Our selection for consideration this week is this verse:
“For the Eternal, when going through to smite the Egyptians, will see the blood on the lintel and the two doorposts, and the Eternal will pass over the door and not let the Destroyer enter and smite your home” (12:23).
At a Passover Seder, if you were to ask the question, “Who killed the firstborn Egyptians during the tenth plague?” someone would undoubtedly answer, “The Angel of Death” or “Malach Ha-Mavet.”
The concluding song in the Haggadah, “Chad Gadya” (“One Little Kid”) mentions him in its last verse: “Then came the Holy One, Blessed be God, who slew the Angel of Death, who slew the slaughterer who killed the ox….” In the Bible, the closest we find to an “Angel of Death” is a “Destroying Angel.” In the midst of a deadly plague, God stops the punishment by commanding the Angel, “Stay your hand!” (II Sam. 24: 16).
In Parashat Bo we find a similar character: Ha-Mashchit, The Destroyer. We know little of this shadowy figure's methods or motives, save that God must protect (“pass over”) the Israelite homes so that The Destroyer cannot enter to kill the residents. Rashi (France, 1040-1105) pointed out that the Destroyer is like a wild animal in a forest at night: “He does not distinguish between righteous and evil” (Rashi to 12: 23). This would explain why the Israelites are told to stay at home: outside, the Destroyer would rampage, killing everyone in its path.
The Destroyer has no free will. The Destroyer destroys because that is its nature and sole purpose. The Rabbis were uncomfortable with the idea that God would entrust divine judgment to a monster, although the Bible at first blush seems to suggest just that. For this reason, Ramban (Nachmanides, Spain, 1194-1270) asserts that God alone executed divine justice by slaying the first-born of Egypt—not The Destroyer. “The Destroyer was not even in Egypt” that night, Nachmanides writes. “The Holy One of Blessing was the slayer.” His interpretation is consonant with the Haggadah, which sharply denies that messengers or angels had any role in the deliverance of the Israelites from Egypt. God alone receives the credit. Above all, Nachmanides takes pains not to portray God as an indiscriminate killer.
Not all acts of violence are equal, even in the chaos of war. Seeing the difference between The Destroyer, the utterly amoral and indiscriminate killer, and God, who, after nine progressively severe plagues, must out of necessity unleash the ultimate punishment, allows us to clarify the difference between indiscriminate violence and violence sparingly applied in the cause of justice in our world.
Precisely because of their similarity to The Destroyer, we deplore terrorists, who do not distinguish between righteous and wicked, soldier and pedestrian, parent or child, in their wanton bloodshed. Precisely because of their similarity to The Destroyer, we censure soldiers who overstep their military directives in the course of combat, killing civilian alongside combatant. We recoil in disgust when terrorist organizations claim moral equivalency between suicide bombings against civilians and targeted military strikes against known militants.
Let us acknowledge that war is by its nature dehumanizing. Combat, from training to actual engagement, desensitizes soldiers to the act of killing. Yet Judaism, which recognizes in certain limited circumstances the need to fight justified wars, nevertheless insists that we cannot allow ourselves to become soulless Destroyers, even when we wage war—especially when we wage war. Human beings do not abdicate their free will, even in bombers or fighter jets, even in the trenches. Whether Israeli or American, Jewish or Gentile, the honor of our soldiers, of our country, and of our faith, can be preserved only insofar as we strive mightily to distinguish between the enemy and the innocent. What will victory mean if achieved monstrously?
So long as war persists, we will hold fast to Judaism’s insistence that ethical guidelines can and should be applied even to this most terrible of human endeavors. But we will never abandon our faith in the Prophet Micah’s dream of every person beneath vine and fig tree, with none to make us afraid (4: 4), a dream we must labor to realize.
These remarks adapted by the author from a previously published piece written for the Union for Reform Judaism's "Ten Minutes of Torah" online column.
"The parasha encompasses the final four plagues: hail, locusts, darkness, and the slaying of the firstborn."
ReplyDeleteActually, it's the last 3, not 4.
One way to remember is consider the gematria of the word Bo (=3).
The previous portion ended with the hail held from falling further (only to fall 41 years later during Yehoshua's miraculous war after stopping of the celestial spheres from movement) and the noises held back (until years later when the huge army of Aram fleed from surrounding Jerusalem on account of these noises, during the prophet Elisha's time).
As for the era of the end of wars to come soon as the Messianic era, we all await anxiously, but untill then we have to remember what the wisest of all men, King Solomon, had said, and, as you say, that there is "A time to love and a time to hate, A TIME OF WAR and a time of peace (Eccl. 3, 8)".
Kol tuv!
Koll tuv!