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In The Daylight We See: We Are Not Alone
A Reflection on Parashat Bo
The Rabbis teach that King David would wake at midnight to study Torah. Somehow, before the invention of clocks King David could intuit the precise moment that the clock strikes twelve.
The Talmud is confounded. How is this possible? Not even Moses knew exactly when the middle of the night was. As it says in Parashat Bo:
Moses prepares to lead the Israelites out of Egypt ‘k’chatzot halailah’ ‘at about midnight,’ True midnight remains a mystery, shrouded in the dark of night.
Night time means different things at different stages of our lives.
For young children, the night is a vast unknown. Midnight is impossibly late and absurdly dark.
As a mother, night becomes an extension of daytime tasks and worries. I am always on the edge of wakefulness. I sleep, still ready to jump at the wail of a bad dream or the whimper for a drink of water. The rabbis didn’t need to go on for pages and pages, they could have asked any parent. We know exactly when midnight is. It is the precise moment that we finally fall into a full slumber, only to wake with a start at the sound of a child’s whimper.
Key moments of the Exodus story are told in the dark. Parashat Bo recalls the death of the first born. “In the middle…
