sleep thinking his son wouldn't die.
This is something I learned about working with prison inmates; the field of prison rehab has this concept of people playing head-games on themselves, of which this is one (or possibly several), to convince themselves it's okay to do something they really, really, want to do but that they know perfectly well is a terrible idea for even purely pragmatic, consequentialist reasons. People bent on committing crimes of profit like drug smuggling or robbing banks convince themselves "well, I'll never get caught" and "I'm sure it's no big deal to go to prison". They convince themselves that, nah, there aren't really consequences, not for them.
And that's what I think is being demonstrated in Paro's example.
P.S. I want to add that I think it's incredibly hard to talk about Shemot – or even perceive it clearly – and what it's saying about knowledge and belief, for us in our time and place, because Christianity has certain epistemological ideas baked into our larger culture, ideas about what it even means for something to even be a religion, that are very at odds with what Shemot is saying about those same things. Christianity, particularly the Protestantism ascendant in the US, has made much of the idea that belief is supposed to be in the absence of evidence. Shemot is about belief in the presence of abundant evidence.
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I don't think we disagree, other than that I had more than one possible explanation in mind. My "maybe magical thinking" comment was meant to be a hedge, because I don't know people's inner thinking, or the most likely patterns, well enough to say, so I held open both possibilities: either he knew and didn't care or he thought he'd somehow be exempt, but either way, he chose to not take seriously the possibility that consequences would happen as clearly announced.
Thank you for bringing your additional experience and explaining the self-applied head games people play. That really does help bring things into focus. (I do hope you write about Sh'mot.)
Good point, and one emphasized through the rest of the torah (particularly D'varim). Even the people who directly experienced these miracles, directly experienced the divine presence, didn't entirely believe it. Not just Paro; Yisrael seemed to ignore abundant evidence at times too.
(P.S. I hadn't heard "Qultists" before. Perfect.)
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Not just Paro; Yisrael seemed to ignore abundant evidence at times too.
Yes, exactly!
I do hope you write about Sh'mot.
I do too. I'm passionate about doing it, but it brushes up against my towering, incandescent rage, and that makes it hard to form coherent words.
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Agreed. I've come to think of QAnon as basically a millenarian cult in all important respects, and this is a wonderfully pithy way of summarizing that...
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As a concession to courtesy, I'll redact the name of God. I hope it makes sense to do it under the circumstances.
The text which I have handy is the New Jerusalem Bible, a Christian Bible. This version gives the text: "And at midnight Y-- struck down all the first-born in Egypt from the first-born of Pharaoh, heir to his throne, to the first-born of the prisoner in the dungeon, and the first-born of all the livestock. Pharaoh and all his officials and all the Egyptians got up in the night, and there was great wailing in Egypt, for there was not a house without its dead."
It wasn't just Pharaoh; no one stayed up in fear of their son dying. It's conceivable that Pharaoh told no one else of the threat, but given what had been happening, I doubt that he would have been able to keep it a personal secret. He wasn't so absolute a ruler that he didn't have to carry out the obligations that came with the throne.
He didn't stay up, not because he disbelieved the threat or because he thought his family was immune, but because the symmetry of the tale demanded that he react as he had reacted to all the previous plague. His defining characteristic is obstinacy. He made concessions after some of the plagues but then reversed himself. He didn't have Moses executed, which is what any tyrant facing such dangerous opposition would have done.
The story makes sense only in symbolic terms. Finding human motivations in it misses the point.