This week's Torah portion, Va'era, is the beginning of the Plagues that God visits upon the Egyptians and their land.
The ones in this parasha are:
Blood
Frogs
Lice
Swarms of Insects
Cattle Diseases
Darkness
Hail
After the first two plagues, the Egyptian magicians demonstrate how they too can make these things happen.
But lice....ah, the lice. It is then that the magicians themselves declare "This is the finger of God."
In the fall, I had a personal encounter with lice. It became the topic of my Yom Kippur sermon, and it was quite an...um...experience for my family. (As I write this, my head is starting to itch....)
I know that reading this particular portion has new meaning for me and for my family. It's always amazing to me how each time I read the Torah, it can speak to me in totally new and different ways.
The text doesn't change. I do.
I am constantly awed by the power of Torah.
Shabbat Shalom!
2 comments:
This weekend my 5th graders and I spend over an hour dividing up and acting out (costumes, props, the works) the first part of this parsha -
The funniest things:
In their skits, Gd was doing yoga while calling Moses on a cell phone from the center of the burning bush (Moshe's phone was pink, btw, not red as one might expect!) . . .
The part of the story that interested them the most, though, was what might have happened to Pharaoh that he just didn't get that people should be free . . .or that he just wasn't willing to have life be a little harder for himself so that it would be so much better for so many others.
It was an amazing hour - the highlight of Shabbat . . .
until we made Havdallah together, me, the 5th graders, and their families . . . but that's another story . . .
When my family and I moved from Israel to Virginia my older daughter brought a particularly stong case of lice with her. I'm not quite sure what the symbolism of it was, perhaps that we were leaving Israel, or perhaps that whatever plagued us--my husband and I--there would follow us to America.
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