The first plagues focused on the personal confrontation between Moshe and Pharaoh. As the plagues advance, they gradually grow to encompass the entire Egyptian people. This expansion is also seen in the haftara of Parshat Bo, which is read from Jeremiah chapter 46. Here, the prophet Yirmiyahu highlights the Egyptian people and their fate as a consequence of the destruction of their state.
“Go up to Gilad and take balm, virgin daughter Egypt. For naught will you apply many remedies; there is no cure for you. The nations have heard of your disgrace, and your screams have filled the earth" (vv. 11-12).
These descriptions of the plagues as striking the Egyptian populace - rather than just the rulers - helps shed light on our understanding of justice in the world.
The Sages were the first to explicitly confront the question of why the masses of Egyptian people had to suffer for what seems like the crime of Pharaoh and his inner circle. They explain that guilt for the subjugation and humiliation of the Israelites did not rest with Pharaoh alone, but extended to the common people as well, who were punished for their activities:
“Because the Egyptians planned to stone the Israelites, the Holy One, blessed be He, pelted them with hail. Because they forced the Hebrews to tend their vineyards, the Holy One, blessed be He, dispatched locusts to devour their trees" (Tanchuma, Bo 5).
Rabbi Mosheh Lichtenstein, quoting his grandfather, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, illustrated how this phenomenon has continued to play out through the ages. Rabbi Soloveitchik asked: Why is it that God killed all the firstborns in Egypt and didn't suffice with simply killing Pharaoh’s firstborn son? This, it seems, was the extent of what God threatened in Parshat Shemot (4:23). The Rav answered: “As a child in Russia who suffered from constant anti-Semitism, from whom did I suffer? When I ran home from those who wished to hit and humiliate me, from whom was I running? Not from the Czar, but from the neighborhood bully."
In other words, both the haftara and the parsha describe plagues inflicted on the entire population because they, on a day-to-day basis, were the main persecutors of Israel - even if the oppression originated in the ideas of their superiors. The people were part of the problem: They bought into Pharaoh's rhetoric; they absorbed his anti-Semitism; and instead of rebelling and resisting the atrocities of their ruler, they carried out his vision. Hence the people of Egypt deserved punishment alongside their masters, and they were stricken together with them.
These ideas have great contemporary importance, and offer a lens through which to understand when there should be a differentiation between the actions of governments and their populations. Throughout the world, we find evil and corrupt governments and states. In some, like the Islamic Republic of Iran, the regime enacts barbaric and genocidal ideals and policies, but these are not shared by the great mass of the people. In fact, the people of Iran have a deep and shared history of friendship with the Jewish people, going back to the deeds of the ancient Persian Emperors Cyrus and Xerxes. As recently as the 1970s, the modern state of Israel had warm diplomatic relations with Iran. When the reckoning comes for Iran's cruel theocrats, justice will be served by them paying the price of their crimes personally. Their subjects, who suffer under their yoke no less than the rest of the world, deserve freedom and a better future.
In other parts of the world, however, hatred and barbarism sadly do not end at the thresholds of the halls of government. One of the greatest horrors of October 7th was the realization that atrocities were being carried out not only by agents of Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, but by thousands of ordinary Gazans who had completely bought into the genocidal ideology and propaganda of their leaders.
Such people - including young adults with no official connection to any terror group - kidnapped, abused, tortured, and murdered hundreds of innocent people throughout southern Israel. This terrifying impression has been subsequently borne out by rigorous opinion polling, in which moral remorse for the horrors of October 7th is almost entirely absent among Gazans.
The way we view those who have hurt and hate us also matters. At the Passover Seder, when we recall the deserved plagues on the Egyptian populace, we do so with a recognition that our persecutors' pain is not something in which we revel. Removing a drop of wine from our cup at the seder for each plague is a reminder that there must be compassion in our hearts as well.
The Sages take great care to teach us that God’s ways are just, and that in some cases, punishment on a society as a whole is deserved. But we do not celebrate their suffering.
As our fallen courageous alumnus, IDF soldier Eitan Oster z"l once stated: “A true warrior fights not because of his hatred for those who stand in front of him, but because of his love for what stands behind him."