PSA to my fellow progressive Jews: when you put together readings for the seder about the “contemporary 10 plagues”, listing out terrible things confronting us — racism, capitalism, misogyny, what have you — you are identifying with Phara’oh and framing God as the enemy. In the Pesach/Passover story, we are on the side of the plagues, which are necessary to break the stubborn will of evil tyrants and their defenders. The plagues are a reminder that liberation does not come bloodlessly. We are not smug or flip about the plagues — they are horrific and ugly — and we reduce our celebration a bit in recognition of that. But if we’re looking to understand today’s struggles in light of the Pesach story, we should not see racism, capitalism, misogyny, etc. as contemporary manifestations of the plagues, but as contemporary manifestations of Phara’oh. And we pray for, if necessary, plagues to come and break the regimes of Jeff Bezos, Jair Bolsenaro, Mitch McConnell, Viktor Orban, Rupert Murdoch, Benjamin Netanyahu, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Elliot Abrams, etc.

If we really want to get precise, we should stop referring to the Ten Makkot/מכות as the “Ten Plagues”, and refer to them, instead, as the “Ten Attacks”, or something like that. The Haggadah does not call them the ten mageiphot/מגפות, the typical Biblical term for “plague”, but the ten makkot/מכות. I suspect the confusion probably has roots in the King James Bible’s translation of מכות/makkot as “plagues” in Deuteronomy/Devarim 28:59 and 61. (I thank my friend Shoshana Michael Zucker for this observation.) The word at its core really means “hits”, “strikes”, “attacks”, or “beatings”, as in Exodus/Sh’mot 2:11, where Moshe sees an Egyptian man hitting or beating a Hebrew. In the curses of Deuteronomy 28 and in the Haggadah’s summary of the Exodus story, God strikes the people worthy of attack, those who need the pressure of an attack to be moved to change their ways — the sinning Israelites in Deuteronomy 28, the sinning Egyptians and Phara’oh in the Exodus story. In both cases, most of the mechanisms through which God goes on the attack align with crop, weather, or skin ailments often identified as “plagues”. But their import is political: God attacking/hitting/striking Phara’oh and the Egyptian people.

As my friend Rabbi Aaron Levy noted in the comments to a social media post on this topic, “The makkot were, as Malcolm X said (notoriously after JFK’s assassination), ‘the chickens coming home to roost.’ An evil society getting its just desserts.” Ezra Furman captures the spirit with which truly progressive and radical Jews — which should be to say, Jews — approach the makkot in her 2018 song, “God Lifts Up the Lowly“, on an album, Transangelic Exodus, that narrates in the language and register of Jewish liturgy and the Biblical exodus story the experiences of trans people, poor people, and all others criminalized in their existence in the dystopic regime in which we live: