Parsha catch-up: Vaera

Here's DovBear's current Vaera post, with more links than you can shake a stick at.

Here's Techelet's take.

Here's a previous post of mine on Parshat Vaera (Vaeira, whatever), with a little Sh'mot (Shemot) and Bo thrown in for good measure.

We spent New Year's night, Sat., Jan. 1, 2011, at Tamar's Israeli Folk Dance New Year's Marathon (from 8:30 PM until . . . well, they were still dancing when we left at around 2:30 AM) at the Kaplen JCC on the Palisades in Tenafly, New Jersey. (I'll try to get some videos uploaded.) This would be of no relevance to the subject at hand, had not one of the passengers in our rented car assured my husband, the driver, that we'd be out of the fog as soon as we left Tenafly, commenting that Tenafly is at a sufficiently higher altitude than the surrounding area that it seems to have its own microclimate. Hmm, says I to myself, is it possible that the area then known as Goshen has or had a microclimate different from the area of Ancient Egypt that was, according to Torah, struck by the plagues, thus accounting for it having been spared most of the plagues? To mix this theory with a more traditional perspective, could HaShem have chosen shepherds to be our ancestors for the purpose of ensuring that, when we went down to Egypt, we'd end up in Goshen and be spared?