
All of us have built much of our lives so that we can avoid the inconvenient truths that would cause us to radically change the way we live if we were to take these inconvenient truths to heart.
With time, these “realities” we fabricate become elaborate fantasies.
If you’ve ever been a teenager, you’ve likely experienced the reality-distortion that is romantic infatuation. For some period of time, your whole world bent around another person’s existence. You may have barely known them except from afar, and maybe even rationally recognized why a relationship with them would be a bad idea, and yet, no rational argument in the world could have stopped you from pursuing them, either practically, or merely in your own imagination.
So much of who we are is invested in these fantasies, making them highly resistant to outside perspective and information, but at some point, these bubbles collide with reality at just the right angle, and they — pop!
Once the bubble of infatuation has burst, you can see hundreds of reasons why it wouldn’t have worked. You might even have the wisdom to appreciate that you dodged a bullet. But you may also be filled with shame that you let yourself go so deep down that rabbit hole. Why didn’t you see the writing on the wall? Why is the bubble of self-delusion so hard to burst?
As soon as I allow myself to live a lie, I have essentially guaranteed that I will develop fears of my lie being exposed — or even more frightening — that I myself will be revealed to be a liar and coward, who is not courageous enough to live truthfully.
As a result, I make reality my enemy, whom I must evade day and night. Fear drives my actions, and my actions accordingly establish my habits. Habits, in turn, further harden and enshrine my fantasies. I sleep easier imagining that I will never have to face the truth in whose light I have grown increasingly terrified of being exposed.
The archetype in the Torah of the ego that doubles down on his lies in Pharaoh. In the last XL, we introduced the otherwise glorious King of Ancient Egypt through this prism of illusion and delusion. It wasn’t easy living up to the expectations of being divine. He had worked out, for the most part, how to achieve this effect through grandiose wall carvings of his achievements, obelisks that bespoke his potency as leader, and a pyramid or other imposing monument that would be his resting place.
One small but recurring challenge, however, was that he could never excuse himself publicly to go to the bathroom as this would be a dead giveaway of his feeble humanity. The Midrash, a rabbinic accompaniment to the text of the Torah, describes Pharaoh’s morning routine of waking up early everyday to stealthily relieve himself by the Nile when no one would see him.
You could imagine, then, that he was surprised to see Moshe, the 80-year-old leader of the Hebrews, appear at his secret spot one morning, to announce the first of what would be ten plagues that would rock his country.
לֵךְ אֶל־פַּרְעֹה בַּבֹּקֶר הִנֵּה יֹצֵא הַמַּיְמָה וְנִצַּבְתָּ לִקְרָאתוֹ עַל־שְׂפַת הַיְאֹר וְהַמַּטֶּה אֲשֶׁר־נֶהְפַּךְ לְנָחָשׁ תִּקַּח בְּיָדֶךָ׃
[Hashem said to Moshe] “Go to Pharaoh in the morning, as he is coming out to the water, and station yourself before him at the edge of the Nile, taking with you the rod that turned into a snake.”
Why did the plagues begin with this satirical encounter between Moshe and Pharaoh?
The answer is that the enterprise of leaving Egypt was more than just national relocation. It was even more than the Hebrew nation’s emancipation from physical oppression.
God took us out of Egypt to free us from the national and personal delusions that imprisoned us there.
Life was about so much more than we were led to believe there. We were capable of so much more than we could imagine there. And the leadership of Egypt had to take responsibility for imposing the artificial glass ceiling on everyone’s imaginations. Our constricted imagination had to be shattered.
This early morning prelude by the Nile helps us understand the Torah’s account of the Ten Plagues to be as much a study of the King of the Universe’s astonishing power to shape reality, as it is a study in the king of Egypt’s astonishing ability to deny the reality in front of him.
When his pseudo-scientists could replicate, even remotely, the change of water to blood, it sufficed for Pharaoh to hold onto his delusional worldview in which he was in perfect control his destiny and that of his nation as well:
Pharaoh turned and went into his palace, paying no regard even this either.
