Light in Dark Times

When do our eyes light up?

Usually it’s joyful experiences – a good conversation with a friend, being in love, singing in a choir, being surrounded by nature, the birth of a child, a grandchild’s first words, watching a sunrise or viewing a distant galaxy;  seeing something, or hearing something, that raises our spirits – a piece of music, a theatrical performance, a moment of sporting brilliance – we each have our own cluster of experiences that (as the saying goes) ‘brings light to our eyes’.

Does the Torah bring light to our eyes? Does it lift our spirits? Maybe not so often?

I have been thinking about ‘light’ this week, literal light and metaphorical light, because the weekly portion of the Torah starts with the following sentence:

“The children of Israel shall bring…olive oil, clear, beaten, for the light, so as to cause a lamp (ner) to be burning, regularly (tamid)” (Exodus 27: 20).

It’s one of those Biblical sentences that are both plain, down-to-earth descriptions of an archaic, no-longer-existing ritual - part of a Judaism that has been defunct for 2000 years – and a sentence that is packed with compressed possibilities, metaphors, symbols: imagery that lights up the imagination, that one senses can speak to our lives in a way that on first reading doesn’t appear to be the case at all. 

In the portable tabernacle – an image of the Jerusalem Temple projected back in time by the Biblical narrator to the desert wanderings of the children of Israel – Aaron the High Priest, and his family, are to be responsible for a lamp, which is to be lit regularly, and kept alight from evening to morning (verse  21).

The phrase ner tamid at the end of the verse is a familiar one to us: it’s what we call the light in the synagogue that is keep alight continually, and we translate it in our modern context as an ‘everlasting light’, an ‘eternal light’, a ‘perpetual light’. But that’s a development from the Biblical phrase - which as one can see from its context, means a ‘regularly lit light’, and one that is kept going as a tradition through the generations (verse 21).

I think that this synagogue symbol is rather taken for granted these days, which is a bit of a shame. We just accept that it is there: we don’t tend to use oil; it’s electric; nobody has to maintain it, or even switch it on. It’s just kept on. It’s part of the furniture. And yet it is the only remaining living link we have to that whole vast system of worship from the days of the Temple, 2000 years ago. It’s part of an unbroken chain of tradition of there being a light at the heart of the sanctuary, a symbolic image of the divine, an image of God’s presence in the midst of the people, flickering but eternal.

We don’t keep it in our homes but in our synagogues, which the rabbis called a mikdash me’at, a ‘small sanctuary’ - a replacement for, yet an echo of, the original mikdash, the sanctuary of old, in Jerusalem, where the people gathered.

In early synagogues that have been excavated in the Middle East, the ner tamid was placed on the western wall of the synagogue – that is, the wall opposite the ark which houses the Torah scrolls. (The ark is always eastern facing, towards Jerusalem). We don’t know why those early synagogues placed it where they did - maybe to distinguish it from the original Temple light?

 But gradually, by the medieval period in Europe, the ner tamid had migrated to being next to the ark, or above the ark, where it still can be found; and that’s because this eternal light slowly became associated not just with God’s presence, but with that other living incarnation of God’s presence that we have, the Torah, which is kept in the ark. Because it is the Torah that, as the Psalmist put it, ‘enlightens the eyes’ – literally “makes our eyes light up/shine”  (Psalm 19:9). 

So if the idea of ‘God’s presence’ is a bit of a mystery to us, or is a question, or a doubt, we still have the ‘light’ of Torah, the enlightenment that comes from Jewish tradition’s foundational text. But what else can we catch glimpses of in this sentence? “The children of Israel shall bring…olive oil, clear/pure, beaten, for the light, so as to cause a lamp to be burning, regularly (tamid) What flashes up in our mind, our mind’s eye?

Pure olive oil. What’s that about? Why does the light need to be, for the sanctuary, pure olive oil? Oil was also produced from sesame seeds, flax, or animal fats. But no, it had to be oil from olives, and zach – ‘clear/pure’. And how do you make it clear? By crushing it with a stone press, hence katit – ‘beaten/crushed’. 

