What God has done for the Israelites...

We are finally in the middle of Parashath Yithro. God has brought the Israelites to the foot of Mt. Sinai, and he is going to do some theophanizing later in the week. Right now, he is telling Moses to give a speech to the Israelites, in which he should ask them if they are willing to accept the Torah.

God's speech begins by reminding the Israelites what He has already done for them.

אַתֶּ֣ם רְאִיתֶ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֥ר עָשִׂ֖יתִי לְמִצְרָ֑יִם וָֽאֶשָּׂ֤א אֶתְכֶם֙ עַל־כַּנְפֵ֣י נְשָׁרִ֔ים וָֽאָבִ֥א אֶתְכֶ֖ם אֵלָֽי׃

Ye haue ſeene what I did vnto the Egyptians, and how I bare you on Eagles wings, and brought you vnto my ſelfe.

(Note that the lexical meaning of the word נֶשֶׁר in Scripture is usually not eagle, but some kind of vulture. This was noted already by Rabbenu Tam. (See Tosafoth on Ḥullin 63a.) There is a good discussion of this issue in T. Kronholm’s article ‘נֶשֶׁר – nešer’ in the Theological Dictionary of the Old Testament, vol. X (Eerdmans Publishing Company: Grand Rapids, Michigan. 1999), pp. 77 ff. Kronholm notes that because of the European ‘low estimation of the vulture and high estimation of the eagle as a royal bird’, European translations of Scripture, since the Septuagint, have translated נֶשֶׁר as eagle. Moreover, Kronholm writes that in Ezekiel 1:10, the source-text about the נשרים in the Merkava, the word means ‘probably the royal eagle’. (82))

Let's look at our commentator's notes on the tagin in this verse:

אשר עשיתי למצרים. רמז בתגין זה שר של מצרים.

What I did unto the Egyptians. The tagin here allude to [the idea that] this refers to the [heavenly] archon of Egypt.

This is a reference to the doctrine that each nation is represented in the heavenly court by an angelic archon, who bears the name of the nation. When the archon is being beaten up in heaven, that is when the nation is suffering down on earth. (The Jewish version of this doctrine preaches that it applies to all nations other than the Jewish people, for they are under the direct tutelage of God, the Lord Most High, above all the petty national archons.) So, in this case, the tagin mean that God is saying not only that he smote the Egyptians with plagues, but also that He has beaten up their archon in heaven. (I'm not sure what the practical difference is between these two, unless the nation and the archon are not as strictly linked as I have presented them. Nonetheless, reading the verse in this way transfers the action from the terrestrial plane to the celestial -- and, as we have seen, that is not uncommon in Ḥasidé Ashkenaz commentaries on Scripture.)

Let us now look at the next comment:

ואשא אתכם על כנפי נשרים. ותרגומו: כד על גדפי נישרין. כנפי יש לתיבה זו תגין, רמז כמו על כנפי המלאכים, וזהו על כנפי נשרים. ולכך מרמז התגין.

And how I bare you on eagles' wings. The Targum (Onqelos) translates this as: "[and how I bare you] as if on eagles' wings". Now, this word כנפי has tagin, which hints that the actual meaning is as if on angels' wings. This is the meaning of on eagles' wings.

Again, the change from eagle's wings to angels' wings is a change from a terrestrial read to a celestial one.

It's interesting to think of the Torah as being on these two planes, with one (the tagin / celestial plane) literally being on top of the other (letters / terrestrial plane). Of course, the tagin do not work at all by themselves; they create meaning only by modifying the existing meaning which is inherent in the words, which are made up of the letters.