A few years ago tucked away in the newspaper was a humorous yet true report. A woman had appeared in the A & E Department saying that she had swallowed a wasp. Although the nurse reassured her that the acid in her stomach had long killed the wasp, the patient insisted that she could still feel it buzzing around in her stomach! After reappearing several times over the next week it reached the point when the staff wanted to redirect her to the mental ward. However a clever doctor on call came up with an ingenuous way to cure the patient. He very lightly sedated her and made a slight incision on her tummy. He got a nurse to find a dead wasp from one of the hospital lights and to put it in a cup at the side of the bed to be seen when she awoke. Amazing! She was cured.
Unfortunately the peace at the A & E didn’t last long. About a week later the woman reappeared with the same symptoms, only much worse. The wasp had laid eggs in her stomach and now she could feel several of them buzzing around her stomach!!!!
Perhaps with this in mind we can answer a problem in this week’s Parshah. Moshe tells the Jews that they are to be set free from this crushing labour but they don’t believe him. Hashem then instructs Moshe to inform Pharaoh that he must set them free. Moshe questions Hashem, “If already the Jews do not believe that they will be redeemed then how on earth will Pharaoh believe it. For the Yidden it was good news and they didn’t believe it so all the more so to Pharaoh to whom it is bad news”.
The Medresh describes Moshe’s words as one of the ten ‘Kal v’chomers’ [argumentum a fortiori] in the Torah. How could this be an ‘argumentum a fortiori’, there was a good reason why the Jews didn’t believe Moshe – the verse explicitly says that it was due to their slavery. However Pharaoh, did he have hardships? Was he a slave? He was the mighty king sitting in his palace full of pomp. He had an entire nation slaving away for him. How could Moshe compare the Jew’s refusal to believe due to their crushing labour to that of Pharaoh?
The verses in Isaiah describes the wicked, “But the wicked will be like the driven sea that cannot rest, and whose waters disgorge mire and mud. There is no peace for the wicked, said my G-d”. Rashi explains the metaphor; the waves of the sea each rise up in a show or arrogance as if to say that they will escape the confines of the sea shore, but as they reach the shore they come crashing down. So too the wicked spend their life trying to escape, trying to be free, but in truth they fail, they don’t attain the freedom they are looking for. The Malbim [1809-1879] explains the metaphor further. The winds that drive the waves are alluding to the ideas that dominate the minds of the wicked. Their imaginations know no bounds, they are never satisfied. This is why they are never at peace. In their minds they are being tossed to and fro, with no guidance to give them any real satisfaction with life.
Yes the Jews may have been in physical turmoil but King Pharaoh was in emotional turmoil. Now the argumentum a fortiori not only makes sense, but teaches us that emotional turmoil and the resulting lack of serenity in mind is worse than the physical turmoil of the slaves.
A mind full of indecisions is so unsettling that in the words of the wisest of all men King Solomon “More than all the other things that can bring joy in this world is the joy of sorting out confusion of the mind!!”
Good Shabbos
Yaakov