Fifth and Sixth Readings: The Torah’s Kabbalistic Structure
“The magicians said to Pharaoh: ‘This is the finger of God.’”
The seven readings in every Torah portion correspond to the seven sefirot (known as the measures of the heart) from loving-kindness to kingdom. The fifth and sixth readings correspond to acknowledgment (hod) and foundation (yesod). Let us see how this correspondence unfolds in our parashah.
The Plague of Honesty
The fifth reading opens with the removal of the plague of frogs thus connecting the fourth reading with the fifth, illustrating the principle that “victory (netzach) and acknowledgment (hod) are two halves of one body.” The first new plague is that of lice. Kabbalah correlates the ten plagues to the ten sefirot from bottom to top—thus the third plague of lice corresponds with acknowledgment (hod), the sefirah that the fifth reading corresponds to. In addition, the Hebrew word for “lice” (כנים) is cognate with the word meaning “honesty” (כנות), the inner quality of the sefirah of acknowledgment. Following the plague of lice, the Egyptian magicians were forced to acknowledge for the first time that the plague was “the finger of God.” Even though in the previous plagues, the Egyptians and their magicians were already beat, and God was victorious, they were not willing to admit their defeat. Only now is the effect of both victory (netzach) and acknowledgment (hod) felt. Interestingly, the value of “finger of God” (יםִהֹ-לֱע אַּבְצֶא), 163, is the sum of 80 and 83, the ages of Moses and Aaron respectively, when they first stood before Pharaoh to free the Israelites. Moses and Aaron themselves are the archetypal souls of victory and acknowledgment.
The sages explain that the Egyptians magicians had to admit that sorcery cannot control anything smaller than a barley grain. The kidneys, which are the bodily organs that represent victory and acknowledgment break down the physical effluence into small parts. In more abstract terms, the right—victory—takes a general principle and breaks it down into details. That is why the plague of frogs began with a single large frog that was then broken down into many smaller sized frogs. The left—acknowledgment takes details and breaks them further down into tiny particles; in modern language, the left side breaks matter down into quantum realm particles—where there is uncertainty, and human vessels cannot control things in these dimensions.
At the end of the fifth reading Moses warns Pharaoh of the impending plague of wild beasts, which will decimate the land. This corresponds with the tendency of acknowledgment (hod) to turn into a decimating force, as in the verse, “My splendor (hod) has turned against me to decimate me.”
Affirmative Discrimination
In all the plagues described in the sixth reading—wild beasts, pestilence, boils, and the warning of hail—there appears a distinct separation between the Israelites and the Egyptians. This illustrates the principle that foundation (yesod) measures and discerns between the righteous and the wicked.
Enlightening Pharaoh
The role of the sefirah of foundation is to reveal, with force, the influence of the sefirah of beauty (tiferet). We see this when comparing the purpose of the plagues as spoken by Moses to Pharaoh. In the previous readings discussing the earlier plagues, the goal is that Pharaoh become aware of God. But in the sixth reading we see that this knowledge is directly linked to the earth in general. As Moses says, “so that you will know that there is none like Me in all the earth... and you would have been obliterated from the earth... in order that My Name may resound throughout the earth.” This is the role of foundation—to draw recognition of the Divine all the way to the ends of the earth.
Plagues of Boils and Pestilence
The plague of boils is a skin disease, and in the ten systems of the body, the skin corresponds to foundation. A skin disease is a result of a blemish to the procreative organ’s covenant.
In the Book of Formation, the procreative organ is referred to with a word derived from “skin”: מעור.
(from Sha’ashu’im Yom Yom)
