Seeing Each Other in the Darkness
Parshat Bo (Exodus 10:1-13:16)
Have you ever stood in the same room as someone else, only to realize you’re living entirely different experiences—one in light, the other in darkness?
“No one could see anyone else or move about for three days. Yet all the Israelites had light in the places where they lived.” (Exodus 10:23)
This week’s reading describes a darkness unlike anything earlier in the plagues. It does not break objects or bodies. It breaks connection. The Egyptians cannot see one another; they cannot move toward one another. The Torah hints at a blindness deeper than eyesight—an isolation that freezes the human heart.
The Israelites, however, “had light in all the places where they lived.” As the commentator Or HaChaim notes, the Torah doesn’t say they had stronger vision—it says they had light. Their illumination was not merely physical; it was relational. They could see and be seen.
Jewish tradition deepens this contrast. The Midrash describes Egypt’s darkness as spiritual blindness—an inability to perceive another person’s humanity. And the Beit HaMikdash (Holy Temple) in Jerusalem offers a counter-image: its windows were narrow on the inside and wide outside, built not to draw in light but to shine it outward. True spiritual light begins within a person or a community, then radiates outward.
Chassidic philosophy echoes this idea with a teaching from the Talmud (Chagigah 12a): that there is a form of light “not dependent on the sun”—an inner radiance that comes from awareness of the divine spark within every human being. When a person sees others through that lens, their presence becomes a kind of light for those around them.
Darkness, in this sense, is not the absence of daylight but the absence of attention. When people stop noticing one another, they begin living in separate worlds, even while standing side by side.
We experience this today in quieter forms:
Walking past a colleague lost in your own worries.
Missing the loneliness behind a friend’s polite smile.
Failing to see the exhaustion on the face of a parent, child, or spouse.
It is entirely possible to share space yet live in different emotional weather—one in dusk, the other in daylight.
This isn’t just ancient history. Our own inwardness can create its own Egypt. And our capacity to attend to one another—to look up, look in, and look out—creates light “in the places where we live.”
The parable of the Temple windows offers a path forward. If inner light is meant to shine outward, then small acts of presence become spiritual architecture:
A phone call to someone who’s been unusually quiet.
A warm message sent without an occasion.
Meeting a loved one’s eyes and really listening.
Even when we feel unseen, offering light to others can soften the darkness within us. Light, the sages teach, grows by being shared.
Chassidic teaching adds this gentle reassurance: you don’t need to fix the whole room. Even a narrow window lets light through.
Where in your life is someone waiting to be seen?
And what single gesture of attention could bring a little more light into their world—and yours?
May our attention create light for others, and may we discover that in brightening someone else’s world, new light quietly returns to our own.
I wish you a good week and Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yonatan Hambourger