Va’era
Exodus 6:2-9:35
Ezekiel 28:25-29:21
An ice storm creates havoc in a Midwestern town; a wildfire spreads through Southern California leaving homes destroyed; several days of freezing weather and Florida’s citrus crop is ruined to the tune of billions of dollars.
Why did these events, and so many others, take place throughout the world? We shake our heads in sympathy and commiseration. After all, these events are all “acts of God.” They are all around us, and yet the ones that we really notice involve tragedy and destruction. People don’t usually refer to their good fortune as “an act of God.”
Inspired by the thoughts of Rabbi Marc Greenspan, who suggested doing a Web search of this expression, I learned that there’s actually a Web site called Actsofgod.org, sponsored by a fundamentalist Christian group. Actsofgod.org defines its ministry as reaching out and helping people and communities both physically and spiritually that have been devastated by a catastrophe.
This week’s Torah portion begins with acts of God, the Ten Plagues. The Torah presents these events as punishments for Pharaoh’s intransigence as well as a chance to teach the king of Egypt and his people who God really is.
As Jews we’ve always been sensitive to the implications of these 10 acts of God even if the Egyptians were our oppressors. At the Passover seder, we dip our finger into our cup of wine and spill a bit of the wine on our plate so that our cup of rejoicing is less full. The 10 acts of God in Exodus teach us compassion even as we tell a story of divine punishment.
But there’s more going on in this story. We don’t always stop to think about this, but most of the plagues are really quite ordinary. Even though we attribute them to God, there’s nothing inherently supernatural about these catastrophes, other than their timing and severity.
Even the first plague, when the Nile turns to blood, can be explained. One perspective suggests that the Nile River may have turned to “blood” because of red sediment that was carried from the highlands of Ethiopia by the melting of the winter snow.
There’s nothing supernatural about the plagues, nothing out of the ordinary that would make it completely obvious that these events were caused by God. The point of the plagues is to teach Egypt, and the Israelites for that matter, that God is present not in the extraordinary but in the ordinary, in the everyday events in our lives.
Our lives are filled with acts of God. It usually takes bad luck for us to sit up and blame God for the things that happen to us. When good things happen we hardly notice God’s signature.
Traditional Jewish worship begins each morning with a series of blessings, which acknowledge God’s presence in the common, every day routines of our lives. Why do we recite blessings for such basic aspects of our lives? The first reason is that we recite them to make ourselves aware that our lives are filled with acts of God. We can’t know God, but we can sense and experience God’s presence in the everyday facts of our existence: that we are breathing, walking, seeing, hearing and feeling.
And the second reason is that we recite these blessing to teach ourselves what to value and how to live. These blessing remind us that we have a responsible to cherish God’s gifts and to use them to serve others. If God gives us sight each day then we have a responsibility to share our gifts with others.
Acts of God, then, not only happen around us; they happen through us. We are God’s hands in the world. And what we do, when inspired by God, becomes one of the many and more mysterious ways that God is manifest in the world.
As for the bad ones, maybe they’re not acts of God because we can’t explain them, but because they offer us an opportunity to do something good and to share God’s love with those in need. What makes an event an act of God is not what happens, but how we respond.
We experience acts of God every day by sanctifying life, by living fully and sharing our gifts with others.
Rabbi Larry Raphael is the senior rabbi of Congregation Sherith Israel in San Francisco.