Dear All,

Like everyone else, I’ve spent much of the last week sheltering indoors from the weather. It’s wet and dark. But this does mean that I can relate a little more to the Plague of Darkness that God inflicted on the Egyptians, which we read about in this week’s parashah. It is the eighth of ten plagues designed to change Pharaoh’s mind so that he will let the Israelites go free from slavery. Gazing into the gloom outside my window, I can start to imagine how dispiriting, and gradually terrifying, it would be if the sun simply didn’t come back each morning.

There is an interesting detail as the Torah describes the darkness. it includes the comment;

“לֹא רָאו ּ אִיש ׁ אֶת אָחִיו”

‘no person could see their neighbour’

It seems like a superfluous point. Isn’t it obvious that people couldn’t see each other in the darkness?

An explanation is offered by Rabbi Alexander Zusia Friedman, a 20th-century Polish commentator. The Egyptians’ not being able to see their siblings, he says, was worse than the plague of darkness. They stopped being able to see each others’ pain, and that made them unable to help each other – or indeed themselves. By becoming blind to each suffering and needs, they fell into a moral abyss more painful than the simple fact of darkness.

At this week’s Holocaust Memorial Day, we were reminded once more of the depth to which we can fall when we stop seeing each other as people. When we lose sight of our neighbours, we risk depriving them of their humanity, and losing our own. The plague of darkness is a reminder not only of our dependence on sunlight, but also of how important it is that we see the pain of those around us – so that we can move, inexorably, towards the spring.

Shabbat shalom,

Tim