The Gen-Ex Connection

If you want to understand Jewish theology, Jewish ethics and perhaps Judaism as a whole, a good place to start is Genesis, Chapter 1, Verse 27. “And God created Adam in the divine image, in the divine image God created them.” This verse is a bold statement not just about Adam, but about every human being, that our outward features and our inner essence reflect and contain an element of the divine. Every human being is created with an equal and infinite worth. All of us are patterned after a single God.

But this is just the beginning.

The great theologian of our time, Arthur Green, tells of being in the classroom of his teacher Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and coming to the second of the Ten Commandments – the prohibition of making images of God. “Why,” Heschel asked, “should we be forbidden to make images of God? What is the big deal? What is the harm?” Heschel answered his own question by explaining, “God has an image, And that is [pointing to the students] you.” Everything you do, everything you say, bears the potential to mirror the divine image, every one of us, in all our actions, is capable not only of serving God, but of acting in God’s image, in Hebrew, b’tzelem Elohim, or alternatively in Latin, Imitatio Dei. (Adapted from Green, Ehyeh, 120-1)

For us as Jews, the domains of theology and ethics, what we believe and what we do, are not just interrelated, but are interdependent. Just as God clothed Adam and Eve in the Garden, so too we clothe the naked. Just as God visited Abraham as he was recuperating, so too we visit the sick. Just as God comforted the mourner and buried the dead, so too each of us. From Moses at Mount Sinai to the ethical writings of Moses Maimonides to the mysticism of Moses Cordovero, it is this verse from the book of Genesis and this principle that serve as the binding force of rabbinic ethics. God’s compassion, God’s mercy, all of God’s acts and attributes are meant to show us a Godly path by which we may imitate and follow the attributes of the Holy One.

This would make for a great sermon if this were the fall, and we were reading the first few chapters of Genesis, not the book of Exodus as we are this morning. This week and next, our focus is on the greatest showdown of all, between Moses and Pharaoh, plague after plague, the insistent demand to “let my people go,” culminating in the Exodus itself. What in the world does the plague story have to do with being created in the God’s image? In order to answer this question, I need to take you on a bit of a detour, which may meander a bit just as the Israelites did in the wilderness, but I guarantee will eventually lead to the promised land.

As some of you may know, I have long held a theory about the plagues, a theory that I recently discovered has been stated and substantiated by someone a whole lot smarter than me, my teacher from rabbinical school, Professor Ziony Zevit. In an article in Biblical Archeology, Zevit tries to make sense of the ten plagues that we read this week and next; their number, their order, and most of all, their meaning.

Zevit offers three explanations. First, he explains the plagues by way of natural phenomena – atmospheric conditions, meteorological disasters, hailstorms, torrential rains - all the ecological circumstances that could have afflicted Upper Egypt in that fateful early-to-late spring. Second, Zevit demonstrates how the plagues may be understood as a coordinated theological attack on the “Egyptian Pantheon.” Heket – the Egyptian deity represented as a frog, Hathor, as a cow, and so on and so forth. Each and every plague is a theological statement of the preeminence of the one Hebrew God over all the Egyptian “so-called” deities.

But it is Zevit’s third explanation that I find to be the most daring, creative and convincing. Namely, that if you really want to understand the plague narrative, or for that matter, the first few chapters of Exodus, then you need to superimpose it over the opening chapters of Genesis. If you do, and if you read those chapters slowly and with each other in mind, you discover a striking series of lexical, stylistic and structural similarities that not only link them together, but also – in their very juxtaposition –make a powerful theological statement.

Let’s begin with a warm-up.

When Moses throws down his staff on the ground before Pharaoh,what does it become? A snake. In Hebrew, a tanin or a nahash. When was the last time a snake figured prominently in the biblical narrative? That’s right – in the Garden of Eden.

