Parshat Beshalach
by Rabbi Avi Billet After the incident in Marah, when Moshe was instructed to put a specific עץ (stick, branch, or tree) into the bitter waters to turn them sweet, God says, “If you obey God your Lord and do what is upright in His eyes, carefully heeding all His commandments and keeping all His decrees, then I will not strike you with any of the sicknesses that I brought on Egypt. I am God who heals you.”
Many questions may be asked on this instruction. Is it instruction? Is it a promise? Is there really a guarantee? How do we know if we are fully obeying God and being upright in His eyes, etc.? Is this the ticket to perfect health? What sicknesses did God bring upon Egypt anyway? Is this referring to all of the plagues? Most of them weren’t sicknesses, as they were external to the body, so is it therefore referring to specific plagues? Will we not be subject to boils or to the death of our firstborns?
One approach championed by the commentaries is that we need to look at this in the context in which it appears. God has just healed “sick” waters – waters which were bitter have now become sweet (Rashbam). Rashi says, along similar lines, that a physician advises what to eat and what not to eat, to help a person avoid illness, presumably the kind that comes from poor eating habits. Chizkuni adds that God’s input here was singular, demonstrating that no doctor has any ability without God.
In his Peirush Ha’Arokh, Ibn Ezra presents this as a contrast to the first plague, in which God made clean waters undrinkable. Here, in making the undrinkable drinkable, God was showing His unique power in this world.
All of these approaches suggest God is in charge of illness and its healing. Ibn Ezra’s instruction of how to overcome illness is to rely on God, כן יש לך להשמר שלא תמר בו, ולאהוב אותו, כי הוא ייטיב לך – “Thus you are to be careful not to provoke Him, and to love Him, for He will be good to you.” Of course it means to seek the assistance of a physician, but in light of what Chizkuni wrote every physician needs God’s help to be successful.
In his Peirush HaKatzar, Ibn Ezra notes that we don’t know the identity of the עץ used to “heal” the waters because the Torah doesn’t tell us. But even if we were to know the species of wood and have all of that type of wood thrown into the water, it would not have worked. The combination of God identifying the specific עץ and Moshe’s following the instructions is what brought about healing to the waters of Marah.
Ramban warns us not to take this to mean a. that God wants the title of “Doctor,” or b. that this is a guarantee to be protected from all illness. Ramban views this as a warning to not follow the ways of Egypt who rebelled against God. After all, those who listened to God in Egypt through, for example, bringing their animals indoors during the hail, were saved. Ramban notes the verse in Devarim 28:60, “If you will not be careful to perform all the words of the Torah, God will bring upon you all the sufferings of Egypt, of which you were terrified, and they will cleave to you.”
This still begs a much larger question about what clinging to God means, and how whatever efforts we make removes the possibility of what Ramban calls מחלה באה בדרך כל הארץ – naturally occurring illnesses from even happening? Beyond the verse itself, Ramban does not address that question here (though see his comment on Vayikra 26:11 for a further presentation of Ramban’s view on this subject.)
But it is quite possible that Ramban’s side comment about what took place in Egypt gives us a hint to a much more rational explanation as to what the “illness that I put upon Egypt” refers.
As has been noted, only the plague of boils was an illness, and of course, as the Torah Temimah points out, there was no natural remedy or physician-remedy that could heal the boils. [God’s guarantee to Israel is therefore that unlike My not providing an antidote to the Egyptians, I will provide antidotes for you!] And while fish died in the plague of blood, animals died in the plague of Dever, and the firstborns died in the final plague, none of these death-inducing plagues were preceded by a long, or even a short, illness. The deaths just happened immediately.
So perhaps we need to look at something else which can be classified as an illness in Egypt or of Egypt that we hope to avoid through heeding the word of God.
Ramban describes the Egyptians deciding to chase the Israelites, and specifically to go through the walls of water at the splitting of the sea as a שגעון, an act of insanity.
In this light, that a מחלה might refer to an illness of the mind, Seforno’s comment is particularly instructive. “All of My Mitzvos are meant to heal a soul from ‘illnesses’ related to desires and negative thoughts so that you can be holy unto Hashem your God… and if you rebel, the soul will become ill and desecrated.”
Egypt was plagued by something far worse than the Ten Plagues, most of which served as a terrible nuisance, but for a limited amount of time. When the Torah describes most of the plagues, they are formidable and frightening when they are active, but when they end, life seems to return to a reasonable normalcy. Of course there is devastation to the economy and to the agriculture, but that could be seasonal and Egypt could at least foresee a recovery.
But what truly plagued them was the enslavement of their minds – to idolatry, to non-belief in God, to being led by an extremely stubborn ruler, to being so blind to the reality that God was defeating them at every turn, and to their general inability to see that their chances for things to improve would lay in their letting go of their trust in Pharaoh preferring to heed the word of God.
For Mitzvos and for God to be the source of our healing, as the verse tells us, we need to be able to clear our minds from distractions which take us away from our task on this earth. We are all enjoined to grow in our relationship with God, to embrace mitzvos, to study Torah, to be kind to others, to be as nonjudgmental as possible, to give the benefit of the doubt.
All of the “illnesses” which plagued Egypt will not come upon us if we are focused on our Jewish tasks which are so beautifully expressed in the verse, “obey God your Lord and do what is upright in His eyes, carefully heeding all His commandments and keeping all His decrees.” If we are able to do this, we don’t need the verse to be a promise or a guarantee because the verse becomes self-fulfilling. The person who has the deepest connection with God knows very well that all healing is in God’s hands, including healing of the body, healing of the mind, and healing of the soul. When we have that deep connection, there is no such thing as suffering, because we are truly in tune to the notion that everything in our lives – good or seemingly bad – comes from Hashem. And thus we are healed from that which plagued Egypt.
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