As is well known, this pattern persisted throughout the 10 plagues, even as the nation of Egypt was brought to its knees. Pharaoh would hang his hat on any detail he could find that supported his elaborate construct of his control over reality. This phenomenon is known in modern psychology and behavioral economics as “confirmation bias.”
Human beings invariably see in the world what they want to believe. Unless, of course, they choose to accept whatever the truth turns out to be — even if it conflicts with their desires.
The last plague, the death of the firstborn, was slated by God to strike precisely at midnight. What does this mean exactly? According to Jewish law, midnight-חצות, like sunrise and sunset, sweeps through the planet from East to West. The Egyptian firstborn would die precisely as the midpoint of the dark side of the earth passed through the land of Egypt (Rabbi Shimon Schwab in Simchat Beit HaShoeiva).
As one would expect from Divine action, the 10th and final plague was executed with laser-precision. And yet, when Moshe gave his warning to Pharaoh, he phrased it as occurring “around midnight—כחצות.” Why didn’t he make a point about the exquisite precision of the plague?
The Talmud’s explaination is that Moshe was concerned that the “yes-men” that Pharaoh had surrounded himself with might claim that the firstborn didn’t die at midnight according to their own time-keeping devices. Given that it takes about an hour for that halfway-mark on the dark side of the Earth to sweep through the land of Egypt, people may misjudge the time by give-or-take an hour.
Who cares? Why is other people’s error of measurement Moshe’s problem? The lesson that the Talmud is trying to teach is that one should be careful to be modest when he expresses himself so that others don’t accuse him of lying even if their accusations are due to their own mistakes.
In our “Misinformation Age,” this lesson is as valuable as it ever was. But, there’s actually a further point about human psychology here.
Rabbi Yosef Tzvi Salant (1885-1981) in his modern classic Be’er Yosef shows us the other side of the coin. We’ve been discussing how deep one can go into a delusion. This episode marks the ocean floor of delusion. Apparently, if Moshe would have been precise with the timing of the plague, and their moondials or hourglasses or whatever would have shown 15 or 20 minutes before or after 12 — despite the fact that inexplicably all firstborn men and women dropped dead within that hour — totaling about a million dead across Egypt — they would have waved off the plague as a “coincidence.”
This capacity for denial is astonishing to ponder. If, however, you’ve been watching the news lately, you know all too well that it’s the truth.
It reminds me of a prank I played on my roommate when I was young and dumb. It was the night before finals, and my friend Brahm was bleary-eyed with exhaustion. He decided to take a 30-minute “power nap” at 10:30pm in order to keep studying at 11pm. He asked me if I could wake him up. I was going out for a run, and said “sure.” I’d wake him up when I got back. When I tried waking him up at 11pm, as he had requested, he said under his breath, with his eyes still shut, “I’m so tired, I can’t believe it’s already morning — I never studied for my test!” Finding the situation humorous, I went with it, and said, “Brahm, we’ve got to go — you can’t be late for your final.” He said, “Oh man, can you wake me up in 15 minutes??” I agreed. I came back into the room two minutes later and woke him up again. Naturally, he said, “It’s been 15 minutes?! It feels like it’s been just a couple of minutes!” He mustered the strength to sit up, and looked, at first, casually at the clock, which I had failed to change for the sake of the prank. It read 11:05am. His gaze stayed fixated on the clock for what felt like ten seconds in utter disbelief. I was sure that the gig was up... His reaction? “The clock says it’s 11:05pm…” “Oh wow, you’re right.” “Our clock is so messed up!!! Can you fix it while I get ready?” he said. He proceeded to shower and get dressed until he opened the curtain with his backpack on, and saw that it was pitch black outside.
The bubbles of fantasy are highly resistant to outside forces causing them to burst.
We see what we want to see until we make a decision to see whatever it is that there is to see.
The culmination of leaving our fantasies in Egypt is the decision to accept the truth at Mount Sinai.