In this week's section we begin to read about the plagues with which God punished Egypt before the liberation of the Jewish people.
We often mention the idea that the stories in the Torah are not just tales or stories, but teachings. Even those stories that could never be repeated (like the story of slavery and the Exodus from Egypt as it happened thousands of years ago) also have a practical lesson for everyday life.
The first of the plagues was the plague of blood. The Torah says, "The soul of the flesh is in the blood" (Leviticus 17:11) and "for the blood is the soul" (Deuteronomy 12:23). (Some misinterpret this, saying that the blood is the soul in practice. However, the Jewish perspective is that the blood is the medium through which the vitality of the soul is transported throughout the body, but the blood itself is not the soul.) We see from this a very deep connection between the blood and the vital energy of the body.
The Torah recounts how the water of the Nile River turned to blood. Water represents coldness. Now, there are two types of coldness: 1) toward the worldly and 2) toward the holy. A person can be indifferent and "cold" in their attitude toward the temptations of the world (in its various forms: money, glory, etc.) or they can be "cold" toward Judaism and spirituality in general. The Nile River represents the second type of coldness.
That is why the first plague was blood. To counteract indifference toward the spiritual, there must be blood; that is, the person must focus their capacity for desire and longing toward the holy and sublime, shifting their focus from the material and worldly in their life.
The reason for this is very simple: if we only exist to dedicate ourselves to the material and mundane, in what are we better than animals?