The Secret of the Locust

Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan

V'ruach hakadim nasa et ha'arbeh - The east wind carried the locusts. (Shemot/Exodus 10:13)

Bo is a parasha of transformation: the Israelites make up their mind to leave Egypt, celebrate their first communal festival, and gather great riches. That transformation is previewed in the description of the eighth plague, locusts. Ruach kadim could be translated as: the east wind, the primal wind, the wind of origination, or the spirit of originality. And arbeh, the locusts, as the symbol of transformation. For what is a locust but a transformed grasshopper!

Desert grasshoppers are normally solitary animals. But when rainfall patterns cause vegetation to grow in small, contained areas, grasshoppers are attracted to those areas. There they eat, drink, and multiply. When conditions become crowded, the pattern of the grasshoppers' maturation changes, and the normally solitary animals grow up into a hungry herd without enough to eat. Their bodies harden and darken and together they swarm off to find food.

Scientists believe that the mysterious origin of locusts was first understood in 1921. But the secret of the locust is encoded in the four letter Hebrew word that the Torah uses for "locust." Rearrange the letters, and find the secret. The locusts, the arbeh (aleph resh bet hey) come into being when grasshoppers travel to the well, be'erah (bet aleph resh hey) where miraculously they multiply, arbeh (aleph resh bet hey) and become something new that God created, barah hashem (bet resh aleph hey). A fitting preview of the journeys of the Israelites - then and now.

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