The final three plagues descend upon the people of Mitzrayim in this week’s parashah of Bo prior to the Israelite’s liberation from the house of bondage. The penultimate plague, the one of thick darkness that descends upon the land, has always struck me as the most painful of the first nine plagues. This is a darkness that keeps the people of Mitzrayim, the oppressors of the Isarelites, from seeing one another, connecting to one other, relating to the other. This of course, is how they had been acting all along in a figurative sense, the plague of darkness just embodies it in a physical sense.
The mystics of Judaism understand this intense darkness as connected to forgetfulness - the letters of darkness - choshekh / חוֹשֶׁך have the same ones as forget - shakhach / שכח, just in a different order.
They are teaching us that darkness is a state we embody when we forget hope. Darkness is a state we become when we forget our values and what we stand for. We descend into darkness when we despair and we live in darkness when we forget that things can be different. Darkness is forgetting what’s at stake, what matters.
But we have a role to play which is not to live in the space of darkness and forgetting, but of creating light and remembering. The Israelites, we are told, still have light when they are in Goshen, a short distance from the Mitzrim experiencing the darkness of forgetting. They are on the cusp of redemption which is the place of hope, the place of belief, the place of remembering that even when things feel unimaginably broken, healing is possible.
The Isarelites were not in darkness and they held on to their belief that change could come. That change would come. So we, too, hold on to that belief. Light comes after darkness, remembering can still come even when there’s been forgetting. We emerge, we repair, we heal.
Shabbat Shalom, Rabbi Sarit
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