Finding Him in the Dark Side

I had the privilege this past week at the RCA conference of hearing Bar Kupershtein speak. After two years in Hamas captivity, after the tunnels, after horrors most of us cannot bring ourselves to imagine, he stood in front of a room of rabbis and shared a piece of what carried him.

Since then I have been reading his interviews, and one thread keeps surfacing. A song. From Rebbe Nachman of Breslov.

V’afilu b’hastara sheb’toch ha’hastara, b’vadai gam sham nimtza Hashem yisbarach.

Even in the concealment within the concealment, surely there too Hashem can be found.

Rebbe Nachman teaches that there are two levels of hiddenness. The first is when you know Hashem is hidden. You feel the distance, you struggle, but you know what is missing and you know to look. The second is deeper. Hastara sheb’toch ha’hastara. The hiding itself is hidden. You no longer remember there is anything to look for.

And the line of the song is that even there, surely, Hashem can be found.

Bar has shared that he sang it in the tunnels.

What struck me, listening to him and then reading his words afterward, was that he was not describing faith as something he held onto. He was describing faith as something that became clearer down there. That when the ohr of an ordinary life is stripped away, when there is nothing left to lean on except who you have always been and Who you have always davened to, the relationship does not become more obscure. In some unbearable way it becomes more apparent.

I have been turning this over all week, and I think it points to something the Torah itself is trying to teach us at the opening of Sefer Bamidbar.

There is a midrash in Bereishis Rabbah that reads the opening pesukim of Bereishis as a map of the five books of the Torah. The repeated mentions of ohr are not just about the first day of the world. They are about the unfolding relationship between God and the Jewish people.

Vayomer Elokim yehi ohr. Let there be light. That is Bereishis.

Vayehi ohr. And there was light. That is Shemos.

Vayar Elokim et ha’ohr ki tov. God saw that the light was good. That is Vayikra.

Vayavdel Elokim bein ha’ohr u’vein hachoshech. God separated between the light and the darkness. That is Bamidbar.

Read that again slowly. The midrash is not saying Bamidbar contains a separation between light and dark. The midrash is saying Bamidbar is the separation. The book where one mode of relationship ends and another begins.

The ohr is the Midbar. The choshech is Eretz Yisrael. How can that be?

Isn’t this the land we daven toward three times a day? The place Chazal describes as avira d’Ara machkim, whose very air makes one wise? How can the Netziv describe the life that awaits us there as darkness?

Not because it is bad.

Because it is hidden.

Here is what he means.

The ohr is the entire wilderness experience. Above nature. Me’al hateva. Mann fell every morning. Water came from a rock. Wars were won by Moshe lifting his hands. There was no ambiguity about whether Hashem was present. You woke up and the relationship was sitting outside your tent.

That is ohr. Not comfort. Visibility.

And the choshech is what comes next.

You plant and you do not know if the rain will come. You fight wars by natural means and you do not know how they will end. You daven for things for years and you cannot tell whether the davening is going anywhere. The relationship continues. But it stops announcing itself.

That is choshech. Not absence. Hiddenness.

And the choshech, the Netziv says, this is the goal. The promised land.

The midbar was not the destination. It was training. The visible relationship existed to form a people capable of sustaining an invisible one.

Most of us live somewhere between these two modes without realizing the Torah has names for them.

There are stretches in a religious life where everything is lit. The job comes together when you need it. The child you worried about came back. A davening lifts you in a way you cannot explain. You can feel the relationship. You are floating.

That is ohr.

And there are other stretches.

The davening you said for years for someone you love, and nothing visibly changed. The marriage you are still inside and cannot read. The child whose path you cannot see. The question you have sat with for years without an answer.

That is choshech. The hiddenness that makes you wonder whether the relationship is happening at all.

Most of us, when we hit choshech, treat it as a problem. A failure of our Yiddishkeit. A stretch to get through until the lights come back on.

The Netziv is suggesting that this is exactly backwards.

The ohr was given to you so that you could survive the choshech. So that when the hiddenness comes, and it will come, in every life, you would have enough memory of the visible relationship to keep walking when you cannot see it.

That is a harder faith. But it may be the deeper one.

Because almost all mature human relationships eventually move this way. At the beginning, presence is obvious. Everything is emotionally legible. And then life becomes structured around years, repetition, illness, fatigue, things that do not announce themselves.

The relationship does not become less real.

It becomes less visible.

Our greatest teacher knew this. At Sinai, when the entire nation stood back from the mountain, the Torah tells us u’Moshe nigash el ha’arafel asher sham ha’Elokim. Moshe approached the thick darkness where God was. Not the fire. Not the cloud. The arafel. The part hardest to see through.

The deepest encounter was not in the place of maximum visibility. It was in the place of maximum hiddenness, approached by someone willing to keep walking when the air got thick.

Moshe walked toward the arafel at Sinai. Bar Kupershtein sang in the tunnels. And the Netziv is telling us that the life Hashem actually wanted with us, the relationship He brought us out of Mitzrayim to build, was going to ask the same of every one of us in our own ways.

I am not in a tunnel and most of us are not. But the question Bar Kupershtein answered with his life is the same question the rest of us answer in much quieter forms every day.

When Hashem feels hidden, where do you stand?

The next time the hiddenness comes, the unanswered tefillah,the long stretch where nothing is happening that you can see, the question to ask is not what is wrong with your Yiddishkeit.

The question to ask is whether this is the relationship.

Because it might be.

It is not only your relationship. It is the relationship of an entire people who learned to stay in conversation with Hashem long after the mann stopped falling and the clouds of glory lifted. Two thousand years of choshech, and we are still davening. Still learning. Still building homes and raising families and asking the old questions in new generations and hoping for all of us to return to Yerushalayim. The deepest avodah is not learning how to find God in the light.

It is learning, alongside the rest of us, how to remain in relationship with Him in the dark.