"Moses held out his arm toward the sky and thick darkness descended upon all the land of Egypt for three days. People did not see their neighbor, and for three days no one would leave their home; but all the Israelites had light in their dwellings." 

                 (Exodus 10:22-23)   

       

        The plague of darkness is in this week's Torah.

        The penultimate plague.

        Seriously.

        That was the best G-d could come up with? 

        Is darkness even a plague?

        Didn't the Egyptians have candles? Torches?

        If I was Pharaoh, I would have thought this Israelite G-d just ran out of miracles.

 

        

        But what if it wasn't a physical darkness, but a communal "darkness". A darkness where "no one left their home" and "no one saw their neighbor".

        What if it was a societal darkness: the complete breakdown of the civil society. What if the plague was the final consequence of a corrupt and oppressive society where it was every man for himself, where no one would leave their home to provide aid for anyone, where no one saw what the oppression of the stranger was doing to their culture.

       "No one left their home".

       "No one saw their neighbor."

        What if Moses "lifted his hands to the heavens" and Egypt was finally exposed as the selfish and evil civilization that it had become because of centuries of oppression of the stranger in their midst.

    

         I think the Torah may be teaching us here that if society is to survive, there has to be people willing to "leave their homes", see the suffering of their brethren, and be there to help their neighbors. Next to the collapse of family, the worse plague is not an infestation of frogs or bugs, but the destruction of communal responsibility for those in need of support, a society that is indifferent and feels nothing for the "other".

         The light that was now extinguished in Egypt was not "physical" light, but the light of the divine that tells us to reach out to our fellow human beings. A society indifferent to cry of a neighbor is a world plunged into darkness. 

           The death of society.

           And our civilization will rise or fall on whether we remain a nation that reaches out to one another, whether we see ourselves as a collective. As long as there are enough people who care for others, who are willing to go out of the comforts of their homes to help the stranger, as long as there are people willing to see the person next to them and hear their cries, ours will still be a good society.

            May the light of this country's goodness always shine hope for our world.