Rabbi Adam Rosenwasser
This week’s Torah portion is Bo: Exodus 10:1 – 13:16
This week’s Torah portion, Bo, depicts the final three plagues that are wrought upon Egypt until Pharoah changes his mind and finally allows Moses and the Israelites to leave. I am always struck by the penultimate plague, the plague of darkness. Exodus 10:21-23 depicts the darkness as being so intense, thick and horrifying, that it could actually be touched. Not only is the darkness recalled in intense sensorial terms, but we also learn that not only could people not see, they also could not move. For three days, the Egyptians were essentially frozen in place.
I recently returned from Israel, where I spent a week traversing the country with a group of two dozen other Reform rabbis through the Amplify Israel Rabbinical Fellowship. We were there to learn as much as we could during our relatively short trip, show solidarity and discover new ways to teach and disseminate our love for and connection to Israel.
In many ways, I felt the paralyzing darkness which has engulfed the country since Oct. 7, 2023. The darkest moment for me was at a visit to Majdal Shams, the Druze village in the Golan Heights where 12 children playing soccer were cruelly and senselessly murdered by a Hezbollah rocket on July 27, 2024. Our group met with Adhan Safadi, a paramedic who arrived at the gruesome scene before the ambulances. Almost immediately, he saw his 11-year-old daughter Venes on the ground in the corner of the field. He knew she was dead. And yet, he ran toward those who were injured and dying to try to save whom he could.
Two other bereaved fathers joined Adhan and shared stories about their beautiful children. The families have named the children the “12 stars,” and even in that indescribable darkness, they believe that by sharing their stories with us, they can still bring some measure of light and, they hope, peace into this very dark world. As a father myself, I’m not sure I could ever recover from such a paralyzing and thick darkness.
Parashat Bo also teaches us that, even as the Egyptians experienced this awful darkness, the Israelites enjoyed light in their dwellings. We saw glimpses of that light throughout the week. We joined Member of the Knesset Rabbi Gilad Kariv at his congregation in Givatayim, a suburb of Tel Aviv, where we sang and prayed and danced with the community, experiencing a Shabbat of joy and hope. A woman named Rona gave us a tour of Kibbutz Manara, located right near the Lebanese border. Virtually every structure on the kibbutz has been damaged or destroyed by Hezbollah mortars and missiles. And yet, the kibbutz survived the war with no fatalities. Rona looks forward to rebuilding and returning to her home perched high above the Hula valley in a place where the local populations used to get along many years ago. She still believes peace can come. We also met with high schoolers at the Leo Baeck school in Haifa. They shared their dreams with us of going to school, joining the army or participating in national service. In many ways, these past years have been so dark for them, and yet they are just “normal” teenagers in so many other ways.
Parashat Bo moves us from slavery, suffering and death to a new chance at freedom, rebuilding and life. We are released from slavery, but we know the road ahead is circuitous and challenging. I feel that way about Israel and our own country as well. I pray that every hostage comes home, that the war will end and that Israel will find new ways to secure its existence. I pray that, even as many of us feel a thick darkness has descended upon the United States, we will find ways to continue to bring light to our endeavors. May we go forth, like our ancient ancestors, from degradation to triumph and from darkness to light.
Rabbi Adam Rosenwasser is the senior rabbi at Temple Emanuel in Kensington, Maryland.
