In this week’s Parshah, the last three plagues befall Egypt before the people of Israel leave their slavery. The ninth plague, darkness, is described in these words: “No man saw his brother, neither did anyone rise from his place.”1
With this description, an event in history becomes current and contemporary. The plague of darkness becomes part of the timeless history of man, symbolic of analogous afflictions that admit no immunity. Simple physical darkness of the night becomes a malady of the individual, of the soul.
There is no blindness like the selfishness that blots other men from one’s vision—the darkness that prevents one man from seeing his brother. This is the plague directed outwardly.
Another aspect of the darkness affliction is satisfaction with what one is, the stagnation that keeps man from growing, from rising from his place. There is a smug arrogance in the very common statement people actually make, “I am a good man.” Such people, blind to their shortcomings, become insufferable; they never dare entertain the possibility that they might be imperfect.
These are the universals in the plague of darkness: the self-centeredness that excludes other men from consideration, and the contentedness that assures us we have attained the epitome of goodness. Darkness keeps us from seeing others or ourselves.
Mourning/Morning Comes... So many kinds of darkness. Depression is known as "The Black Dog". Darkness falls for us all. I have a book I used for a class on Jewish mysticism called Journeys. The rabbi who wrote the book said in the preface his own darkness descended when his Mother got cancer and he was rethinking becoming a rabbi. We all experience such depths of despair and the deepest of meaning questions seems to arise from these moments. I appreciate it when rabbis are honest, and very human in approaching deep issues of soul. This brought me closer to his book.
We know the color black absorbs all color and light, and that white is the reflector, prismatic. We have from the science of light and color, insights that pertain also to our lives, as in, the Black Holes we all enter. And surely space, outer space, has its black holes, and science is beginning to probe this for understanding, and it is said most of space is "dark matter".
But we know, light is emergent from even the darkest of despair.