January 29, 2009
“Avoid cliches like the plague,” advises William Safire, purposefully illustrating the type of cliche he warns against, while inadvertently pointing to this week’s Torah reading, which is, after all, about plagues. These are real plagues, though, not metaphoric ones, and that is what prompts Safire’s caution. If any old thing we want to avoid can be likened to a plague, we become deadened to the reality of real ones.
The Western world’s historic example is the Bubonic Plague, which wiped out 25 million people in five years, spreading like darkness and extinguishing all light of hope. But wait: Maybe “spreading like darkness” is another cliche we should avoid. Is it fair to compare “plagues” to “darkness,” or does the use of either one cheapen the other?
“Darkness” is exactly the right word, if we imagine a time without street or house lights; no flashlights, torches, fires or even matches; no sun, moon, or stars; complete absence of sight; no warning of impending danger; and no hint of nearby comfort. Now add in bitter cold to the blackness. Plagues are like that: death-like in their darkness.
I get this analogy from Abravanel, who discovered that the three plagues in this week’s Torah portion differ from the previous seven in that they have darkness in common. The locusts arrived in droves so thick that “the land was in darkness.” (10:14) Locusts come and locusts go, however — Egypt had experienced them before. So the next plague upped the ante: just darkness, lasting and inexplicable, “thick darkness that can be touched, for three whole days.” (10:21-22) Still, no one died from it; people huddled together, holding hands, perhaps, until it was over. The final plague, therefore, added death to darkness: every first-born killed, precisely at midnight.
No one willingly enters a plague zone. Even if you think you are personally exempt from danger, the horror of being there is just too much to bear. That is why, with the locusts about to arrive, Moses had to be “brought” to Pharaoh (10:8) — he would not come willingly. Blood, frogs, boils, and the rest — those he could handle. But not genuinely plague-like darkness. “Let someone else tell Pharaoh that three stages of increasing darkness are on their way,” Moses must have hoped.
He should have paid closer attention to God’s command: “Come,” not “Go,” to Pharaoh. “We can never distance ourselves from God,” says Menachem Mendel of Kotsk. “When God said ‘Come,’ God meant, ‘Come with Me. I, God, will accompany you.” God would not send even Moses all alone to announce the three final plagues of escalating darkness.
I think of this when I visit a dying patient. We picture plagues as mass diseases, spreading from person to person, home to home. But terminal illness is equally a plague for the person suffering from it. It too spreads, limb by limb, organ by organ. It may start with the metastatic proliferation of murderous cells that consume the body like locusts devouring a landscape. Then comes the darkness of despair so thick it can be touched. And, finally, death at what may as well be midnight.
It is a terrible thing to watch someone die. “The mind withdraws,” says Louise Harmon in her Fragments on the Death Watch. “There is a turning in toward the self, a curvature of the spine that directs the remaining life force toward the center. The knees are tucked up under the body. The arms are folded like a praying mantis, a caricature of moot supplication, and the petition is for safety.”
As I say, no one willingly enters a plague zone — because no sane person wants to watch this happen. So when disease approaches hopelessness, and the hospital room becomes a virtual plague zone, people stop visiting. As the plague advances, loneliness sets in: no one to talk to even as we lose the light to see them by.
But it is precisely when final darkness looms that the dying need our visits most, and not just to talk banalities. We come at such a time not to turn on lights but to share the darkness. It can be a horrible ordeal to sit, and wait, and do nothing more than lend a loving presence through the moments leading up to midnight. But it can be strangely satisfying too, if we remember that the commandment is “Come,” not “Go.” “Come with Me,” says God, “I will sit there with you.”
The Talmud locates God’s presence lending comfort to patients by resting above their head. Visitors, too, report sensing that presence at times, especially when death finally arrives. And why not? God never dispatches us all alone to endure the darkness.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
Comment: comments@njjewishnews.com
--TOP--
