עשר מכות

The Ten Plagues

-  Tali Bogler & Meirah Glick

 

The ten plagues cannot simply be looked at as a set of supernatural events that ruined the Egyptian empire over 3000 years ago. Rabbi Yosef Y. Jacobson once said, “The Torah is a blue print for life, a manual for the development of the human race, not merely a record of ancient tales. The episodes recorded in the Torah represent timeless, spiritual tales occurring continuously in the heart of each man.” If this is so then what do the ten plagues teach us about the human race and how we should behave?

The Kabbalah discusses how the human soul is made up of ten key characteristics. They are: Super-conscious, conception, intelligence, love, rejection, compassion, ambition, submission, bonding and confidence. Every person in life is given free will. This means that every person may chose to either refine and repair these characteristics or pervert these characteristics by expressing immoral behaviour. Egypt, during the era of Moses, with its unjustified program of eliminating all the Jews in their country undoubtedly chose to pervert all ten of these attributes. The negative energy released from such a large group of human beings choosing to pervert them, was the cause of the punishment given to Egypt in the form of the Ten Plagues. The last plague, the death of the first-born Egyptians, beautifully depicts this idea. The tenth and final plague, the death of every Egyptian first-born, was the most devastating of all. It relates to the development of the human race, as it teaches us that abuse of the soul not only affects your conscious ideas but your sub-conscious ideas as well.

In the Kabbalah, the first-born child represents the first-born instincts that are beneath the surface of one’s conscious mind. Although this characteristic is more difficult to pervert then others, a life of abuse, like that of the Egyptians, will ultimately kill the first-born child, or the super-conscious element of one’s soul. This plague was the final plague before the Jews hurriedly left Mitzrayim, ”the land of inhibition” and entered the desert, the place where they received the Ten Commandments. It is interesting to note the connection between the Ten Plagues and the Ten Commandments. While the Ten Plagues represent the perversion of the attributes discussed in the Kabbalah, the Ten Commandments represent the path of spiritual healing in each of these faculties.