The plagues in Egypt were designed to destroy the entirety of Egyptian society. It was God’s judgement that that society was evil and had to be uprooted.
D’var Torah – Parashat Va’era / The Plagues and the Collapse of an Unjust Society
One of the powerful lessons of this week’s parashah is how an unjust government—and even an entire unjust society—ultimately collapses.
The Ten Plagues are not random punishments. They are a systematic assault on Egyptian civilization itself, from the ground up.
It begins with the plague of blood. The Nile was not just a river in ancient Egypt; it was a god. Egypt’s economy, agriculture, and identity depended on it. When the Nile turns to blood, the message is unmistakable: your god is powerless.
From there, the plagues move through nature itself. Frogs, lice, wild animals—creation turns against Egypt. One detail that often gets overlooked is how unnatural the plague of wild beasts truly was. These animals did not attack one another. Predators and prey moved together, united. Nature itself was reordered to show that the moral order Egypt relied upon was false.
Each plague strips away another layer of Egyptian authority—religious, natural, economic—until finally the ultimate symbol of power, Pharaoh himself, is exposed as helpless. By the end, the government is revealed to be incapable of performing its most basic function: protecting its people.
History shows us this pattern again and again. When people realize that a regime is not all-powerful, that it cannot defend itself or its citizens, its authority begins to crumble. Once fear disappears, the foundations of oppression weaken.
This is why, in many historical conflicts, the goal has not only been military victory but the destruction of the myth of invincibility. During World War II, Allied strategy aimed to show that the Nazi regime was not omnipotent. During the American Civil War, Sherman’s march was designed to dismantle the social and economic structure that sustained slavery.
The Torah teaches a difficult but essential truth: an unjust society cannot simply be reformed at the surface. Its foundations must be dismantled before anything moral can be rebuilt. Redemption does not come through cosmetic change; it comes through transformation.
Of course, destruction alone is not enough. Rebuilding matters—but that is a separate stage. This parashah focuses on the first step: exposing false gods, breaking unjust power, and clearing the ground for something better.
That is one of the enduring messages of the plagues—and something worth thinking about.
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