A Frog In Your Throat?
A Frog In Your Throat?
Parshas Va'eira: Breaking through the noise
It's buzzing, pinging, ringing, binging. Technology bombards us with noise. And whilst this noise often takes the form of shrill, intrusive sounds, it can just as well manifest as a host of different distractions. Sometimes it's the content-churning, cash-burning, concentration-spurning streaming services. In other cases, it's a torrent of trivial tidbits spewed forth from the shadowy underbelly of social media.
Already three decades ago, psychologist Kenneth Gergen proposed that the incessant racket of technology would lead to a fractured vision of the self. After being drawn by stimuli in a thousand directions, a person gradually loses his identity. "I am linked, therefore I am," he mused, grimly parodying Descartes. Speech and information have reached a state of meaninglessness.
It's tempting to blame Silicon valley for all of our woes. From Facebook to TikTok, social media empires make for convenient scapegoats. Truth be told, tech corporations are largely responsible for today's devastating mental health crisis. But the rot goes far deeper than that. Social media and technology merely hold a magnifying glass up to humanity. Whilst they may have amplified our flaws, societal decay had already taken root. But what exactly lies at the core of our cultural dysfunction? And how should we go about preventing or ameliorating its harmful effects? Is it even possible to cut through all the noise?
We have centred our discussion around a noted quality decline in human speech and information. The Zohar refers to the Jew's enslavement in Egypt as an 'exile of speech'. What this means, Rav Moshe Shapiro explains, is that as much as the Egyptians exploited our physical bodies, so too they dictated the content of our language. Such a reality meant that the very words we used in communication ceased to be our own.
Throughout the works of the Rambam, we see that intellect and understanding are the closest representation of the core self. Under Pharaoh's oppression, our words failed to reflect our inner essence, thus becoming disconnected from their true root. Much like in our generation, an all-encompassing but empty society stripped language of the profound meaning that flows from a person's soul.
Drawing a parallel between Egyptian culture and ours is all well and good, but how does it get us any closer to addressing the problem at hand?
One midrashic teaching indicates that each supernatural calamity handed down by God simultaneously played the role of punishment for the Egyptians and a cure for the Jewish people. An understanding of this is that every public disciplining of the Egyptians clarified the debilitating effects of corrupted civilisation on the Hebrew nation, thus enabling us to target and nullify the defects that had crept into our national psyche. As we will see, the second plague of frogs, described in our Parsha, is crucial to comprehending the toxic cause and effects of unending senseless speech.
Unlike many of the other ten plagues, Parsha's Va'eira does not portray the frog infestation in terms of the physical damage it wrought. For example, by the plague of wild beasts, God's threat is that:
"... I will incite against you, your servants, your people, and your houses a combination of dangerous creatures..."
{Shemos 8:17}
The language of 'Mashliach' incitement to violent damage is nowhere to be seen concerning the pesky frogs. Instead, we see words such as 'shoratz' swarming. And when the verse deals with the actualisation of this aquatic apocalypse, it declares:
"....and the frogs came up and covered the land of Egypt."
{Shemos 8:2}
As Rabbi Aaron Lopiansky explains, it was primarily the vast numbers of frogs that made the epidemic so excruciatingly unendurable. One lively frog makes for a charming pet. One million croaking frogs will drive a man to insanity. Infinite multiplication of noise defined this particular plague.
Indeed there is a negative relationship between content and sound. When one's words are linked to his intellect, they are necessarily limited by the boundaries of his knowledge, understanding and judgement. In contrast, those who leave their speech untethered from all intellect make the biggest racket. For a good reason, the assertion that 'an empty barrel makes the most noise' is a well-worn cliche.
A particular verse in midrash features the grotesque imagery of frogs jumping into the throats of the Egyptians so that when they tried to speak, all one could hear was croaking. This occurrence reflected the actual reality of Egyptian speech back at them. All their words were just noise, entirely severed from the inner self.
The current cultural climate is saturated with tones of an overwhelming racket. But the empty bluster and clamour indicate something more threatening than just an annoying distraction. Ours is an era in which we can no longer hear ourselves think. As one perceptive author put it, "People don't want to listen to their thoughts, so they fill the earth with noise." The abundance of sound and distractions hides the loss of an ineffable world—the world of the soul. It seems that:
We are so focused on what's outside us that we have become strangers to ourselves.
But what, then, is the solution? Tellingly when Moshe brings the plague of frogs to an end, he does so with a Tzaakah, a cry. What differentiates a cry from mere words? Words can be an effective mode of persuasion even if they do not reflect a person's inner emotional state. For example, a sly or glib politician can convince anyone of anything. A cry, in contrast, directly expresses an individual's deepest desires. Try to fake a sob, and one risks the accusation of crocodile tears. To cry out in prayer, then, is the first step. We must allow our souls to be vulnerable before God.
But this alone is not enough. By crying out, we open a window to genuine experience, yet we have all seen how that space can disappear in a flash. Our sages teach that the entire purpose of redemption from Eygpt was so that the Jews would receive the Torah at Sinai. Each of us has a place in the Torah that we can tap into at our core.
As we study the words of our sages, words of pure truth, we are reminded of who we truly are -inconceivably beloved children of an incomprehensibly majestic God. In time, we can break through the endless noise and tap into the serenity of the soul.
Good Shabbos, and Keep Pondering!