Darkness and Light

Sermon Shabbat Bo 5784

Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ

I was speaking with our upcoming visiting scholar, Dr. Joel Hoffman, this week, who will be right here speaking about “Ancient Answers to Good and Evil” two weeks from Monday night, in a talk we are co-sponsoring with Church of the Apostles.  He lives back East, and he said, “it’s 17 degrees here; I’m looking forward to being in Arizona!”  Of course he is.

Look, here in Tucson we live in a world of sunlight most of the time.  We enjoy well over 300 days a year of sunshine, and soon come to take it for granted.  Especially this time of year, when much of our country is cold and frozen, we are typically blessed with beautiful weather and sunny days, like today.  The fact that at Beit Simcha for three years we were located next door to a tanning salon is one of the truly astonishing things you could ever imagine.  Who needs a tanning salon in the Sonoran Desert?  Apparently even in a place filled with sunlight there are those who crave even more illumination.

Light is considered a blessing in Jewish tradition.  It is, after all, God’s very first creation in Genesis, Y’hi Or, “let there be light”; we light candles each Shabbat and every festival to symbolize the special blessing of light that we are granted on these holy days; Hanukkah, of course, brings an abundance of light into a period of darkness.  In Zohar, the amazing Kabbalistic text we study every Tuesday at noon and again at 7pm, light is understood to be the way in which divine energy emanates into our own universe; the very name “Zohar” means a kind of illumination, divine light.  And the great movement of the 19th century that brought the great light of reason to bear on our entire tradition is called the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment; my grandfather was a part of that, as were the leading lights of early Zionism and all other modern Jewish movements.

So the denial of light would be, in nearly all circumstances, a challenge of the first order.  Which makes the ninth plague, the penultimate punishment of the Egyptian slaveholders, such a dramatic moment in a narrative replete with them.  The description of this event, the advent of deepest darkness, is eloquent in our Torah portion of Bo in Exodus:    

Then the Lord said to Moses, “Hold out your arm toward the heavens that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness that can be felt.” And so Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was. (Exod. 10:21-23)

There is something uniquely powerful in this particular plague that differs qualitatively from the plagues that preceded it.  It’s not as though the earlier punishments were trivial.  Indeed, they were vivid and awful, each in its own way.  But this plague of darkness somehow has a different quality to it.

There is a Midrash on this, in Shmot Rabbah (14:2) that calls the plague of darkness “The darkness of Gei-Chinom, Hell, connecting the darkness visited upon Egypt with the primordial darkness that preceded God’s command “Let there be light!”  Remember, the Torah tells us this is a darkness that is so deep it can, literally, be felt.

Have you ever explored a deep cave, like the wonderful ones at Kartchner Caverns near Tombstone?  Sometimes when you tour a cave they do a little demonstration for you, as a visitor, and shut off the artificial lights, so that you can see what it feels like when the lights go completely out, when it’s truly black.  You can hold your hand in front of your face and not see it.  When you have that experience, of utter darkness completely devoid of all sources of light, you begin to understand what it might mean to “feel the darkness.”  A period of a minute in an utterly dark cave is enough to cause some serious anxiety, I can promise you.  A period of three days would be utterly terrifying. 

We know that the long-term effects of being deprived of light, especially sunlight, are very negative.  Most people consider Scandinavia to be a place where people generally are very content; those countries are quite well off, their educational systems and health care are excellent, their governments well thought-of, they have many advantages that most nations don’t enjoy, including elegant furniture designs and incredibly safe cars.  Lots of people in many parts of the world would love to live in Scandinavia.

Only not so much in the winter, when wonderful countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland have spectacularly high suicide rates, among the very highest in the entire world.  It’s not the cold that causes this; it’s the long days in the far northern winters with minimal light.  It’s the darkness.

Darkness is closely associated with depression in psychological literature, and the causality is well established.  Even when there are no other stressors, research shows that darkness causes depression, and can even damage the brain, limiting its ability to accept positive neurotransmitters. That is, prolonged darkness provokes a kind of anti-endorphin response, and we sink down into a dark tunnel.  The response it provokes is also one of alienation. We see, or rather feel the darkness, and simultaneous believe we are alone in this.  We perceive that we are alone in the dark, as it were.

Our Torah commentators focus on this when considering the plague of darkness.  You see it wasn’t just the darkness that was the problem; it was that those afflicted with it were unable to see anyone else.  They became locked in the prison of themselves. 

