Parshah Commentary
Do we believe in demons? Apologies for the atavistic-sounding question—I am, of course, thinking of Donald Trump. He has called his opponents “demonic,” playing on a growing belief among conservative Christians that they are surrounded by people literally possessed, and a yearning for an authoritarian exorcism. But saner liberals also seem drawn to the language and causal framework of the satanic when describing Trump. Sometimes, this is explicit, but more often it’s latent. For instance, in the view of the New York Times editorial board—secular liberalism’s high priests—Trump is above all sui generis: exceptional for his charisma, his defiance of American political norms, and his personal vices; explicable in personal rather than collective, systemic terms (which is to say, inexplicable); malignant and aberrational, to be defeated individually in court, rather than by posing a political alternative (which is to say, not to be defeated)—in short, if not supernatural, then at least supersocial. People like me usually scoff at this personalizing obfuscation, preferring to trace continuities between Trump’s politics and longer processes in the American state and economy, to see him as the predictable outgrowth of increasing inequality, foreign wars come home, and discontent with the neoliberal consensus. Yet contemplating, say, the arcane symbolic tattoos on Trump’s alcoholic, sexually abusive, and ultra-violent nominee for secretary of defense, I wonder how many of us are confident enough in our cool, rational analyses not to be spooked. For me, at least, the demonic names the gap between what I know and how much I fear, reflecting the way my anxieties, like hospital bacteria with a tolerance for antibiotics, have grown resistant to rational explanation.
As it happens, this week’s parshah implicitly stages a debate regarding the existence of demons. Anyone who has been to a Passover seder knows the “rationalist” side: The Haggadah, quoting an early midrash on the verse in our parshah, presents God as insistently denying the role of any angel or other supernatural intermediary in striking the firstborn sons of Egypt. And indeed, God—instructing the Israelites, through Moses, to paint their doorposts with blood—emphasizes divine agency: “When I see the blood I will pass over you, so that there will be no plague to destroy you when I strike the land of Egypt.” But when Moses relays the plan to the Israelite elders ten verses later, he attributes the impending violence to an angelic Destroyer: “God will see the blood . . . and God will stand over the door and not let the Destroyer enter and smite your home.” As the (wonderfully named) scholar Shimon Gesundheit proved, this sequentially later verse is actually the older text—and in a previous version, was attributed to God. A later scribe, Gesundheit shows, demoted the line from God’s word to Moses’s and inserted before it the revised version in which God takes sole responsibility for the killing. In that added verse, the scribe also massaged the name of the angelic Destroyer (“hamashḥit”) into an odd, incongruous verb form (“l’mashḥit”), the “m” preserving a remnant of the divine killer. With monotheistic zeal, the later scribe reduced a rival supernatural agent to a simple report of the process at hand; the text’s transfiguration records an early moment of secular disillusionment, the knowing rationalist poo-pooing someone else’s demon as a mere phantom.
These two verses within the very same chapter of our parshah thus present opposing images of that night: In one, a Supreme Deity is both judge and executioner, personally decimating Egyptian society, in a perfectly choreographed spectacle of omnipotence. In the other, destruction comes from a mysterious, malignant force, held in check by—but ontologically separate from—a protecting God. The mashḥit has its own shadowy methods and motives, maybe even its own jurisdiction. For this reason, if I prefer the later scribe’s version metaphysically, I am more morally comfortable with the earlier text, in which the death of numerous innocents is, in some sense, not God’s doing.
I suspect the earlier text also more accurately captures the experience of revolutionary transformation. While the ultimate point of the plagues is to demonstrate God’s sovereignty—everyone, even Pharaoh, will “know that I am God”—as they unfolded, that question remained in doubt. For both Egyptians and Israelites, the time of the plagues was chaotic and confused, with rival interpretations of these catastrophes. The only certain fact would have been manifest contradiction: a clash of peoples, classes, natural forces, and even gods, in which it was unclear not only who would prevail, but even what the sides were. Perhaps the scribe’s revision of the Destroyer into a destroying God not only correlates with the emergence of a rationalizing monotheism—gradually draining the world of its spooky, local demons—but also reflects a retrospective projection of historical clarity. That is, if the older text depicts a still unresolved war among the gods, the later one knows not only who won, but that there was never any real contest.
That earlier version, then, understands demons neither as exceptional, fearsome forces that altogether deny analysis, nor simply as illusions to be dispelled by the smug, enlightened analyst. Rather, demons are the “morbid symptoms” of a social “interregnum”: the old, conservative constraints have been loosened, but the left is not yet strong enough to provide a new direction, so reliable prognostication fails. The twin texts of our parshah suggest that in such moments, analysis rarely outstrips, and frequently lags behind, political praxis. In other words, we will never be able to interpret our world until we can change it.
Raphael Magarik is an assistant professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago and a contributing writer for Jewish Currents.
