The 10 Commandments stand on the opposite side of creation. If creation served to conceal the Almighty, then the giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, beginning with the 10 Commandments serve as the absolute revelation of God. Before the God spoke the 10 Commandments, there was a heavenly decree that the spiritual and mundane realities should not mix. More importantly, physical reality could not be rectified permanently without the medium of Divine commandments. So even though the Patriarchs had dedicated their lives to serving God and seemed to make tremendous headway in rectifying their surroundings, the change was temporary, most of it becoming inconsequential after a short period, with people and reality falling back to their negative behavior and habits.
But, all that changed with the giving of the Torah. The 10 Commandments begin with the word, Anochi [I], “I am God your God, who has taken you out of the Land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.” As such the 10 Commandments are entirely a revelation of “Anochi,” which the sages read as, “Anochi mee she’anochi,” “I am that which I am,” the essence of God. In all 10 Commandments God Himself is revealing His prescription for healing the world. When the Torah was given to Israel, the heavens opened and it was God’s very essence that was revealed.
How do the 10 plagues act as an intermediary between the 10 sayings of creation and God’s revelation at Mt. Sinai with the 10 Commandments? The 10 plagues create a separation, a distinction. We said that by meditating on the secrets of creation, we come to the realization that everything in the world is equal. Everything is standing on an equal base. But the 10 plagues are the first time in history that God reveals to the world that there is an inherent distinction between souls; that it is good thing to take an Egyptian soul, which represents negativity in the world and smite that negativity in order to heal the positive Divine soul of Israel and to create a Jewish entity.
On the face of it, the 10 plagues were merely the Almighty’s instrument that allowed us to leave Egypt. But actually, they acted on many levels at the same time. When Isaiah describes the plagues, he says, “And God smote Egypt; He smote and He healed, and they returned to God, and He answered their prayers and healed them.”
The plagues not only smote the Egyptian preparing them to release the Jewish people, they also healed the Jewish people themselves, bringing them closer to God, convincing them that God hears prayers, and most importantly perhaps, they made the souls of the Jewish people ready and able to leave their slave mentality to become a free and liberated nation. Most importantly, they acted to separate the Jewish people from the Egyptians. Throughout the description of the plagues, the Jews are constantly being segregated from their Egyptian masters, the plagues at one and the same time smiting the masters and healing the slaves.
Thus, the 10 plagues are a stage of “separation” that follows “submission” [the 10 sayings of creation] and is followed by a stage of “sweetening” [the absolute revelation of God with the 10 Commandments]. The Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Chasidut taught that any true process, be it spiritual or psychological, must pass through these three stages: submission, separation, and sweetening. The separation stage is always an intermediate stage between the submission stage and the sweetening stage. When God is revealed, all of reality becomes sweet.
The message in the Torah relating how God created the world, is that we are all equal. There is no difference between any of God creatures as everything was created by the same Creator and everything’s common purpose is to fulfill His will, equally. But, the fact that there is separation between souls, as revealed by the plagues, that is a novelty, that is something new. The separation is necessary in order to ultimately achieve the sweetening of the 10 Commandments, the giving of the Torah to Israel.
(from a class given on 19th of Tevet, 5771)
