While the Ten Plagues of the Haggadah might be fun in the same way as some people get a voyeuristic kick out of Game of Thrones or a slasher movie, most of us do not seriously believe that our tap water will turn into blood, or frogs will invade our bedrooms. Still the image of ten plagues, or “signs and wonders” as the Torah calls them, is one that we surely all relate to in our own way. Here are ten “signs of trouble” in modern life, and what we can do about them.

1) Isolation

My recent quarantine has jolted me into awareness about the nature of the confinements that so many people suffer as a regular part of their daily existence. Housebound because of chronic illness, locked up tight due to unlawful or inexplicable incarceration, escaping deep into the recesses of their rooms to drown out the storms in their minds of depression, social anxiety, fear of human contact. For such individuals, “social distancing” is not some temporary lexicon of the digital age, a phrase that will become a memory or disappear with a Coronavirus vaccine. It is a permanent feature of their torment and their struggle to keep up with a world that is too loud, too scary, too fast or too remote. Compared to these prisons, virtual and walled, my quarantine was scarcely an impediment; it was a luxury.

2)  Outsourcing Your Life

The Talmud states that every time gossip is uttered, three people are damaged: “The one who spoke the gossip; the one who listened, and the subject of the gossip.” The person being gossiped about is an obvious choice for harm; who hasn’t felt the sting of finding out that others were chatting about us behind our backs? But the speaker and the listener? They too, have forfeited something valuable; in spending time, energy, and lots of money purveying or consuming gossip, they have rerouted the vitality, focus and personal introspection needed to live well, and transferred it to someone else’s life. 

Some years ago, I remember my students talked repeatedly about Tiger Woods and his disintegrating marriage. I do not expect that Tiger Woods is much interested in my marriage – is there a reason I should have been interested in his? Will his fleshly infidelities help me figure out the value of my own short and complex existence on earth? Unless of course that is exactly the point, that the spotlight continuously flashed on Mr. Woods and the myriad of changing names that imbue this contemporary religion of celebrity gods, are important precisely because they allow me not to focus on my own life, to divert me as much as possible from my own challenges. 

Stop outsourcing your life.  

3) Narcissism – Much as people would like to brand millennials as self-absorbed and vapid, that would be a) a gross generalization and b) historically short-sighted. Already forty years ago, the American historian and social critic Christopher Lasch, in a book whose title would be the catch phrase for a generation that cultivated self-involvement, announced “the culture of narcissism.” Lasch writes: “To live for the moment is the prevailing passion — to live for yourself, not for your predecessors or posterity.” 

A look at some of the male elder statesmen in various political positions of power around the world—naming no names–is enough to confirm that a narcissistic bent is not simply the province of the young and tanned. Narcissism, going back to the utterly egotistical Greek hunter who gave the term its origin, has always been with us. 

As Maimonides cuttingly observes  in the 12^th century everyone imagines “that all that exists, exists with a view to his individual sake; it is as if there were nothing that exists except him…[but] if a person considered and represented to himself that which exists and knew the smallness of his part in it, the truth would become clear and manifest to him.” 

Judaism’s answer to excessive self-love is humility and outer directedness. Self-care is a good thing, but it’s not the only thing.

4) Tribalism

“A man with a conviction is a hard man to change…Suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen. The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of his beliefs than ever before.”

It sounds like some typical op-ed in 2020 commenting on our increasingly intransigent convictions about everything from politics to morality. But the passage is from a 1957 book, When Prophecy Fails, written by the psychologists Henry Riecken, Stanley Schachter and Leon Festinger. 

The sheer idiocy of all of our Jewish tribalism, our nitpicking about the other and our reflexive judgmentalism, was beautifully harpooned many years ago in R. Yitz Greenberg’s telling quip: “”I don’t care what denomination you’re a member of, as long as you’re ashamed of it.”  

Let’s try hearing out the other person for change.

5) Lack of Urgency

A standard answer that is usually given as to why the Jews ate matzah coming out of Egypt is that they didn’t have time to let their bread rise. To which I might ask, “Why not?” You are slaves for 400 years and you can’t stop an extra few minutes to bake bread?

When it comes to changing our lives, everyone seems to find a reason for delay, usually on the grounds of physical or emotional discomfort. Imagine a slave coming out of Egypt saying, “I’d like to escape barbarism and tyranny but I can’t leave until I have my twelve-grain.” We do versions of this every day. Many of us act as if we have unlimited time, and that if we put off crucial decisions, there will always be another time when we can get to it. As the psychoanalyst Allan Wheelis pointed out “Some persons sit at the crossroads, taking neither path because they cannot take both, cherishing the illusion that if they sit there long enough the two ways will resolve themselves into one and hence both be possible.”

