A.
As our parasha opens, the first seven of the mighty blows which would bring Egypt to her knees have already fallen. The entire Egyptian nation is tottering, reeling at the destruction rained on their economic well-being. So, G-d tells Moshe: בא אל פרעה כי אני הכבדתי את לבו ואת לב עבדיו למען שתי אתתי אלה בקרבו: ולמען תספר באזני בנך ובן בנך את אשר התעללתי במצרים וגו' (“Come to Pharaoh, for I have made his heart heavy, and the heart of his servants, in order that I might place these signs of Mine in his midst. And in order that you will tell in the ears of your son and your son’s son that I have run amok in Egypt....”). Rashi explains the word hith‘allalti (which I translated above “run amok”) as שחקתי, “I played, I made fun”, and cites other instances in support (cf., e.g., Numbers XXII, 29, and I Samuel VI, 6, where the word is similarly used).
The mind reels as we contemplate the verse: Is G-d then a sadist? Were the Egyptians indeed ready to give up, and yet G-d is hitting them again and again, setting them up for the fall, in order to provide a spectacle to tell the children at Pesah?
In order to understand what is indeed going on here, we turn to one of the most profound thinkers of the 20th century, Rabbi Yitzhaq Hutner זצ"ל. Rav Hutner calls our attention to a comment by Rabbeinu Yona on Proverbs XXVII, 21. The verse reads: מצרף לכסף וכור לזהב ואיש לפי מהללו (“A refining pot for silver and a furnace for gold, and a man according to his praise”): אם הוא משבח המעשים הטובים והחכמים והצדיקים תדע ובחנת כי איש טוב הוא ושורש הצדק נמצא בו כו' והמשבח מעשים מגונים או מהלל רשעים הוא הרשע הגמור וגו' (“If one praises good deeds and scholars and tzaddiqim, you may know and judge that he is a good man, and the root of tzedeq is found in him... and one who praises unworthy deeds or glorifies rësha‘im, he is a complete rasha‘...”). Rav Hutner continues: והיינו שאם תרצה להעמיד למבחן אפיו של אדם תראה לאן נוטה עיקר ההתבטלות שלו שתנועת ההתבטלות נובעת מכח הכרת החשיבות שלפי ההכרה שיש לו להאדם לחשיבות איזה ענין באותה מדה הוא מתבטל כלפי אותו הענין ולפי מהללו פי' מה שהאדם מהלל תדע האיש פי' מהותו הפנימית (“That is, that if you wish to arrive at and judge the quality of a person, you should look to where his self-abnegation [hithbatluth] leans, for the direction of his self-abnegation is derived from the recognition of importance, for in the degree that a person recognizes the importance of some matter, to that degree he effaces himself toward that matter; and ‘according to his praise’, i.e., what the person praises, you will know ‘the man,’ i.e., his internal nature”; פחד יצחק, עניני פורים, ענין א' ).
There is a universal human tendency to try to minimize the gravity or importance of a situation, rather than face up to it as it is, often through ridicule. The Hebrew word for this tendency is létzanuth. This quality of létzanuth leads one to look for any chink in the armor, any weak spot in a structure, any loop hole, in order to cut something down to size, so that it does not appear so important, and hence does not need to be addressed with the seriousness it might otherwise command. Hazal characterize ‘Amaléq as a létz (שמות רבה פכ"ז סי' ה'), for the reason that, at the height of Israel’s greatness, when אז נבהלו אלופי אדום אילי מואב יוחזמו רעד נמגו כל ישבי כנען (“then panicked the chiefs of Edom, the leaders of Mo’av were seized with trembling, all the inhabitants of Këna‘an melted”; Exodus XVI,15), ‘Amaléq went looking for the chink in Israel’s armor, to bring them down, because ‘Amaléq would not face up to the reality of what was happening... The king of Egypt, too, clutched at this midda of létzanuth.
B.
We see this in an observation attributed to the Gra concerning the makka of dever, the plague which struck the Egyptians’ livestock. When the plague struck: וישלח פרעה והנה לא מת ממקנה ישראל עד אחד ויכבד לב פרעה ולא שלח את העם: (“Pharaoh sent and behold, there had not died of Israel’s livestock up to one; and Pharaoh’s heart was heavy and he did not send out the people”; IX, 7). Applying the Talmudic principle of עד ולא עד בכלל (“‘up to’ is not included in the generality”; ברכות כ"ו:), this clearly implies that one of Israel’s animals did die, at least so far as Pharaoh was concerned. Whose was it?
As Ramban explains, the mëqallél who was executed for cursing G-d (cf. Levitcus XXIV, 10) was the son of the Egyptian overseer whom Moshe killed at the beginning of his career; the slave whom the Egyptian had been beating to death was the husband of Shëlomith bath Divri, on whom the Egyptian had sired the child (עיי' הערתו שם בשם רבותינו הצרפתים). The halacha that ethnic identity follows the mother’s lineage took effect only after Mattan Torah; hence, the boy was, in fact, an Egyptian; but as he chose to stay with his mother, so far as the Egyptians were concerned, he was part of Israel, and his animal, of course, was pastured with the rest of Israel’s animals. Says the Gra, it was his animal that died, and it was this which provided Pharaoh with the illusory “comfort” that (despite the fact that all of Egypt’s livestock lay dead in the fields) Moshe’s prediction had been inaccurate; perhaps he was victim of a “natural” disaster without moral content after all, one which had claimed one of “Israel’s” animals as well.
This was the reed to which Pharaoh clung throughout Egypt’s ordeal; when the hartumim were able on some level to reproduce the first two miracles he called them mere magic tricks; as the evidence mounted that it was not so, he continued to clutch at straws.
Right up to the very end. When Moshe announced the makkath bëchoroth, in which the first-born of Egypt perished, Moshe announced: כה אמר ד' כחצת הלילה אני יוצא בתוך מצרים: ומת כל בכור וגו (“Thus said Ha-Shem: At about midnight I am going out amidst Egypt. And every first-born will die....”; XI, 4). In the end, when the blow fell, ויהי בחצת הלילה (“It was at midnight....” ibid., XII, 29); so why did Moshe say ka-hatzoth, “at about midnight”? שמא יטעו איצטגניני פרעה ויאמרו משה בדאי הוא (“Lest Pharaoh’s astronomers err and say Moshe is a fraud”; רש"י ע"פ ברכות ד.). In other words, all the bëchoroth Mitzrayim would be dropping like flies, but because it seemed to happen five minutes earlier or later than Moshe said, due to an error in the Egyptian clocks, the king would cling to his belief that it was not an act of G-d....
This attitude of létzanuth, present, as we see, to the bitter end, was what had to be broken.
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