JANUARY 26 • 2023 | 51

T

his week’s portion 
features the last three 
plagues, the Pesach 
commandments and 
the actual Exodus from 
Egypt. 
The next-to-last plague 
was darkness. A large 
cloud descended over 
all of Egypt. This cloud 
submerged the Egyptians 
into darkness. That very 
same cloud provided 
light for the Jewish 
people. It was possible 
that if an Egyptian and 
a Jew were sitting in the 
same room, the Egyptian 
would be sitting in obscurity; 
the Jew would have light.

We are promised that when 
Moshiach comes, we will 
see great miracles as those 
performed in Egypt. 
 The plague of darkness 
contains practical 
lessons for us today. The 
exile in which we live 
is spiritually dark. For 
many millennia, we have 
been persecuted, killed 
and driven from land to 
land. At the end of this 
exile, we find ourselves 
able to live freely as 
Jews. The darkness is 
no less intense than in 
previous generations. The 
Almighty has made it such that 
the darkness itself provides light 

for the Jews.
A story is told of the Alter 
Rebbe. While in jail, he was 
transported across a river by 
boat. One evening, he requested 
the captain to stop the boat 
to be able to say the monthly 
blessing of the moon. The 
captain refused and mocked 
his “prisoner.
” Suddenly, the 
boat stopped. As much as he 
tried, the captain could not 
get the boat to move. After a 
period of time, the boat again 
began to move. The rabbi 
asked the captain again to stop 
the boat, only to be met with 
the same response. The boat 
again stopped. Upon the third 
request, the captain agreed to 
stop the boat.
The question is asked, “Why 
did the Rebbe wait for the 
captain to stop the boat and 
not bless the moon while it had 

miraculously stopped?” The 
answer: Mitzvahs are to be done 
through natural means only. 
Even the preparation for the 
mitzvah, i.e., stopping the boat, 
had to be done though natural 
means. The captain, the initial 
obstacle to the mitzvah, became 
the facilitator for the mitzvah.
The Divine revelation 
experienced with Moshiach 
will actually be much greater 
than that witnessed by the 
Jews leaving Egypt. We have 
begun seeing some of that great 
revelation. What we as Jews 
need to do is to take advantage 
of the great opportunity given 
us. By utilizing the world 
around us for holy purposes, we 
will bring Moshiach. 

Rabbi Herschel Finman, along with 

his wife Chana, is co-director of Jewish 

Ferndale. He is best reached at rhfin-

man@jewishferndale.com.

continued from page 50

the 19th century, and there was 
need for a verb meaning “to 
obey,
” it had to be borrowed 
from the Aramaic: le-tsayet. 
Instead of a word meaning 
“to obey,
” the Torah uses the 
verb shema, untranslatable into 
English because it means [1] to 
listen, [2] to hear, [3] to under-
stand, [4] to internalize and [5] 
to respond. Written into the very 
structure of Hebraic conscious-
ness is the idea that our highest 
duty is to seek to understand 
the will of God, not just to obey 
blindly. Tennyson’s verse, “Theirs 
not to reason why, theirs but to 
do or die,
” is as far from a Jewish 
mindset as it is possible to be.
Why? Because we believe that 
intelligence is God’s greatest gift. 
Rashi understands that God 
made man “in His image, after 
His likeness,
” to mean that God 
gave us the ability “to under-
stand and discern.
” The very first 
of our requests in the weekday 
Amidah is for “knowledge, 

understanding and discernment.
” 
One of the most breathtakingly 
bold of the rabbis’ institutions 
was to coin a blessing to be said 
on seeing a great non-Jewish 
scholar. Not only did they see 
wisdom in cultures other than 
their own, they thanked God 
for it. How far this is from the 
narrowmindedness that has so 
often demeaned and diminished 
religions, past and present.
The historian Paul Johnson 
once wrote that rabbinic Judaism 
was “an ancient and highly effi-
cient social machine for the pro-
duction of intellectuals.
” Much of 
that had, and still has, to do with 
the absolute priority Jews have 
always placed on education, the 
Beit Midrash, religious study as 
an act even higher than prayer, 
learning as a lifelong engage-
ment, and teaching as the highest 
vocation of the religious life.
 But much, too, has to do with 
how one studies and how we 
teach our children. The Torah 

indicates this at the most pow-
erful and poignant juncture 
in Jewish history — just as the 
Israelites are about to leave Egypt 
and begin their life as a free 
people under the sovereignty of 
God. Hand on the memory of 
this moment to your children, 
says Moses. But do not do so in 
an authoritarian way. Encourage 
them to ask, question, probe, 
investigate, analyze. Liberty 
means freedom of the mind, not 
just the body. Those who are 
confident of their faith need fear 
no question. It is those who lack 
confidence, who have secret, sup-
pressed doubts, who are afraid.
The one essential, though, is 
to know and to teach this to our 
children, that not every question 
has an answer we can immedi-
ately understand. There are ideas 
we will only fully comprehend 
through age and experience, 
others that take great intellec-
tual preparation, yet others that 
may be beyond our collective 

comprehension at this stage of 
the human quest. Darwin never 
knew what a gene was. Even the 
great Newton, founder of mod-
ern science, understood how 
little he understood, and put it 
beautifully: “I do not know what 
I may appear to the world, but to 
myself I seem to have been only 
a boy playing on the seashore, 
and diverting myself in now and 
then finding a smoother pebble 
or prettier shell than ordinary, 
whilst the great ocean of truth 
lay all undiscovered before me.
”
In teaching its children to ask 
and keep asking, Judaism hon-
ored what Maimonides called 
the “active intellect” and saw it 
as the gift of God. No faith has 
honored human intelligence 
more. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan 

Sacks served as chief rabbi of the 

United Hebrew Congregations of the 

Commonwealth, 1991-2013. His teachings 

are available to all at rabbisacks.org. This 

essay was written in 2012.

SPIRIT

The Changing of 
Darkness to Light

TORAH PORTION

Rabbi 
Herschel 
Finman

Parshat 

Bo: Exodus 

10:1-13:16; 

Jeremiah 

46:13-28.

