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The Plague of Darkness
Contributed by Sophia + Jacob

  • TOP HAGGADAHS FOR 2023

In my search for tools—spiritual tools—to help us hold this moment, I want to turn in particular to one moment in our liberation story, to [ a ] plague that I believe captures some of what this moment is taking away from us and some of what it also offers us.

So, after hundreds of years of enslavement and degradation and humiliation, the time had come for the liberation of our ancestors. And we know the story of the Ten Plagues: first came the water turning to blood and then the frogs and the lice and the wild animals and the pestilence and boils, the thunderstorm of hail and fire and locusts. And then the ninth plague, the plague of darkness. And the Torah tells us that God said to Moses, “Hold out your arm toward the sky. There will be a darkness that will descend on the land, a darkness that can be touched....This plague feels really strangely out of place: so, it’s going to be dark for three days and three nights, and I’m sure that that was inconvenient—we had rolling brown-outs here in Los Angeles last night. I’m sure it was uncomfortable, no doubt. But the plagues progressively worsen.

And this is the ninth plague, and it doesn’t seem exactly as bad as some of the earlier ones were. So, we ask: what was so terrible about the plague of darkness? Moses holds out his arm toward the sky, and a thick darkness descends upon all of Egypt for three days. And the text tells us that people could not see one another. And for three days, no one could get up from where he was. So what’s so terrible about the plague. The people could not see each other.

But the...rabbinic voices bring to us a deeper understanding of what was actually happening in that time of darkness:...for three days, no one could get up from where he was. This is the deepest darkness. When a person can’t even see his neighbor and therefore can’t be with another person in his suffering and pain. When a person no longer feels the pain of his neighbor, he feels like he’s impotent, and therefore he sits by another person’s pain idly.

“No one could get up from where he was,” the text says, meaning people can’t even stand up to help one another, couldn’t be with another person in their time of suffering and pain, which left them feeling impotent and stripped their lives of meaning. I want to acknowledge today that this is part of what is so incredibly painful about what we’re experiencing right now. There’s so little that we can do. There’s a lot that we cannot do..., but there’s very little that we can do. And there is a profound and very real human instinct to reach out and to help. And this is precisely now perhaps an act of selfishness, to [ physically ] reach out and help somebody who’s in danger.
haggadah Section: -- Ten Plagues
Source: Rabbi Sharon Brous

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