This is the second week in a row in which we find ourselves immersed in the process of the makot, a process which Chazal say took a year to complete. If we are looking at the makot as a system of punishment, it’s a little hard to understand why all this time and space is devoted to them. The makot, however, have little to do with our Western concept of punishment. In the Torah, there is a concept of tochacha, rebuke, whose purpose is never punishment, but only clarification of reality, for the purpose of growth. This is what the makot were. The makot clarified the true nature of our world and ourselves.

This is what we mean when we say that the 10 makot parallel the 10 ma’amarot with which the world was created. There existed a time in history when it was possible to understand properly what Hashem was revealing to us when He created the world through ten utterances. By the time we were slaves in Mitzrayim, that was no longer the case. The result of all the sins of humanity was that the ten expressions that Hashem used to create the world were distorted. Their message could not be heard properly in the world. The first plague, therefore, begins where the last ma’amar ends, and reveals its message. Each makah peels away another layer of distortion, one by one, until the true message of the ma’amarot could be heard, and the true nature of our world was revealed.

As each facet of truth was revealed, it impacted reality, and that impact was felt according to who was receiving it.  The Zohar (2:36a) says that the makot were, at one and the same time, a plague for the Egyptians and a healing for the Jews.  (This is also the essential nature of gehenom in the world to come, see Nedarim 8b) For the Egyptians, the makot were the revelation, one facet after another, that everything they had built their society on was false. Each makah was another blow at the essence of their national culture and identity. Facing the truth was a painful experience. On the other hand, for the Jews, for us, living through the makot meant going through the process of rediscovering our true selves, and the true nature of our world. It was the joy of rediscovering our relationship with Hashem.

The last of the makot, the end of the process, was the death of the firstborn of Egypt. It was the death of Pharoah’s perception of the world as if Egypt were the firstborn, and he was a god. On the night of the final makah in Egypt, Hashem’s Presence was revealed. Even more, Hashem’s relationship to his true firstborn, our nation, was inescapably revealed. On the first night of Pesach we came face to face with the glorious reality that we are Hashem’s beloved firstborn, and that we fulfill the purpose of creation through our relationship with Him (see Rashi, Bereisheit 1:1).

This moment of revelation was marked by something unique to this makah. Moshe tells Pharoah that on the night of makat bechorot, “There will be a great outcry in the land of Egypt, such has never been heard before.” (Shemot 11:6). And this is indeed what happened (Shemot 12:30). A cry is a sound that expresses what can not be put into words. The cry of makat bechorot relates to the ma’amar of Bereisheit, a ma’amar that is substantively different from the rest of the ma’amarot. It does not use the language of speech. Instead, it expresses the emergence of the essence of creation before it could be grasped or put into words.  It is undefined, but it is what enables everything that is expressed after it.

Within ourselves, the ma’amar of Bereisheit relates to the feeling of self that we can’t express in words, the feeling of self we express with a cry. A cry is the sound we make that comes from a deeper part of ourselves than speech, it comes from our heart, or from our essence, from the part of ourselves which is too deep to be formed into words. Each of us has the ability to cry. Every newborn cries. We emerge into the world with a cry. Our cry is the root of our ability to speak, to bring out our essence and express it.

In Egypt, at chatzot, on the night of the redemption, there was a great cry that was heard throughout the land. But it was a different cry for the Egyptians and for the Jews. For the Egyptians, the entire conception of the world had been ripped out from under them. They were speechless. There was nothing left to say. Their cry was the cry of the utter self-destruction. It was the cry of despair that comes with the recognition that at their very essence, there was nothing. Everything they believed was built on a lie.

We cried a completely different cry.  It was the cry of prayer. For a Jew, the deepest part of ourselves is expressed in prayer. This is the essence of who we are.  When a Jew comes face to face with reality, when we recognize that the deepest part of ourselves is connected to our creator, we pray. The Zohar tells us that crying is the greatest form of prayer, and that whenever we cry out, Hashem promises to listen. This was, in fact, how the redemption began. Hashem heard our moaning, and our cries (Shemot 2:23).  And it is how the redemption ends. In the words of the Midrash (Shemot Rabbah 18), while Pharoah was desperately screaming, trying to force us out of Egpyt, trying to save his life from the angry Egyptians, we were busy saying Hallel.  

The halacha is that in our tefillot, we join redemption (as expressed in the brachot of Shema) to prayer (the Amidah). It is a halacha that reflects a deeper truth. The prayer itself is the redemption. On the night of makat bechorot we were redeemed through experiencing the depth of who we are. The result was that we gained the ability to truly pray. We have the opportunity to relive this redemption every morning and evening.

As Ramban explains in his introduction to Shemot, the purpose of the redemption was to bring the entire nation of Israel to the level of the Avot. And the level of the Avot was prayer. As we have mentioned earlier, they were the ones who established prayer for us, and gave it over to us as an inheritance. To return to their level means to step into the place they left for us, the place of prayer. To experience redemption is to pray.  

At the moment, we are still living in exile. And when we are in exile, our speech is in exile with us. We speak, but we often don’t know what to say. What do we ask for? What do we want? But the cry of connection and yearning for Hashem that comes from deep inside is real and unfalsifiable. We may not know what to say, we may not connect to all the words of davening, but if we can make space in our world and in our prayers for that one groan or cry that comes from deep within, we can begin to move ourselves, and the whole world with us, into a place of redemption.