The Torah's Critique of Caste
Why Even First-Borns Must Become Second-Borns
Moses said, “Thus says the Lord: Toward midnight I will go forth among the Egyptians, and every [male] first-born in the land of Egypt shall die, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sits on his throne to the first-born of the slave girl who is behind the millstones; and all the first-born of the cattle. (Exodus 11:4-6)
The first [male] issue of the womb of every being, human or beast, that is offered to the Lord, shall be yours; but you shall have the male first-born of human beings redeemed, and you shall also have the firstling of impure animals redeemed. (Numbers 18:15)
And fire came forth from the Lord and consumed [Nadav and Avihhu]; thus they died at the instance of the Lord. (Leviticus 10:2)
Jacob said [to Esav], “First sell me your birthright.” (Genesis 25:31)
The word “b’chor” can mean either first-born male or it can mean legal inheritance. Normally, the two are the same—the first born male was the legal inheritor. But Genesis is rife with examples in which birth position is decoupled from spiritual authority. The most extreme example comes in the story of Jacob and Esav. Whether you think Esav sold his birthright (b’chor) or was swindled out of it, or both, the point is that something typically taken for granted as inalienable became alienable. Can you transact your biologically mandated birth position? No. But can you transact the existential and ontological implications of it? Yes. Judaism gives credence to nature’s facticity, but does not allow nature to have the final word. Part of what it means to subdue nature and have dominion over it, as per God’s blessing to Adam and Eve, is to elevate the status of the second born and diminish that of the first born.
Isaac is the second born son of Abraham. Seth, the originator of Noah’s line, is a third born son. Judah and Joseph are not first-born. Moses is younger than Aaron. The antagonism towards first borns comes to a head with the 10th plague, when all Egyptian b’chors are given a death sentence. We can see this as a kind of “measure for measure” punishment given the Egyptian eugenics policy against all Jewish-born male babies. But the metaphoric power is targeted: by going after the b’chor, Israel, a civilization that is itself belated, sends the message that we don’t assume that first is best or that nature itself is moral. The splitting of the sea and the other miracles in the Exodus story reveal a path of redemption that involves stretching nature to its extremes, if not negating it outright.
Franz Rosenzweig writes that the miracle of the splitting of the sea was not that it split but that it split at the precise moment when the people needed it to split. It was, in other words, a miracle of timing. When people fall in love they feel eunoia, a sense that the world is conspiring in their favor. They see signs everywhere. In a sense, the splitting of the sea, though real, was also a kind of externalized expression of a psychological state of abundance. Look, nature, which once seemed cold and indifferent is now on our side. This is the stuff of romantic poetry. The clouds sing psalms, the birds buzz with hymns, the trees sway in gratitude. Nature becomes religious. The world pulses with love. Love imbues significance into a world whose patterns seem inhuman. The death of the firstborn is a violent example, but it expresses the idea that we can’t conflate biology and ontology. We must allow ontology to inform biology. The psalms and religious poetry express this, too, and it is no coincidence that the people sing upon leaving Egypt.
In later parts of the Bible, we don’t literally kill first borns, but we exercise a ritual that suggests first borns need redemption. The given must become elevated, the default must be redeemed.
In this week’s Torah reading, Shemini, we witness the death of Aaron’s first born son, Nadav, and his brother, Avihu. While the reasons given for this sudden death do not reference the 10th plague, the contrast of the Haggadah and Shemini suggests that from a macro point of view the death of the firstborn did visit Jewish homes. It also suggests that the redemption of the first born is a tikkun (a karmic recompense) not just for the slaying of the Egyptian first borns, but for the death of Nadav and Avihu—those priestly children who perhaps mistakenly felt emboldened by their birth position, by the assumption that priesthood is a right rather than a privilege. Yes, being a priest in the ancient world was connected to caste—but the death of Nadav and Avihu serves as an immanent critique of the idea that spiritual legitimacy is tied to caste. The priest’s authority derives ultimately from God, not from paternity. The b’chor is not the b’chor. The presumptive inheritor is not necessarily the moral or theological inheritor.
The Torah offers us the idea that even a first-born must see himself as a second-born, must experience a second-birth, a rebirth. If the first-born place signifies one’s thrownness into the world, the second-born place signifies one’s reception and transformation of it. The first-born is handed tradition, the second-born makes tradition anew. The first-born leaves Egypt. The second-born tells the story. The first-born is this world. The second-born is the world to come. The first-born is the sun. The second-born is the moon. The Jewish people are a people of second-borns. The point is made powerfully by the death of the first born, but more softly by the law of the pidyon haben (redemption of the first born). Covenant can’t be default, or it becomes hardened like Pharaoh’s heart, the Torah becomes a tomb, Jewish history as quaint and artifactual as the pyramids. The b’chor must be actively reshaped by each generation, which means it must be achieved and worked for. To avoid the death sentence, we must not just place the proverbial lamb’s blood on our lintels, but we must, in so doing, become shapers of tradition. We must become second-born. When we do, we’ll find that the sea is always splitting. There is always a way.
Shabbat Shalom,
Zohar Atkins