Drash on Va’eira 2025

I was in shock, grasping the steering wheel tight as my car descended into the LA Basin. The entire sky was dark brown and my mouth suddenly tasted of soot. I was driving into a hot zone, collecting my kid from my mother’s house in West Los Angeles. I had seen reports of the fire, but still could not fathom the extent of the damage.

Every puff of smoke, every breath, every scent on the wind used to be something else: the sofa where a grandmother loved to sit and read, the ugly jumper someone else never wore, a child’s fingerpainting, perhaps. Choking on one another’s lives is an eerie feeling, at once horrific and intimate.

Parshat Va’era, the second in the Book of Exodus, tells of the encounter between Moses and Pharoah. Their “negotiations” quickly devolve. With each impasse, God ups the ante by sending plagues, demonstrating Divine power over the natural world: blood, frogs, lice, insects, disease, boils, hail. With each new horror, Pharoah acquiesces just a bit (but not enough), and the process repeats until its ultimate, wrenching, redemptive conclusion.

I’ve sung these plagues at seders and studied this text through the years. I’ve even lived through plagues (AIDS, Covid). But I’d never before experienced such an otherworldly sensation as I did driving into Los Angeles on 9 January 2025. It was overwhelming and disconcerting, especially since much of the city was still at work: traffic lights, restaurants, appointments. Everything was the same and everything was different. Perhaps you’ve experienced that, too.

Why did God send plagues instead of simply changing Pharoah’s mind? And why did all Egyptians need to experience them? How deeply unjust of God to cause even the enslaved girl toiling at the millstone to suffer, when self-centered Pharaoh was an audience of one.

Because we are, all of us, complicit in systems of oppression and consumption. We, human begins who share oxygen and cities and networks, eat and wear other people’s labour. Although we believe ourselves to be independent, we create one another’s realities. We breathe one another’s existences, whether we realise it or not.

Even the kindly Egyptian benefited from cheap labour. Even the one who hated the system enjoyed its benefits.

We know by now that climate change is at work, making Planet Earth hotter, drier, wetter. Even so, we keep spewing carbon as we skip past tipping points. We who live in highly developed countries, who read these words on devices, who eat produce out of season and buy what we don’t need, who drive into Los Angeles in rented cars and fly out on jumbo jets, we are responsible. We did not strike the match or wield the whip, but we added to the burden.

Abraham Joshua Heschel observed: “Few are guilty, but all are responsible.”

We are the Israelites, and we are the Egyptians. The time is now; a hot wind blows for us all.