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NIGHT KILLER
Times Square, new York City. Piccadilly Circus, london. le Champs elys�es, Paris.
A million watts of electricity turning night into day. We live in a society that prides itself on being
twenty-four-hour, round-the-clock. We never close. Our culture has blurred the distinction between
the two halves of the day so that, on a social level, night has become day. In an agrarian society, the
cycle of life used to be dictated by the rising and the setting of the sun. The cock crowed. The fields
had to be plowed. But now battery hens burn the midnight oil - or electricity. They, like us, live in
a world where we can turn night into day at will. We can make night vanish in a second.
Nowadays - we can kill the night. There are two views of the world that stand eternally and implacably opposed to each other. One view seeks to place everything in the glare of day. Its understanding is bound by that which can be dissected on the operating table of science. What cannot be seen does not exist. What cannot be brought into the light is not there. This is a world whose symbol is the sun that never waxes or wanes. It is always the same unblinking eye of fire. This is the world that wants to murder the night - to turn it into day. But there is another world - and another people. A people that counts its seasons by the moon. A people who will emerge out of a deep darkness, just like the new moon that seems to renew itself out of a pitch-black sky. A people in its darkest hour just before dawn. A people who lifts its gaze above the fluorescent glare of a world that knows no night. The month of Tevet is the darkest time of the year. Its days are the shortest of the year and its nights the longest. The tribe associated with Tevet is the tribe of dan. When the children of Israel traveled and camped in the desert, they encircled the holy Ark. The tribe of dan was the most northerly encampment. The north is a dark cold place. The long nights of Tevet are even longer in the north. The hebrew word for "north," tzafon, is spelled the same as tzafun, which means "hidden." The Talmud tells us that one of the names of the yetzer hara, the negative drive, is Tzafuni (Sukka 52). Beginning on the eighth of Tevet, three days of spiritual darkness descended on the world. The first darkness was the translation into Greek of the Torah (see "Art for Art's Sake," p. 180). King Ptolemy took seventy-two great Torah sages and confined them in separate cubicles and instructed them to translate the Torah. hence its name - the Septuagint. With the translation of the Torah into Greek, the radiance of the Torah that shines through the sentences, the words and the letters of the holy Tongue, was shuttered into a closed room, its light constricted and obfuscated. for however accurate a translation may be, the Torah's fathomless depths, its mystical secrets, become truncated and lost when it speaks in another tongue. The second day of darkness was the passing from this world of ezra the Sofer on the ninth of Tevet. ezra was among the last of the prophets. It was he who gave the Torah the letters that we recognize today - Ashurit script. By employing Ashurit, ezra made the Torah accessible to all the people. The Torah's light was able to shine out to the least scholarly of the Jewish people. According to the Talmud Yerushalmi, it was also ezra who instituted the public reading of the Torah on Mondays and Thursdays and at mincha on Shabbat. ezra brought Torah to the people. When his light went out on the ninth of Tevet, the world became darker, and the Torah more constrained and confined. On the tenth of Tevet, the armies of the Babylonian emperor nevuchadnetzar, led by his general nevuzaradan, began the siege on Jerusalem, resulting in the destruction of the first holy Temple and the exile of the Jewish people to Babylon. On account of the events of this day and those of the eighth and ninth, the spiritual masters instituted a day-long fast when we can contemplate our spiritual flaws and the ways to remedy our mistakes and those of our forefathers. If you think about it, on the tenth of Tevet itself, ostensibly nothing really tragic happened. no wall was breached. no one died. not a shot was fired. Only the siege was begun. You can look at a siege in two ways. A siege stops the beleaguered city from obtaining help and sustenance from the outside. eventually the hapless inhabitants capitulate because of starvation. however, there's another aspect to a siege. A siege also stops anyone or anything getting out. The fast of the tenth of Tevet commemorates that the Torah is itself confined under siege. It is confined in a Septuagint. It is confined in a world without prophecy, a world where what-yousee- is-what-you-get, where everything has to be glaringly on show. The Torah is trapped and confined in a padded cell whose unblinking lights are never extinguished twenty-four hours a day. And all we can hear is its beautiful muffled voice. for it is from Zion that Torah emanates to the world. And Zion was put under siege on the tenth of Tevet. If you count the total number of candles that we light on Chanuka, you'll find it comes to thirty-six. If you count the number of days from the twenty-fifth of Kislev, the day when Chanuka begins, till the end of Tevet, that number is also thirty-six. Chanuka spreads its light across two months, from a month of light into a month of darkness. And even after Chanuka is over and the blaze of all its eight candles gone, when it seems that the night is flooded by an artificial neon glare, those thirty-six hidden candles burn on in the days of Tevet for the People of the Moon. More articles available at Ohr Somayach's website. |