Parshas Va'eira: The Plague of Happiness

I wrote this for my school paper, but I liked it so I decided to share:

The Plague of Happiness

Aviva Morris

I was sitting on the couch with my friend from high school this past weekend and we were talking about motivation in life. Luckily, after becoming religious, I remained close with many friends from high school and one had asked me, going along with my whole new “religious shtick”, what motivated me? I said I was once asked if I was happy being miserable. Happy being miserable may seem like a foreign concept, but many people are content staying the way they are: miserable. When I really took a minute to think about if I was truly happy or if I was just content to be miserable, I underwent an internal search for happiness.

With this new found insight and quest, what really hit me like a brick is when I actually found my happiness! I found it by saying Modeh Ani everyday. When we wake up and thank Gd for everything we have, we focus on the positive and are grateful. Gratefulness, to me, is true happiness.

The same day my friend asked me about my motivations and view on happiness, I sat down to read this week’s parsha, Parshas Va’eira. Reading about the plagues, I found the way some of the plagues were carried out a bit curious. In two instances, with the blood and lice, Hashem said to Moshe “tell Aaron.” Why didn’t Hashem tell Moshe to carry out these plagues but, instead, instruct Moshe to tell Aaron to do it? Here is where the theme of gratefulness popped up again.

The river that protected Moshe as an infant was going to be turned to blood. Instead of Moshe inflicting the plague on the river that once saved him, eighty years prior, Hashem commanded Aaron do it instead. In the instance of the lice, Hashem commanded Moshe tell Aaron to strike the dust of the land so that it may turn into lice. This is the same dust of the earth that once hid the Egyptian man that Moshe had killed in Parshas Shemos. Rashi explains that the Torah is telling us that Moshe should not be the one to carry out these plagues in order to display gratitude. Gratitude, mind you, to an inanimate river and dust. How, then, can we not be grateful to the Gd that created us, took us out of Mitzrayim, gave us Torah, and set us free?

There were many things going on in this parsha, but I found that gratefulness was what I really took to heart. We often know to thank Gd and our parent’s for the “big things” like life and substance, but we really need to focus in on the “rivers and dust” in our lives. Then we will, bizrat Hashem, be plagued with happiness by choosing gratefulness over contentment.