When I Sit in Darkness, Hashem Is My Light

The prophet Micah wrote: “Do not rejoice over me, my enemy. Though I fell, I rose. Though I sit in darkness, Hashem is my light.” Opening There is one mistake that keeps repeating itself, year after year, heart after heart. A person sits inside a hard situation, inside the pressure, the confusion and the pain, and he waits. He waits for something outside to change. He waits for the situation to turn around. He waits for the darkness to end. And as long as the darkness has not ended, he thinks his redemption has not yet come. This is the feeling of being “stuck,” with no way out. It is not that there is no way out. It is that he is looking for it in the wrong place. The Foundation The prophet Micah says: “Though I fell, I rose. Though I sit in darkness, Hashem is my light.” Let us read carefully. The verse does not say, “I fell, and later I rose, and after that I came out of the darkness.” The order is completely different. “Though I fell”: he is still lying in the fall, and yet “I rose.” “Though I sit in darkness”: he is still sitting inside it, and yet “Hashem is my light.” The rising does not come after the darkness is over. The rising happens inside the darkness, at the very moment a person discovers that Hashem is his light. Here. Now. Right in the place where he is sitting. In other words, redemption does not begin when the situation changes. It begins when the way you understand the situation changes. A Note: Midday on the Ninth of Av There is a beautiful proof of this from a Jewish custom. On the Ninth of Av, the day we mourn the destruction of the Holy Temple, we cry until midday. We read the Book of Lamentations. We sit in mourning over the destruction. The darkness is darkness, and nothing else. But from midday on, the great authorities of Jewish law and the masters of Jewish mysticism made it the custom to begin comforting others and being comforted. The words of the prayers change, and something changes in the heart. And yet the Holy Temple is still destroyed. We are still in exile. Nothing physical changed at midday. So what changed? Our awareness. At midday we begin to live with a different verse. Hashem told our forefather Jacob: “I will go down with you to Egypt.” Hashem is not waiting for us at the end of the road. He goes down into it together with us. And once we know this, there is light even inside the darkness. It is not a light that arrives from outside. It is a light that is revealed from within, inside the darkness itself. Going Deeper Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, author of the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, wrote in the section called “The Gate of Unity and Faith”: “There is no place empty of Him.” There is no corner of creation without Hashem’s vitality inside it. If so, then even inside the darkness, even there, Hashem’s infinite light is waiting. But this light does not show itself on its own. It is waiting to be revealed. And whether it is revealed depends on a person’s inner work. It depends on his decision to look for the light right there, inside the situation, and not to wait for the situation to change first. This is the difference between feeling “stuck” and feeling “needed.” A person who thinks his redemption depends on things outside himself is a stuck person. A person who understands that Hashem’s light is waiting to be revealed here and now is a person with a mission. Closing Followers of Hasidic teaching know that the great movement of the soul is not escaping from the hard place. It is discovering Hashem inside it. My brother, if you are sitting in your own darkness right now, in your own “though I sit in darkness,” do not wait for the darkness to end. Ask one question: Where is Hashem my light, here, inside this? The moment you ask that question seriously is your moment of “I rose.” That is where redemption begins. Not with the end of the darkness, but with the beginning of the light inside it.