Can one sense something going on here, just beneath the manifest surface of the text? Is this just pragmatic details? Or are there some ideas latent in the imagery? As so often, the midrashic tradition opens this out for us: it reminds us that, unlike other liquids, olive oil doesn’t mix with other liquids. If you try to mix it, it doesn’t lose its separate quality as olive oil. I don’t know if this is true or not. I doubt that the rabbis of that period were the ones who did the cooking. But the rabbis would never let facts get in the way of a good symbol – or a good interpretation.

When they thought about olive oil not mixing with other liquids, those ancient sages thought: ‘Ah, that’s just like us…just as olive oil remains distinct when you try and mix it with other liquids, so too the community of Israel remains separate in the midst of the other nations’. (Which shows that those rabbis of old were filled with wishful thinking, just as rabbis of today might be).  

The rabbis of that era (3^rd – 7^th century CE) were already alert to the ways in which the Bible itself links the community of Israel to olives. The prophet Jeremiah describes Israel as a “flowering olive tree, fair, with choice fruits” (11:16). So this fertile, symbolic imagery connecting olives, olive oil, and the people themselves is already there waiting to be pressed into service by later generations. 

And then there’s that extra word the Torah texts adds: that the oil has not only to be ‘clear’, but to produce pure oil the olives have to be katit – ‘beaten/crushed’. Of course that’s how you make clear olive oil - you have to crush the olives. But the word ‘beaten/crushed’ - when it is found in the context of olives as representing Israel - well, the word is heaven-sent (as it were) in adding another dimension of meaning for the later rabbis reading and responding to this text.

Like olives, they say in the midrash, Israel’s destiny too is to be ‘beaten and crushed’. In other words 1500 years ago, the rabbis are already reading their texts with the full weight of history on their backs, in their hearts – the history of post-Temple exile, oppression,  fragmentation across the whole of the Middle east and North Africa and the Mediterranean.

They read the text each year and recognise themselves in it : katit – ‘beaten/crushed’. But the light went on. The light of Jewish continuity continued to glow. We are talking about ner tamid, the everlasting light. And a thousand years after the midrash makes this imaginative link, the second Koznitzer Rebbe, Rabbi Moshe ben Yisroel (1757-1828), plays with this same verse:

“It is written: ‘Pure olive oil beaten for the light’.  [What does this refer to?] We are to be beaten and bruised, but in order to glow with light”. (Martin Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Later Masters, p.177).

In other words suffering gives the Jewish people a power – and a destiny. Our role, the role of the Jewish people in the world, is to use our understanding of suffering in order to bring light into a suffering world. This is an old motif, Israel as the “light to the nations” (Isaiah 42:6), but in the early 19^th century in a small Polish shtetl the Koznitzer rebbe gives voice to it anew, and with an eternal Jewish hopefulness. Our role is to ‘glow with light’ – whatever happens to us, whatever is done to us.

We still need that hopefulness, when we might feel sometimes that the forces of darkness are gathering around us:  Brexit, European populism and racism,  environmental catastrophe on the horizon, drought and flooding, wildfires out of control - the world can appear quite dark. We know this: hopefulness for the future of our country, our continent, our world, is being beaten out of us.

But when we return to our texts, our tradition, and root ourselves again in this unbroken chain of engagement with the words of old - “The children of Israel shall bring…olive oil, clear, beaten, for the light, so as to cause a lamp to be burning, regularly” – we are reminded that we are now the priests, the guardians of the light. That original role was to be enacted “throughout the generations”. Well, here we are, our generation, our turn: bearers of light, bringers of light, a heritage to make our eyes shine, light up. We bring what enlightenment we can, while we can. And then we wait, as Jews always have, to see where it gets us.  

[based on a sermon/discussion at Finchley Reform Synagogue, February 16^th, 2019]