Let’s keep going. What’s the first plague? Blood. “Every gathering of water, mikveh mayim, turned to blood.” (Ex. 7:19) Mikveh mayim, the same word used when God gathered the waters in order to create the sea. What plagues come next? Frogs, lice and flies – all of the creepy crawly things that are found in the sea, on the earth and in the air. It is a strange triad of plagues, until you realize that it exactly the same triad created in Genesis that multiplied and swarmed across the earth. What follows in Genesis? The creation of animal life. What follows in Exodus? Pestilence, a plague whose object is to afflict animal life. What about locusts? – an assault on vegetation; and what is hail if not an atmospheric occurrence reflecting the dark underbelly of creation. As for darkness, it represents the opposite of God’s initial act of creating light. And what was the final act of creation? The last item before the day of rest? The creation of humanity – an act that finds its horrific reversal in the final plague, the death of the firstborn.

The parallels are not perfect, but it is, I believe, fairly compelling to read the ten plagues as a gloss on the creation story. If, as it states in Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers, the world was created with ten utterances (5:1), the ten are turned upside down with the plagues. If the point of Genesis was to go from a state of chaos to a structured order, then in Exodus we take the reverse journey back into the heart of chaos, the entire paradigm inverted and transformed.

While it is fun to draw out these parallels and juxtapositions, the real question we need to ask is “so what?” What does this all mean? Well, if you understand the intended audience of the plagues to be Pharaoh or the Egyptians, then the answer is rather straightforward. “You, Pharaoh, who would dare make yourself out to be a God, are way, way out of your league. I, the God of Israel, will show you the chaos I can inflict. I will show you what it means to be God.” But as many have pointed out, the plagues need not be understood as a hard knuckle negotiating tactic on God’s part. If that were the case, why so many plagues, and why these ten specifically? In fact, the text makes explicit that the intended audience of God’s mighty acts was not Pharaoh or the Egyptians but the people Israel, who “saw what God had done and believed in Lord and his servant Moses.” (Ex 14:31) A far more plausible explanation is that the correlation of the plagues with creation was an echo that could only be understood and appreciated by the Israelites. The number, the order, the manner of the plagues, the road to freedom served to be a source of faith, security and fulfillment to the Israelites, even as they charted out new and uncertain territory.

Perhaps the object of all this was the Egyptians. Perhaps it was the Israelites. Who knows? Authorial intent is hard to figure out, all the more so when the author is God. But for us, the readers a few thousand years later, the message becomes rather clear, and brings us full circle to where we began. The same God who is capable of performing life-giving acts of creation is also capable of inflicting massive damage – an observation that we need not look hard to know is as true today as it was in the Bible.

But it also means something else. It also means that if God can function in multiple capacities, creating and destroying, then each of us, created in that divine image, can do the same. Like God, we can be compassionate, merciful and creative; or like God, we can be vengeful, punishing and destructive. As Erich Fromm wrote, “That man can destroy life is just as miraculous a feat as that he can create it … In the act of destruction, man sets himself above life; he transcends himself as a creature. Thus, the ultimate choice for a man, inasmuch as he is driven to transcend himself, is to create or to destroy, to love or to hate." (Fromm, The Sane Society)

Ultimately, the most important thing about comparing Egypt to the Garden of Eden is not about creepy crawly things, darkness or even snakes. The most important point of comparison is that they are both Exodus stories, narratives about people leaving a place, Egypt and Eden, to which – although they may wish to do so – they will never return. In that sense, both Egypt and Eden are stories about the joys and responsibilities that come with freedom, and they are no different than our own. Imbued with the Godlike ability to distinguish right from wrong, given the liberty to make our choices, toward what purpose shall we direct the divine spark? Will we, like Adam and Eve, having eaten of the fruit of knowledge, continue to be stewards in completing God’s creation? Or will we, like Pharaoh, harden our hearts, abdicate our humanity in a manner that proves to be our undoing? It is as good a litmus test as any, in the political sphere, in our interpersonal relations, in all of our actions. Created in the image of the divine, are we choosing to build up or tear down God’s creation? The choice is ours. The only question really, is which path, which story you choose to be your own.