A D’var Torah for Parshat Bo by Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson
Rereading this week’s parshah, with its familiar story of the final three plagues, I was struck by a new observation: It seems Pharaoh was not a firstborn.
Never mind my assumptions about who gets to be king; never mind the portrayals offered by modern midrashim from Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain to Prince of Egypt. The text of the Torah seems pretty self-evident:
In the middle of the night, THE ETERNAL struck down all the [male] first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle. And Pharaoh arose in the night, with all his courtiers and all the Egyptians — because there was a loud cry in Egypt; for there was no house where there was not someone dead. (Exodus 12:29-30)
Pharaoh survives the plague; therefore he must not have been a firstborn.
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I’m not the first one to notice this discrepancy. Rashi picks up on it but reaches the opposite conclusion. Referencing the midrash known as the Mechilta, he writes that Pharaoh was a firstborn but was spared by this plague so that God could show him God’s full might at the Red Sea.
Rashi’s reading makes dramatic sense. The whole purpose of the ten plagues was to show the world — beginning with Pharaoh, the Egyptians, and the Israelites themselves — that God is the supreme divinity. Having Pharaoh succumb to the tenth plague, when the story isn’t quite over, would be clumsy storytelling. But to my mind, in his rush to make Pharaoh a firstborn, Rashi misses out on an interesting alternate interpretation.
One of the hallmarks of Genesis is the recurring trope of the younger son supplanting the older: Seth is chosen over Cain, Isaac over Ishmael, Jacob over Esau, Joseph and Judah over Reuben; Ephraim is placed before Menashe. This continues into Exodus and beyond: Moses is the baby of the family, as is David. We usually read this as a marker of worthiness over birth order, breaking from the status quo, a leg-up for the underdog. We sometimes even take it a step further, as a statement of a foundational Jewish ethic: valuing righteousness over power structures, obedience to a supernal authority over deference to earthly ones.
What if Pharaoh was also such an underdog, a younger son who somehow gained the throne? Clearly that wouldn’t make him the good guy, but it does scramble our clean symbolic narrative of morality. It becomes harder to claim there is a “Jewish ethic of power” encoded in the Genesis stories of sibling rivalry.
Let’s complicate the picture further. Two parshiyot ago, while Moses is on his way back to Egypt after the burning bush episode, God gives him this instruction: “Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says THE ETERNAL: Israel is My first-born son.’” (Exodus 4:22) (It’s also worth noting that in the following verse, God continues, “If you refuse to release My firstborn, I will kill your firstborn” — foreshadowing, or perhaps fair warning for, the terrible final plague that we read this week.) So Israel, the younger child, has completed its evolution and ascended to the coveted status of firstborn. Aaron and Moses, the middle and youngest of three, have been challenging Pharaoh — also a younger child — through nine plagues. And now, Pharaoh’s firstborn lies dead at his feet, presumably elevating his younger son to the position of heir.
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Firstborns can be supplanted in many different ways, not all of them virtuous.
Reading this parshah this year, in the early weeks of Israel’s new ultra-right government, I can’t help but think about how logics of power and precedence are applied to the occupation by both Jewish and Palestinian extremists. Arguments about who was here first — who is the “firstborn” of the land of Israel/Palestine, if you will — are made in both directions. Each claims the land as their birthright (to the exclusion of the other) and rightful ancestral plot. Who will use what kind of power to drive whom out, and who will claim they are doing so under the mantle of divine approval? In the terms of our story, who will be Israel and who will be Pharaoh? Who is on a moral and spiritual journey that frees them up to achieve their truest self — and who is on the verge of overreaching and losing all?
At the end of the ninth plague — the darkness that prevented “each person from seeing their fellow or moving from their place for three days” (Exodus 10:23) — Pharaoh dramatically tells Moses, “Be gone from me! Take care not to see me again.” (Exodus 10:28, emphasis added) Literarily, both the plague and Pharaoh’s response point us to the antidote to this impasse: seeing the other. As our teacher Rabbi Danielle Stillman pointed out in her (M)oral Torah for Vayishlach earlier this fall, Jacob and Esau’s meeting (including Jacob’s wrestling with the angel the night before) is full of face imagery — see Genesis 32:31-32 and 33:10. That acknowledgement, that seeing of a person in their whole self — regardless of how they have wounded you in the past — points a path towards reconciliation.
I am not so naive as to think that Jews and Palestinians seeing each other as human is the key to ending the occupation — and, to be clear, neither is Rabbi Stillman. What I do know is that seeing each other’s humanity is an unavoidable bare minimum, because the politics of wrestling for firstborn status are failing everyone who lives between the river and the sea. And the consequences of delay could be catastrophic.
Rabbi Lev Meirowitz Nelson (he/him) is T’ruah’s Director of Leadership and Learning and was ordained in 2013 from Hebrew College, where he was a Wexner Graduate Fellow. In 2017, Lev was honored by the Covenant Foundation with a Pomegranate Prize, which recognizes early-career Jewish educators. Lev, his wife Eliana, and their three kids live in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Kensington.