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J
ust imagine sitting on the
ground with your children
after a long day of work, sand
between your toes, looking up at
the sky and seeing a dark, ominous
cloud heading your way. It’s moving
fast ... so fast you can hear it buzzing
louder and louder as it draws near.
You wrap your arms
around your kids, protect-
land: hungry, overworked
ing them from this terrifying
and destitute. When the
blackness overhead. It is a
waters of the Nile turned
swarm of locusts, four miles
to blood and the livestock
long and two miles high and
died and darkness fell and
it’s almost here.
hail rained down from
This feels biblical. And it
the heavens, the Israelites
has been in the past — as
suffered alongside their
Rabbi Jennifer
locusts swarmed Egypt
oppressors. They may have
Lader
in this week’s Torah por-
felt the plagues even more
tion. But the story above is
keenly than their Egyptian
a firsthand account from
neighbors living in safe,
Argentina in 2016 as the
sturdy homes, not to men-
worst infestation of locusts in
tion palaces.
more than 60 years destroyed mil-
In our world today, it is often the
lions of acres of farmland across the most vulnerable who feel the effects
country.
of the choices of others. When cor-
We think of the plagues as things
porations put financial gain over
of the past — Divine punishment
the health of our planet and govern-
intended to persuade our enslavers
ments fail to act, when food systems
to free our ancestors as they began
and use of land change the livability
of our climate, the poorest among us
an exhaustive journey toward the
suffer the most.
Promised Land. Yet today our world
Let us learn from the Torah, using
is wrought with natural phenomena
our strength to stand up for others.
that feel overwhelmingly Divine.
Let us learn from the Torah and
There are hurricanes, extreme cold
consider how our actions affect the
spells, tornadoes and wildfires.
There are superbugs, droughts, crop lives of those around us. Let us learn
from the Torah and protect God’s
failures and species extinction.
creation. •
The plagues of the Torah did not
just affect the Egyptians. Our people
Jennifer Lader is a rabbi at Temple Israel in
were the most vulnerable in the
Parshat Bo: Exodus
10:1-13:16; Jeremiah
46:13-28.
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34
January 18 • 2018
jn
West Bloomfield.