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The ten plagues in a time of plague
Contributed by East Side Jews

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

We might also reflect on the meaning of the ten plagues at a time when a very literal plague is sweeping across the planet. In the traditional story, the ten plagues were sent to Egypt by G-d so that Pharoah would release the Jewish people from slavery. Water turned to blood, frogs swarmed the cities, then lice, then flies, then disease of the cattle, boils on people’s skin, then hail, then locusts, then three days of darkness, then finally the death of each family’s first born.  

Today’s plague, far more scientifically grasped and yet no less terrifying in effect, hems in our freedom. It is tearing through the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people, aided by the incompetence and indifference of modern-day Pharoahs who show the same indifference to climate catastrophe, to children in cages, or families devastated by poverty. History often has a sick, ironic, even apocalyptic sense of humor. 

Lefitst and social justice oriented Jews have long used the plagues as metaphor, either in terms of social ills we fight against today or in terms of weapons we use to strike back against them. 

Jews fighting against the occupation and subjugation of the Palestinian people talk of the “plagues” of apartheid, of tearing down olive trees, of denial fo basic resources and other crimes daily carried about against Palestinians by the state of Israel. 

Comrades from the All That’s Left Anti-Occupation Collective have also listed the ten plagues exposed by the coronavirus: governmental hubris, police brutality and abuse, lack of healthcare and housing, and so on. 

Meanwhile, the left-wing Jewdas collective in Britain have listed their “ten plagues to fight against capitalism,” provocatively reimagining the plagues as strikes, union drives, and other efforts to promote solidarity among working and oppressed people that give capitalists ulcers. 

We also would invite you to think of it from both angles. What are the plagues we face today and what weapons we have to fight against them. You're welcome to put them in the chat of this Zoom and I'll read a few of them out.

The tradition of the Seder tells us to spill a drop of wine for each plague. This ritual maintains the communal memory of resistance to slavery – both our own and that of others. Perhaps then it would be most fitting to think of these drops as symbolizing plague and repression, protest and liberation from that repression, whatever form it may take. We will be surely be facing more of the former and needing more of the latter in the coming months and years.


 
haggadah Section: -- Four Children

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