The darkness is not just an inability to see things.  It is in particular an inability to see people, other people, to recognize them as similar human beings who have similar needs. 

As one commentator says, “Just as the special light of Shabbat is an appetizer, a foretaste of the world to come, the reward that awaits the righteous, so the darkness of the ninth plague is a foretaste of Geihinnom, the punishment that awaits those who cannot truly see their neighbors, who cannot feel the pain and recognize the dignity of their afflicted neighbors…  The person who cannot see his neighbor is incapable of spiritual growth, of rising from where he is currently.” 

There is a famous passage in the Babylonian Talmud (Berachot 9b) that explores how we know when dawn has come and darkness has ended.  Although I first studied that tractate during high school with my father, Rabbi Baruch Cohon, it was brought to my mind by an Episcopal Rector named Clay Turner when I served a congregation in South Carolina.  The rabbis are discussing when it is we know that dawn has come and the darkness of night is over.  They debate, and argue about whether night is over and the morning has come when you can tell a white thread from a black one; or perhaps it’s only when you can tell a blue thread from a green one, a much harder thing to judge, a tougher standard.  After pages of discussion another answer is offered: the night is over and morning has come when you can look on the face of a fellow human being and see the face of God. 

That is, dawn has come and darkness is over when you can look at another person and see the divine image, the face of God.  When we can see the other, and recognize the Divine image shared by all humanity, then darkness ends.

In Bo the Torah describes the effect of darkness as, “People could not see one another, and for three days no one could get up from where he was.”  Rabbi Yitzchak Meir Rotenberg, the Alter Gerrer Rebbe, founder of the Ger Hasidim near Warsaw, comments that the greater darkness is when a person does not see his neighbor and does not sympathize with his pain; the result is that his capacity to feel becomes dull and he is paralyzed, and therefore no one could rise from his place, nobody could move.  It was lack of empathy that caused this paralysis, a total inability to realize that they—meaning we—are all in this together.  Each of us must seek a way out of the darkness, and when we realize that we are not alone we find others to help us.

Remember, this plague of darkness in Exodus is no accident.  For the darkness the Egyptians experience, the terror and depression that overcomes them and make them feel the deep angst of their existential aloneness, is closely tied to how they have acted for 400 years as enslavers of the Israelites. The Torah tells us that the Israelites suffering under Egyptian slavery were so afflicted with hard labor that they had kotzer ru’ah, depressed spirits. 

Yet the Egyptians did not see the despair of the people of Israel. They did not look into the eyes of their fellow human beings, the suffering Hebrews, and acknowledge their pain.  Metaphorically, they already were stumbling about in moral darkness, tripping over core values like basic respect and human freedom.  These Egyptians were a people already blind, engulfed by spiritual and emotional darkness.

Now, how does darkness become a plague? By blocking the light, turning off our awareness, shutting down relationships, and preventing us from feeling, from changing our behaviors and our culture and society.

It is notable that even after the plague is lifted the Pharaoh and his people do not allow the Israelites to go free.  For the plague of darkness they have so recently experienced is still mirrored in the darkness of their own souls.  They act unjustly, inflicting slavery and darkness on those weaker than themselves.  A little object lesson in obscurity does not prove to be enough to change their dark habits.  A greater, even more powerful and destructive punishment will have to be employed in order to free the captive Israelites.

But perhaps this lesson of darkness may prove to be enough for the rest of us.  For the great message of this plague is that when we can bring light to bear we will see that we are not alone, that others suffer more than we do, that we have the capacity to rise from despair and bring hope and blessing to others through our own actions.  Proverbs, Mishlei, teaches us that Ner Adonai nishmat adam, the soul of a person is the light of God.”  We each have the ability to bring light into our world by our own actions, by truly seeing those people all around us, feeling not the darkness but their warmth and need, and helping them.

At the end of Shabbat each week we kindle light once more, at Havdallah.  We light the braided candle and illuminate our Saturday night, bringing the special light of the Sabbath into the week to come, assuring that it will not begin in darkness, allowing its flames to remind us that we each have an opportunity to bring our own nitzutzei Elohim, our own small sparks of God into our own society and world.

In my own home, we always put some coins in the Tzedakah box right after Havdallah.  It’s a small reminder that this light of God, this illumination that prevents the plague of darkness, is within our capacity to ignite, even in the smallest of ways.  May we each find ways to do so now, on this Shabbat, in this coming week, and always.