Or HaChaim on Exodus 11:5/אור החיים על שמות י״א:ה׳

1 ומת כל בכור, and every firstborn will die, etc. G'd did not say: "I will kill him." The reason, as we have pointed out on previous occasions is, that evil does not originate with G'd. He is the Creator of all that is good. Anything in the nature of evil is initiated by one of the agents He has designated. G'd Himself indicated who was the firstborn, His agents carried out the death sentence. This is why the mention of "destroyers" at the time the Israelites put the blood on their door-posts and the fact that G'd Himself orchestrated the plague are not contradictory.

2There may also be another meaning, similar to what we are told in Shabbat 34 where Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai put his eye on a sinner and that sinner died as a result. At first glance, how are we to understand that a pious person of the calibre of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai would summarily "execute" someone by giving him "the eye?" The same Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai had castigated people of the evil eye as possessing a very negative virtue (Zohar 3, page 211). Actually, the exact wording in the Talmud was יהבי עיניה, "he looked at him with his eye" (singular). We would have expected the Talmud to say that "he looked at him with his eyes (pl)." We have to remember that inasmuch as "evil" and "death" are synonymous how is it that evil exists at all? This is because there are no absolutes; just as the attribute of Mercy contains a small part of the attribute of Justice, so every good virtue contains a small element of evil, and vice versa. In the case of evil, death occurs when that small part of "good" or "life" which kept it alive is withdrawn. Keeping this in mind, we can understand the peculiar statement in Sukkah 52 according to which G'd will slaughter the evil urge at an appropriate time in the future in the presence of the righteous. How are to understand this? How can one slaughter an angel (disembodied spirit)? Considering what we have just said we can understand the statement in the Talmud very easily. G'd will remove the part of the evil urge which makes it a viable i.e. active force.

3We also need to appreciate the natural tendency of identical or basically similar virtues to coalesce with each other. The good attracts the good, the evil tends to attract more evil to itself. This is the secret of how the souls of the Israelites which had their origin in the positive emanations could "draw" to themselves the "lost" souls which we described as being particularly prevalent in Egypt. [The author has repeatedly described these souls as having been captured by the negative side of the emanations as a result of Adam eating from the tree of knowledge (compare his comments on Genesis 49,9). Ed.] G'd had given outstanding Torah scholars the ability to attract to themselves the "good" part of any sinner. When Rabbi Shimon looked at the sinner in question he extracted the good part of that sinner, thus leaving no viable element within that person. As a result the sinner died. When G'd passed through Egypt on that night, He extracted the good that was within any of these firstborn; as a result such a firstborn simply dropped dead. It was as if Rabbi Shimon had put his eye on such an individual.

4The meaning of ומת כל בכור is not simply that the soul of that person would die leaving the body as it had been, but the element which had made that person different from others because he was a firstborn would die with him. In other words there would never again be Egyptians (or even other Gentiles) whose characteristics would include elements of what had been known as the "firstborn" of the people beholden to the powers of the קליפה, the forces of negative virtues. Perhaps this is why no exile ever again assumed the dimensions of the exile in Egypt. G'd had weakened the powers of the קליפה permanently.

5I have tried to find a reason why the dying of the firstborn was a necessary prerequisite for the Exodus, as well as why even non-Egyptian firstborn (compare 12,29) had to die if they happened to be in Egypt on that fateful night. The reason is connected to G'd having described Israel as "My firstborn son" (4,22). We have a tradition (Zohar 2, page 263) that whenever G'd created some phenomenon which is clearly recognisable as something good, He also created its counterpart, i.e. something potentially evil at the same time. Every sacred phenomenon in our world is matched by a parallel phenomenon under the control of Satan, or what is known in Kabbalistic parlance "the forces of the קליפה." The latter make every effort to gain dominance over the former. We must therefore understand the forces of the קליפה which represented their firstborn as exerting every effort to frustrate the emigration of the Jewish people from Egypt. These efforts did not cease until G'd had "killed" the firstborn of the powers of the קליפה which opposed His will. What G'd had to do was to eliminate the concept of the firstborn being special, otherwise the relief as a result of the death of the Egyptian firstborn would have been only temporary. When the Torah (12,29) stresses that: "the firstborn of the captive, the firstborn of the maidservant and the firstborn of the animals died," this is in contrast to the firstborn of the Israelites who were subsequently sanctified (Numbers 8,17). The reason this sanctification of the Jewish firstborn became necessary is that G'd had done away with the concept of the firstborn being somebody special at the time He eliminated the firstborn on the night of the 15th of Nissan. Had this not been the case we would not understand why the firstborn of the animals had to die also. In Numbers 8,17 G'd declared that henceforth the firstborn of the Jews would be sacred to Him, i.e. there should no longer be a firstborn associated with the powers of the קליפה. If we find that the Egyptians still engaged in hot pursuit of the Israelites even after the death of the firstborn, this was because they had not yet realised that their former power had vanished. As a result, not a single one of them survived the debacle at the Sea of Reeds.