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.