Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Va-era 5767: Healing Magic

Exodus 6:2-9:35

After Moses’ first disaster talking to Pharaoh and the Israelites, God talks to Moses again and tells him to talk to the Israelites again, they are so stressed out, they promptly ignore him. Then God tells a despondent Moses to talk to Pharaoh once again, and Moses objects -- again. God tells Moses that he will use signs and wonders to make sure everyone knows God’s power. First there is the wonder of the staff being turned into a snake, then the staff eating the other snakes. Then begins the plagues, where we have the first seven of the ten: blood, frogs, lice, swarms, cattle disease, boils and hail.

Before the plagues however, we have a bit of a magic competition:

8. And the Lord spoke to Moses and to Aaron, saying, 9. When Pharaoh shall speak to you, saying, Show a miracle; then you shall say to Aaron, Take your rod, and throw it before Pharaoh, and it shall become a serpent. 10. And Moses and Aaron went to Pharaoh, and they did as the Lord had commanded; and Aaron threw down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent. 11. Then Pharaoh also called the wise men and the sorcerers; now the magicians of Egypt, they also did in like manner with their enchantments. 12. For they threw down every man his rod, and they became serpents; but Aaron’s rod swallowed up their rods. [Ex 7:8-12]

While most know magic is prohibited by Torah, the question become why this competition and what is it proving. The pattern continues in the early plagues where the sorcerers of Pharaoh did something similar to each plague. To make sense of this text, there is a very interesting episode in the desert as well.

5. And the people spoke against God, and against Moses, ‘Why have you brought us out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no bread, nor is there any water; and our soul loathes this light bread.’ 6. And the Lord sent venomous serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and many people of Israel died. 7. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, ‘We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against you; pray to the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us’. And Moses prayed for the people. 8. And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a venomous serpent, and set it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks upon it, shall live.’ 9. And Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked at the serpent of bronze, he lived. [Numbers 21:5-9]

Let us add to this one more interesting pattern with the first three plagues, all of which started, like the snake turning into a staff, with the staff. And while the Egyptians were able to seemingly duplicate frogs and blood, they didn’t do something very significant: they couldn’t stop the plague. In the Midrash, the Rabbis make the wonder of the snake even more incredible based on a literal reading of the text by noting the snake turned back into a staff first then swallowed the staffs of the Egyptians. The wonder is not the creation of the snake, which even Egyptian schoolchildren could do according to Midrash, but the removal of the other snakes. The true wonder is not the plague, but the removal of it.

In the Midrash to the story of the bronze snake the rabbis noticed the word pole, neis in Hebrew, had another meaning:

And the Lord said unto Moses: make thee a fiery serpent... And it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he sees it, shall live (xxi, 8). Not merely one bitten by the serpent but, He said, every one that is bitten. Even one bitten by an asp, a scorpion, a wild beast, or a dog. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and set it up by a miracle (ib. 9). He cast it into the air and it stayed there. [Numbers R. XIX: 23]

Neis may be commonly remembered as the letter nun on the dreidel in the acronym Neis gadol haya sham (a great miracle happened there). Neis means both miracle and pole. For the commentator of Midrash Rabbah the snake floating in mid air was a wonder, but the Mishnah thinks otherwise:

[It is written], make thee a fiery serpent and set it up on a pole, and it shall come to pass that everyone that is bitten, when he sees it, shall live. Now did the serpent kill or did the serpent keep alive? No; [what it indicates is that] when Israel turned their thoughts above and subjected their hearts to their father in heaven, they were healed, but otherwise they pined away. [Rosh Hashanah 29a]

The real wonder is that people healed. It was not the snake that healed but that people turned to God, and then healed by God. It was not that the Nile turned to blood or frogs overran the land. The magicians could all do this. They could not get rid of the blood or the frogs, yet Moses turning his thoughts above did. The magicians could not even cure their own boils, and after we are told they take a sick day instead of confronting Moses, they never show up in the text again. The early plagues were just the setup for real wonder that only God heals and relieves from oppression.

Healing is of course not purely divine, we can help along the process in many ways, from the knowledge and technology we have for healing. There are incredible surgical procedures, and therapeutic techniques and I am the first to believe when we need them to use them . Indeed the Rabbis of the later Gemara were rather liberal in their interpretation between magic and healing stating in Shabbat 67a “Abaye and Raba both maintain: Whatever is used as a remedy is not [forbidden] on account of the ways of the Amorite [i.e. magic practices].” Even otherwise forbbiden magic could be used – if it healed.

In the early to mid 18th century we have another example of how respected a Jew using magic can be. From about the 16th through the 18th centuries a class of Jewish folk healers emerged primarily in southern Poland, but throughout eastern Europe. While some were certainly charlatans, many were serious practioners of magic and shamanic divine intercession to help heal people, basing their methods primarily on Lurianic Kabbala. As a class they are known as Baalei Shem, or Masters of the Name due to their manipulation of divine names in healing amulets. Yet most of these healers are lost to history except one who was exceptional in his abilities based in the southern Poland town of Miedzybóz. Israel ben Eliezer who most know of as the Baal Shem Tov, was the founder of the Hasidic movement and so good a healer we have a series of rather remarkable documents attesting to his status. Polish tax records of the town of Miedzybóz record that Israel Baal Shem had the title “dockor” written down on these records by the Catholic Polish authority. The Jewish ruling council of the town, the Kahal, had given him tax exempt status as part of the religious establishment not as rabbi, but as healer. Not only had the Jews believed in his mystical healing abilities, the gentiles did too. But if one were to ask The Baal Shem Tov about his healing methods, he probably would have told you all he did was pray and be pious, the rest was done up above and by the person healing.

As the Baal Shem Tov would have told you, ultimately the thing we call healing happens and is not directly controllable. It needs God, it needs us to turn to above to begin the process, Hasidism might advocate the use of the tzaddik as an intermediary, yet we as individuals must want to heal and turn to God in order to heal. As such, healing is not prohibited magic at all but recognition of the agent who really does. A common Hasidic custom of changing or mounting more mezuzahs on the doors of the house when someone is sick and needs healing is not some idolatry around the mezuzahs, but like the copper serpent, an avenue to thinking about God.

In Egypt the Israelites needed a big psychological healing. They were so traumatized by their experience as slaves they simply ignored Moses’ attempts to rally them. That healing came in these first plagues. The message was the relief from their oppression would come from God. At that point, I do not believe they were afraid of the Egyptian Chariots, but Egyptian sorcerers conjuring plagues of snakes, blood and frogs if they resisted the Egyptians and followed Moses. Yet, it was God and only God who removed these things from the scene. The magicians of Egypt needed to be proven powerless; that everything they could throw at the people could be easily healed or repealed by God. Anybody can oppress, but those who believe in God are the ones who leave Egypt. They are not afraid of earthly magicians; they have turned their thoughts upward. In the early plagues, this was the lesson that needed to sink into the Israelites before the thought of leaving was possible.

One of the shortest prayers in Torah*, Ayl na rafa na la, Please God, Please heal her [Numbers 12:13] is Moses’ prayer for healing of Miriam’s tzarat. This short, easy to pronounce prayer is in some way the most effective, and points like the staffs and snakes to above. There are many kinds of healing of course; there is the healing of the body, of the mind, and of the spirit. There is healing for individuals and healing for groups and whole societies. But part of that process, whoever is healing is inherent in Moses’ simple formula to heal his sister, to humbly acknowledge God, and to ask for healing.

And so for all who need healing Ayl na rafa na la.

* To learn to read this prayer in Hebrew, check out lesson one in the Shlomo's Drash Hebrew Page

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