Nearer to 90 seconds this week - but here's Miriam's thoughts on this week's parasha Vaera.
Until the final plague, most of the 10 plagues wouldn't have killed Egyptians. Instead they were an assault on everything that made ancient Egypt powerful and prosperous - the Nile, agriculture, livestock, their building projects and their own bodies. It would have been horrific to live through and the cartoon version we tell kids is not the version that us adults need to seriously take on board. So why? Why, as one of my students asked, couldn't Hashem airlift the Israelites out (although that metaphor "al kanfei nesharim / on eagles wings" is used later in the Torah)? Looking at the structure of the 10 plagues, which break down into 3 sets of 3 and then the final one, and the words that Moshe uses with each set, gives us some clues...
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