This week, during Shabbat morning’s Torah discussion, we studied the ten plagues, and in particular the plague of darkness. The conversation centered around how to understand what took place during the plague of darkness and what the Torah is trying to teach us in its description of it. To represent our conversation, I offer you a d’var torah (Torah-based teaching) I previously offered on the subject in 2017:
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Darkness. The ninth plague was simply darkness. As a child, I thought this was silly. The Egyptians had just been through a bevy of what I thought of as truly terrifying plagues. Rivers turning to blood, an epidemic of boils throughout the land, hailstones as big as bowling balls. And then, just darkness. There was supposed to be an escalation of the plagues’ seriousness, severity. How could simple darkness be seen as anything but a step backward on this trajectory of terror being rained down on the Egyptians by our God? How could mere darkness be anything but an inconvenience in comparison with the unholy afflictions that had lambasted our oppressors. Lice, Beasts, Vermin. And now, simply darkness.
But of course, it’s not that simple. As I got older, and the plagues began to take on a less literal, a more metaphorical bent, I began to sense the devastation inherent in darkness, perhaps all the more so because it is non-physical, intangible, ethereal.
Harold Kushner, and the writers of Etz Hayiim, suggest that the darkness was perhaps a spiritual or psychological darkness. A deep depression or melancholy. They point to the fact that the Torah says that for three days, during the darkness, none of the Egyptians could get up from where they were. We know that depression can do this. It can sap the ability to get up from where we are, to take part in the activities of the world, of day-to-day life. It can turn us away from our families, away from the loving connections that sustain us. It can cause us to see only ourselves. Our fundamental relationship is with our own interior melancholy, not the world around us.
In this way, darkness is an appropriate metaphor. God casting the plague of darkness over the Egyptians can be seen as the Egyptians, dreadfully, succumbing to collective depression, in the wake of the plagues.
Or, the darkness could be another metaphysical malady: anxiety. fear. Remember that societies in this time saw the talion principle — the principle of an eye for an eye — as fundamental. That communities paid a price for their sins. Remember that the Egyptians had engaged in the mass incarceration, the mass enslavement of another people, throwing the infant children of this people into the Nile. With the knowledge of their complicity in this, and with what had befallen the Egyptians, the mounting plagues, there must have a sense of existential dread, a sense that there was a cosmic comeuppance in the offing, especially in societies where the notion of an eye for an eye held deep meaning.
We all know what comes after the ninth plague — it’s is the tenth. The killing of the first-born. In ancient societies, where the first born was the heir to the proverbial throne, through whom the lineage was passed down, the cherished child, this would have been a knockout blow. Like knocking the foundational stone out of a tall structure. Undermining an important pillar of their families, and their societies, in addition to the devastation that the loss meant on a personal level.
Perhaps the darkness stands for a fearful intuition, an anxiety that had been building up in the Egyptians.
Either way, we know how they responded. No one got up from where they were. They stayed immobile. Inactive. They couldn’t engage.
Compounding these fears, these anxieties, were deep senses of alienation. The torah writes “lo ra-u ish et achiv.” During the period of darkness, a man could not see his brother, a woman could not see her sister, people could not see one another. Just as they became communally inactive, they became disconnected. They stopping tending to the relationships that nurtured them, that sustained them. When things got hard, they recoiled. They turned inward.
It wasn’t only their family that they were alienated from. Remember that the chief God in the Egyptian pantheon was Ra or Re, the Sun God, the sustainer of all life. Thus darkness suggests not only malaise and inactivity, not only alienation from family, but a loss of faith — disconnection from one’s spiritual core, one’s spiritual tradition. The sun going out over the nile delta represents the extinguishing of a people’s faith. Darkness means disconnection from their God, their source of hope, their source of strength.
In the most troubled times, Egyptians found the social fabric to which they were accustomed inaccessible to them. The communal participation they once knew, their family circles, their friend circles, their faith, felt out of reach to them.
Just when things got hard, after eight, relentless, unimaginable plagues, Egyptians did not, or could not, make use of the things that had sustained them over the centuries: activism, family, neighborly kinship, spiritual connection. They gave up on it—or were deprived it of it—when they needed it most.
The very next verse, after telling us of the malaise, or the anxiety—the darkness—that overcame the Egyptians, it tells us l’chol bnei yisrael haya or bemoshvotam—but all the Israelites had light in their dwellings.
So what does this tell us? Does this tell us about some national superiority that the Israelites had? No, I don’t think so. Instead I like to think this verse might provide a roadmap for us. It suggests is an antidote to times of collective melancholy, collective fear, collective anxiousness. I think it tells us to avoid the tragic pitfalls into which the Egyptians succumbed: being immobilized and inactive, being alienated from their brethren, being unable to keep faith in the source of all creation, in the source of life, God, something bigger than themselves.
The roadmap that the Juxtaposition of Egyptians encountering darkness and Israelites encountering light might provide is that we do our best not to succumb to the same lethargy, alienation, and loss of faith that the Egyptians may have done.
We do our best not to withdraw from the world, not to curl up in our proverbial fetal position, but rather to engage with intention, with kavannah, with determination.
We do our best not to sever our bonds with others — with family, with neighbors, with friends, with our communities. Instead we nurture these connections — being transparent when we need help, letting others in to shed light on our circumstances that we might be otherwise blind to.
And finally, we do our best not to let a sense of darkness, of trying times, blot out our faith. Our faith in God, our faith in our community, our faith in our ability to overcome when sadness or fear strikes.
