"And locusts invaded all the land of Egypt and settled very heavily over all the territory of Egypt; never before had there been a locust like it, and never would there be again. And it covered the eye of the land, and the land went dark." (Shmot 10:14)
Darkness and the terror of darkness. Darkness and the destructiveness hidden in the darkness.
The saga of darkness runs like a deep and troubled river throughout this week’s parasha: the plague of locusts that, in "covering the eye of the land," in Robert Alter’s literal translation of the Hebrew, makes utter devastation possible. The darkness drowns the land so that it can’t even be seen. It’s a darkness that even Pharoah himself calls "this death."
The horror of the invasion of locusts is followed by a plague that seems to undo the primal act of creation itself. ‘VA’YHI OR," God said, to bring the world into being. And there was night and there was day. But now, for three days, there is no day and even the darkness of the night, says Rashi, grew darker.
...to be followed by the horror of the slaying of the first born in the depths of night.
How strangely and disturbingly fitting an ending this deluge of darkness seems to be to the saga of Moshe in Mitzrayim. For darkness is blinding, and the story of Moshe in Egypt began with vital acts of seeing.
SHMOT 1. Pharoah’s daughter went down to bathe on the river...and she saw the ark among the reeds...she opened it and saw it, the child – and behold, a boy that wept. She had compassion for him, and said "This is one of the Hebrews’ children."
SHMOT 2. And it came to pass in those days, when Moses was grown, that he went out to his brothers, and he saw their burdens, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, one of his brothers, and he looked this way and that way, and when he saw that there was no man, he slew the Egyptian...
SHMOT 3: And Moses was shepherding the flock of Yitro his father-in-law...an angel of God was seen by him...he saw the bush was burning with dire and the bush was not consumed. And Moses said, Now let me turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush does not burn up: And when God saw that he turned aside to see, God called to him, and he said Here I am. And God said, I have surely seen the suffering of my people.
From the outset of Shmot, then, acts of seeing are associated with acts of kindness and generosity, acts of compassion and empathy; acts of holiness, leaps of faith, spiritual, visionary experience.
But now, in our parasha, in the final pangs of the Hebrews’ lives in Egypt, there is no seeing at all. There is only darkness.
The 17th century commentator Kli Yakar notes that the simple meaning of our text is that the locusts couldn’t see the land, and he asks – what difference does it makes whether the locusts could see it or not? What’s the "nafka mina"?
Drawing on Talmud, he compares the locusts to people who can’t see their food and thus, no matter how much they eat, no matter how much they gorge themselves, are never satisfied. The locusts, too, become monsters devouring everything in their wake precisely because they could not see the land.
Just a few lines later, after Pharoah yet again refuses to yield to the will of God, the image of the blinded locusts is transmuted into an image of a complete black-out.
And a darkness falls upon the land of Egypt, a darkness so palpable it could literally be felt.
Verse 22: And Moshe stretched his hand over the heavens and pitch dark descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days.
Earlier, the locusts could not see the land – but in this deeper darkness of the penultimate plague, the people of Egypt are themselves reduced to blind paraplegics. "People could not see one another," the text tells us, "and for three days no one could get up from where he was."
Our commentators tell us that in this three-day darkness, we are plummeting to the depths of human anomie, isolation, and despair. For, in the words of Rabbi Yitzhak Meir of Gur, "the greatest darkness is when a person cannot see his fellow man, when he cannot participate in his suffering, he cannot feel it – feeling is dimmed and silenced."
If the Divine within us is the capacity to see the suffering of others and to act upon it, "to get up from where we are," the Pharoah within us is the refusal to see and the refusal to act.
And not seeing, not allowing ourselves to see, can, as our text implies, turn us all into agents of destruction like the locusts. Spiritual and emotional darkness cripples our capacity for empathy for our fellow and sister human beings. It paralyzes us from making the "leap," the "pesach," into an understanding of those who are different from us, those we may fear as threatening to us.
" Jerusalem – Nov 19, 2004. Thousands of red locusts swarmed into southern Israel on Friday, threatening the region's agriculture with a biblical-like plague.
"The country's agriculture ministry went on high alert after the insects landed in the Red Sea port of Eilat and close-by areas of the Negev desert, Channel Two TV reported. It said authorities feared a larger invasion
"Shmuel Ripman, a local government official in the Negev, ‘This is like an Egyptian plague,’ Ripman said. ‘They'll eat all the crops in the area, the livelihood of lots of people. I hope ` we can get the upper hand.’
"The locusts crossed into Israel from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula, after invading Cairo on Wednesday. "
I’ve just returned from three weeks in Israel. I did not see any locusts, but in addition to the beauty and joy all around me, I did feel and see also the very plague that beset the ancient world: a darkness in which ain margishim b’tsaro shel ha’vero: a darkness in which one cannot see the suffering of one’s fellow human being.
I saw a nation so blinded by its own losses, it is too blind to the sufferings it has caused another people. I saw a nation torn apart by the fissures between, on the one hand, the conflicted population of settlers, who – with the encouragement of the various governments over the last 30 years, made their homes in the territories conquered by Israel in the Six Day War -- and, on the other, those who have insistently opposed that occupation. And while left-wingers like myself may heave a sigh of relief that the army is finally withdrawing from at least Gaza -- that old overwrought Philistine town where the eyeless Samson once labored at the mill with slaves -- it is also incumbent upon us to acknowledge the trauma of those whose values we opposed, incumbent upon us to have compassion for the trauma they are undergoing. Not to make an empathic leap to recognize their pain is to hinder any possibility of healing in that beloved and troubled land.
Yet the failure of empathy – the failure to "see one another" – is a danger we face not only on a political scale – it can be much closer to home, much more personal.
Today is my 60th birthday, and I feel blessed to be sharing it with my husband, a true partner, a soul-mate I could have only dreamt of short two years ago. But today, too, I feel the need to acknowledge publicly one of those hidden realities many of us know to be true and I myself felt for so long: in the youth culture of America, and particularly in the "family culture" of the Jewish community – including that of our own minyan - to be a single, older woman is to feel invisible.
But I also have been made aware that many of the young men and women who come to the library minyan – people who are not machers, who are unmarried or do not have children in Pressman Academy or have not been coming here for 10 years - know what it feels like to be invisible here. Never to be offered an aliyah. Never really to feel seen at all.
Surely we must not only see them, but also help them find ways to be seen.
Look around you now – look beyond your little corner of this room and the comfortable, familiar faces – look and see the people who have been invisible to you. Go on. Really see.
And so we Jews have our own plagues of darkness to overcome... our own failures of vision, compassion, and most important of all, our failures of empathy and failures of action. In too many ways, like the ancient Egyptians in the plague of darkness, we ourselves fail to see one another, we ourselves fail to get up from our perches, and we ourselves fail to act.
After 430 years of slavery, it was at dawn that the Hebrews hastened out of Egypt toward freedom. And how do we know when dawn comes? As my friend and colleague Julie Pelc has reminded me, our sages teach that we know when dawn has come "when one person can see another."
May this coming year see the plague of darkness in our own midst lift, and may we all, with compassion, empathy, and healing, all experience the true pleasure of many gloriously, divinely, lit dawns.