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Parashat Bo 5785 / פָּרָשַׁת בֹּא

✷ to be read on February 1⎮3 Shvat ✷

In Bo (“Come”), God sends the eighth and ninth plagues, locusts and darkness. Still Pharaoh will not release the Israelites. God tells Moses to prepare for the 10th plague: the killing of the firstborn Egyptians. The Israelites spread the blood of lambs on their doorposts in order to protect their firstborns. After the last plague, Pharaoh and the Egyptians demand that the Israelites leave.

A pressing ethico-political question arises in the context of this parsha: to what extent can all Egyptians be said to be responsible for the enslavement of the Israelites, hence to have "justly" been punishment? As the medieval commentator Sforno points out, all were punished “from the most guilty of parties [Pharaoh] to the least guilty of parties [the children of the captives who were sitting in the dungeon].” In other words, it would appear that even those who could in no way be said to be guilty were subjected to collective punishment. Such is the way of war, of course. But is this the way of justice?

Adina Garver argues, if there is here a lesson about justice to be drawn, it cannot be located in the sense that all the Egyptians - even the captive children - were guilty, hence deserving of the death that was visited upon them. We must instead look beyond the collective punishment that occurred to where it points: the matter of collective responsibility.

It does not seem reasonable to claim that all the Egyptians were directly responsible for the oppression of the Israelites. Yet, as Garver argues, we might say that they were nonetheless implicated in the enslavement of the Israelites to the degree that they were witness to it and, in light of that witness, obligated to dissent, protest, resist.

So, too, we in our contemporary moment are implicated in suffering that we have neither intended nor directly caused. Indeed, in a globalized world, the unintended impact of our economic activity reaches so much farther than we can see. But this non-knowledge - this invisibility - of suffering does not relieve from us the burden of ethical obligation. Arguably, the paramount challenge of our ethical moment is to learn how to see what is otherwise covered over by the conveniences and abstractions of capitalism - and to make different, inconvenient choices in that light.

Of course, abstractions are always attractive to the degree that they distance us from more immediate wounds. It would be another form of denial - of irresponsibility - to read Parashat Bo only in terms of the way in which capitalism renders our responsibility global, hence endless....hence seemingly impossible to fulfill. This Torah portion begs to be read more immediately - more intimately. For me, this parsha cannot but invoke the spectre of the children of Gaza, who have suffered so much - punished unduly for a crime in which they had no part - and our own abdicated responsibility.

Learn more about this parsha and others at My Jewish Learning.