When God Stops Arguing With Evil

Avigail Gimpel
3 days ago
6 min read

Parshat Bo as the Continuation of Healing

Dedication

In memory of our holy soldiers who fell sanctifying God’s Name and the Land of Israel:

Ephraim son of Liat and Shmuel, Yosef Malachi son of Dina and David, Eliyahu Moshe Shlomo son of Sarah and Shimon, Yosef Chaim son of Rachel and Eliyahu, Netanel son of Revital and Elad, Yakir son of Chaya and Yehoshua.

May their memories be a blessing, and may the elevation of their souls bring merit and strength to the entire people of Israel.

In my work with trauma survivors, there is one theme that returns again and again:

recognition.

Survivors speak about an unmet need for the perpetrator to feel what they felt, to grasp the weight of the pain inflicted, to take responsibility, to say — I see you, and I understand what my actions did to you. Often, that recognition never comes. People are hurt in silence. Their stories remain untold. The one who caused the harm moves on, lives freely, is sometimes even honored, while the victim is left carrying the question that echoes for years:

What about me?

Recognition, responsibility, and the collapse of impunity are not luxuries in healing. They are core needs. Yet many victims never receive them directly from those who harmed them.

Parshat Bo speaks powerfully into this gap.

Last week, in Va’era, we saw that redemption begins with healing. God teaches Moshe how to work with a people whose free choice has been crushed by avodah kashah. The work starts by creating space, confronting the source of suffering, allowing breath between contractions. Slowly, painfully, their voice returns — first through complaint, then through

speech.

Bo carries the healing forward.

The focus, however, shifts.

In Va’era, Moshe is guided in how to stand beside the victims and support their recovery. In Bo, God Himself takes over the next stage of healing. The Torah turns its attention toward the perpetrators — not in order to redeem them, but in order to heal those they harmed. Pharaoh and Egypt recede from the moral center of the story. Their inner lives no longer matter. What matters now is what Israel — and Israel’s future — require in order to shed the imprint of slavery and return to life and agency.

A Radical Shift: God Names His Intention

At the opening of Bo, God says something startling. He says openly that Pharaoh’s free will has been removed. And then He uses a word the Torah almost never uses:

אשר התעללתי במצרים¹“That which I hit’alalti in Egypt.”

This language is forceful and unambiguous. It signals distance and clarity rather than conciliation.

Hit’alelut means being acted upon, toyed with, stripped of agency. God is signaling something crucial here:

I am no longer engaging Pharaoh as a moral subject.I am no longer trying to change him.I am done centering him.

This is an act of moral containment, moral clarity.

No Sympathy for the Perpetrator

One of the deepest mistakes societies make — and one of the deepest wounds victims carry — is the pressure to humanize the perpetrator before the victim has healed.

The Torah refuses to do this.

In Bo, God does not invite us to empathize with Pharaoh or to understand his psychology. This is not a balanced story. He sidelines Pharoah completely.

Once Pharaoh’s free will is removed, he becomes irrelevant — and that irrelevance is the point.

Why?

Because healing can not come from softening evil.Healing comes from de-centering it.

Why the Plagues Continue After Free Will Is Gone

If Pharaoh no longer has free choice, why continue?

The Torah answers explicitly:

“So that you will tell your child and your grandchild…”

The focus here is Israel’s recovery, not Egypt’s fate.It is about Israel’s recovery across generations.

Oppression harms the body and reshapes the inner world. It conditions the soul to experience power as inevitable, cruelty as permanent, and resistance as futile.

That belief must be dismantled.

That belief yields only to lived experience and witnessed reversal.

The Final Three Plagues as a Healing Reversal

The last three plagues form a deliberate process, the exact inverse of slavery, enacted on the oppressor for the sake of the oppressed.

Arbeh — The Collapse of False Power

Arbeh appears almost benign at first glance. No one even dies. Where is it's power? What is it's message?

It targets something far more insidious than life itself. Arbeh erases the meaning of effort. It consumes what survived, what was saved, what seemed to promise recovery. In doing so, it exposes the emptiness of Pharaoh’s power: a power that can neither create, nor protect, nor sustain a future.

For Israel watching, this matters deeply:

Our exhaustion came from labor stripped of meaning.Meaning was taken from our work by force.

That distinction restores the possibility of agency.

Choshech — The Loss of Recognized Self

Chazal describe this plague as a collapse of human presence. Midrash Tanchuma (Bo) explains that the darkness functioned like imprisonment: people could not see one another and could not move from their place, rendering them socially and physically stuck. The Zohar (Bo) deepens this further, describing choshech as a thickening of concealment in which faces could no longer be perceived as faces — a state where relational reality itself breaks down.

Choshech is not just darkness. It is a world where people cannot see one another and cannot move. This is slavery stripped to its essence: the erasure of selfhood.

When Egypt experiences this, Israel sees their own inner reality validated. What happened to us has a name. It is a structure of dehumanization — and it can be reversed.

Makat Bechorot — The Collapse of a Stolen Future

Slavery trains a person to live without a future of their own. Time becomes something imposed rather than chosen, endured rather than shaped. Generations unfold without ownership, continuity without authorship. By dismantling Egypt’s future, God reopens Israel’s relationship with time itself. The horizon returns. Tomorrow becomes imaginable again, claimable again, and capable of holding hope.

The message is unmistakable:

Tomorrow belongs to life, choice, and those who can shape it.

Why This Heals the Victim

Healing takes place when inevitability loses its grip. Agency returns when a person sees that what once felt absolute was constructed, imposed, and therefore capable of reversal.

The Torah articulates a process that modern psychology has since named: recovery accelerates when survivors witness a clear collapse of the system that harmed them. Power loses its mythic quality. Cruelty is exposed as contingent rather than permanent. The inner world reorganizes around possibility instead of threat.

Judith Herman, a foundational voice in trauma psychology, describes this moment precisely: “The restoration of justice is a central task of recovery. Without justice, the survivor remains trapped in a world of danger and fear.”¹ Healing requires moral clarity, not reconciliation.

Ronnie Janoff‑Bulman likewise explains that trauma reshapes a person’s assumptions about reality, and that recovery depends on lived contradiction: “It is not enough to reassure survivors that the world is safe or meaningful; they must encounter experiences that disconfirm the traumatic worldview.”²

Parshat Bo provides exactly such an experience. God recenters the narrative around Israel’s needs and Israel’s future. Pharaoh is removed from the emotional and moral center, and Israel is surrounded with truth, clarity, and witnessed reversal.

This is what hit’alelut signals. The word names a deliberate theological move: evil is contained, bounded, and deprived of its power to dominate meaning. Moral discomfort dissolves because cruelty is neither justified nor indulged; it is rendered structurally irrelevant. In its place, the conditions for healing, continuity, and renewed agency take hold.

A Torah Model for Trauma‑Informed Leadership

Bo teaches a radical lesson about trauma‑informed leadership. Energy is not invested in redeeming the perpetrator or softening moral clarity. The work does not revolve around balance, explanation, or empathy directed upward toward those who caused harm. Instead, leadership is measured by the ability to name the harm clearly, dismantle the illusion of inevitability, and render the oppressor irrelevant to the ongoing story. Attention is directed relentlessly toward the victim — and toward the victim’s children — creating the conditions necessary for a return to life, continuity, and restored agency.