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.