Give your life the urgency it deserves. 

6) Actual Slavery 

As the Washington Post’s Max Fisher reported in 2013, we think of slavery as a practice of the past, an image from Roman colonies or 18th-century American plantations, but the practice of enslaving human beings as property still exists. He writes: 

“There are 29.8 million people living as slaves right now…living as forced laborers, forced prostitutes, child soldiers, child brides in forced marriages and as pieces of property, chattel in the servitude of absolute ownership. In Sub-Saharan Africa, roughly 0.7 percent of the population is enslaved — or one in every 140 people. Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe are blighted particularly by sex trafficking. Women and men are coerced into participating, often starting at a very young age, and are completely reliant on their traffickers for not just their daily survival but basic life choices; they have no say in where they go or what they do and are physically prevented from leaving. 

Since Fisher wrote this, matters have only gotten worse. The slave trade now oppresses over 40 million human beings, and its tentacles stretch to every part of the globe.

7) Workaholism

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik observes that there are two ways to talk about slavery. In the Haggadah it says, “We were slaves to Pharaoh.” But in a verse from Genesis 24:34, Eliezer states “I am Avraham’s slave” (literally “a slave to Avraham am I”). Rabbi Soloveitchik points out that the phrase in the Haggadah implies that “I am my own person, and I happen to be a slave to Pharaoh at present.” But Eliezer’s expression means that my very essence is inextricably linked with my master. In other words, is being a servant what I do, or is it what I am?

As reported by various health websites, work addiction, often called workaholism, is a real mental health condition. It often stems from a compulsive need to achieve status and success, or to escape emotional stress. So it turns out you can be financially comfortable, and under no one’s control, and still be a slave.

8) Distraction

I have talked about this in a previous post (“From Doubt to Distraction”).

Sometimes on the street, or the restaurant, the bus, the plane, the park, it could almost be the set of a post nuclear movie where every single person, as if in unison, is staring down at their phones, the small rectangular lover. My ensuing sense of claustrophobia, that there are no spaces left that are free and uncluttered, is palpable. The planet has become a stuck elevator. 

There is nowhere left to hide.

None of this is accidental. There are forces at work that seek to find and distract us, whatever it takes. Distraction is zero sum. If you are staring at a screen, then you are not with me, not really present, no matter how much you’d like to pretend. Commercial interests benefit from my lack of focus, seducing my gaze and redirecting my fractured attentiveness towards toothpaste, a weekend in Mexico, a mindfulness retreat, a high-powered lawnmower. The membrane between the private and the commercial has been so seamlessly ruptured that most of us don’t even realize that we are the object of the “sell” practically every waking moment. 

What are the implications for friendship and intimacy, for love and for marriage when we can no longer “stay” with anything, not even the person who is trying to speak to us? One journalist claims that in the year 2000, the average amount of time we could remain focused on one task without our mind wandering to something new was twelve seconds. By 2010, he says it had dropped to eight seconds. What would it be now, one wonders?

9) Meaninglessness

The Torah stresses (Exodus 1:13) that “the Egyptians made the Israelites serve with hard labour. The Ben Ish Chai, a notable Iraqi sage of the 19^th century, understood the phrase this way: “Doing meaningless work is the ultimate hard labor. Even a slave in bondage has satisfaction when he sees that his labor results in some purpose. But if he is told to draw water from the river and to pour it back, his labor will be a thousand times more difficult.” 

Part of what enslaves human beings is a feeling of futility and meaninglessness attached to their lives. As Erich Fromm already reported in the 1950’s, “Today I would say that most people who go to a psychoanalyst are people who suffer from what [Freud] used to call `la malaise du siècle,’ the uneasiness which is characteristic for our century. No symptoms at all, but feeling unhappy, strange, not even sleeplessness, life has no meaning…They have everything but they suffer from themselves.” 

10) Looking Past the Other

R. Jonathan Sacks astutely comments on the weirdness of the invitation we offer to others early in the Haggadah: “This is the bread of oppression our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come in and eat.” As Rabbi Sacks asks, what hospitality is it to offer the hungry the taste of suffering? 

His insight is that sharing food is the first act through which slaves become free human beings. “Bread shared is no longer the bread of oppression.” It’s not the food, but rather the fellowship that matters. 

At your Seder, pour out a drop of wine for each of these. And then let’s get to work on liberating ourselves and loving others.