Thesis: We ignore important details that are in front of us all too often.
Question: How could the Egyptians keep hitting the frog? How could the Jews ignore Moshe?
Answer: They were intentionally blind to the obvious facts in front of them.
In 1979, Johann Wolfgang wrote a famous ballad called The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. It was famously filmed in Disney’s Fantasia with Mickey Mouse as the Apprentice – and there are many other versions of the story. The story starts with a new apprentice to a wise sorcerer who is instructed to do an number of chores while the sorcerer leaves for a few hours. Being newly trained in magic, he decides to cast a spell on the mop to clean the room for him. The mop start doing a good job, but soon the room is filled with water since he isn’t trained with the magic to stop it. He quickly reasons to break the mop– but to his surprise, the two halves become two separate mops and make the problem much worse. His frustration builds and he starts splitting all the mops, which in succession become more and more mops. When all seems lost, the sorcerer walks in and puts an end to the mess.
As a child this was one of my favorite Fantasia stories.
Interestingly, this week’s parsha has a very similar episode – the plague of the frogs. We all know from either our own childhood or listening to our children at the seder, the plague was millions of frogs descending upon Egypt and their lives became unbearable with all the frogs jumping around and making noise. There are plenty of songs that the children here can sing to describe the scene.
However, the language of the passukim are quite interesting. When describing what he is about to do, Moshe says:
וְשָׁרַ֣ץ הַיְאֹר֘ צְפַרְדְּעִים֒ וְעָלוּ֙ וּבָ֣אוּ בְּבֵיתֶ֔ךָ וּבַֽחֲדַ֥ר מִשְׁכָּֽבְךָ֖ וְעַל־מִטָּתֶ֑ךָ וּבְבֵ֤ית עֲבָדֶ֨יךָ֙ וּבְעַמֶּ֔ךָ וּבְתַנּוּרֶ֖יךָ וּבְמִשְׁאֲרוֹתֶֽיךָ:
And the Nile will swarm with frogs, and they will go up and come into your house and into your bedroom and upon your bed and into the house of your servants and into your people, and into your ovens and into your kneading troughs;
However, when he actually performs the plague, the text of the passuk is:
וַיֵּ֤ט אַֽהֲרֹן֙ אֶת־יָד֔וֹ עַ֖ל מֵימֵ֣י מִצְרָ֑יִם וַתַּ֨עַל֙ הַצּפַרְדֵּ֔עַ וַתְּכַ֖ס אֶת־אֶ֥רֶץ מִצְרָֽיִם:
And Aaron stretched forth his hand over the waters of Egypt, and the frog came up and covered the land of Egypt.
Why did the language of the plague change from when Moshe explained it to Pharaoh to when the plague actually occurred? Why did the language change from singular to plural?
The Gemara picks up on this. Rabbi Akiva says (Sanhedrin 67b):
רבי עקיבא אומר צפרדע אחת היתה ומלאה כל ארץ מצרים
It was one frog and every time the Egyptians hit it, it would spit out another frog. This is the ancient version of the Sorcerer’s Apprentice. They kept hitting them and they just kept splitting into more frogs.
However, the question that boggles me is, why did they keep hitting the frog? The first few times I understand since you want to see if you can kill it. However, after you’ve tested it 10 – 20 times, you should figure out that you can’t kill it and you are just making more frogs. Even if they hit it 100 times, I doubt that 100 frogs would have created that much havoc in Egypt. They must have hit it thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of times to create enough frogs for it to be a plague. The question is why? Wouldn’t they stop at some point when they see it multiplying too much?
I think the answer lies in a study done in 2001 by Daniel Simons. He created a video where many subjects were walking around the screen passing multiple balls to each other. He asked the participants to count the number of passes that occurred in the video. However, what he did not tell them was that there would be a very large person in a gorilla costume that would walk through the middle of the group of participants. When asked after watching the video, over 50% of the participants reported to not see the gorilla. He coined the term INTENTIONALLY BLIND, which meant that the brain intentionally ignores information based on your focus. If you are focused intently on one thing, your brain will tune out everything else to make sure you can focus properly. This can be both for good and bad.
While the Gorilla was right in front of them, they were too distracted by the balls being passed to notice the massive gorilla pounding his chest. They weren’t harmed by missing the gorilla.
The Egyptians were so focused on ridding themselves of the nuisance that they missed the fact that they were creating their own plague. In this case, being too focused on their goal became their own downfall. They were intentionally blind to what was happening.
However, I think this is not just a single moment for the Egyptians where they were intentionally blind. Rather, it is a pattern that continues through all the plagues. It takes the Egyptians until the 7th plague to finally complain to Pharaoh to let the Jews go.
Pharaoh himself was stuck in this mindset. It was only after the 6th plague that Hashem has to harden Pharaoh’s heart. Up until that point, he had hardened his own heart. The way we can understand this is that he was so focused on proving to Moshe that he was right and God was wrong, that he could not see the obvious ways it was destroying Egyptian society. He is so hyperfocused on his own narrative that there is no need for Hashem to harden his heart – he already did it himself.
The Jews are no better. They are so focused on being slaves they can’t hear the message of freedom right in front of them. When Moshe comes to tell them that “now it’s happening”, the response is:
וְלֹ֤א שָֽׁמְעוּ֙ אֶל־משֶׁ֔ה מִקֹּ֣צֶר ר֔וּחַ וּמֵֽעֲבֹדָ֖ה קָשָֽׁה:
And they could not listen to Moshe since they were short of spirit from the hard work.
They were so caught up with being slaves, they could not comprehend what the larger picture is. Even later, the medrish describes how many Jews died during the plague of darkness since they did not believe in God. How could they not? What kind of rock are you living under to not see the last 8 miracles! It was because they were so focused on their slave-life that they could not process the obvious miracles in front of them.
The question is what are we focused on? Is it work, TV, projects? What is the ball being passed around in our lives that we can no longer see the giant Gorilla standing in front of us. The second part is what are we losing focus of. Is it time with our children or spouse? Are we losing touch with friends?
It is important to stop and reflect on what is pulling our attention to the point that we can no longer focus on what is important. For example, are we so involved with our phones that we can no longer hold a conversation at the dinner table. In that case you’ve missing your family beating their chests as a gorilla looking for your attention.
Just focusing on a number of practices may be able to help with this. For example, Shabbos is a great time to avoid thinking about the week and reflect on the important people around you. During the week you can focus on Brachos since the goal is to force you to stop throughout the day to focus on all the miracles in your life that you have but overlook. The fact you can go to the bathroom, have food to eat, or drinks to enjoy. These are all blessings that we tend to ignore.
Stop focusing on the balls being passed around. Start paying attention to the Gorilla.