Parashat Bo
SERMON Parashat Bo January 23, 2026 6 Sh’vat 5786
Rabbi David Edleson Temple Sinai South Burlington, Vermont
THE PLAGUE OF DARKNESS
It is a time of upheaval, of massive shifts in the world order. Large numbers of refugees are moving between the great economies, and tides of violence and civil unrest wash across kingdoms and nations. Inside the largest nation, the people do not know who to trust and they don’t seem to trust each other. Some blame the current leadership for overreach and stubborn power while others blame the opposition for stirring up people in protest and in hopes of a new order. And even among the various groups there is growing tension of the erosion of trust and people are pushed to take a side because things seem to be moving too fast to really understand what is happening or what is useful to do. And then there is a blackout.
These are the events described in this week’s Torah portion, Bo. While we and Cecile B. DeMille might read this as a simple morality tale between the Israelites who are oppressed and the Egyptians who are doing the oppressing, the story is much more complex.
In lived history, a massive famine has resulted not in deaths, but in the seizing of all the land by the government, whose chief minister is Joseph, an immigrant.
Now a new regime has taken over and they are desperate to assert power over a restless Egypt. Seeing an opportunity in the legacy of Joseph, they focus their blame on his descendants, whom they now incarcerate, enslave and impoverish. They order Israelite children killed. But not everyone will go along with the new leaders. The head midwives refuse and the Pharaoh’s own daughter secretly adopts an Israelite child and hires his mother to raise him.
We also know that after a few plagues, the Egyptians and then the Egyptian nobility began to turn on Pharaoh, but Pharaoh could not back down from the power match.
And then comes the plague of darkness, a darkness we are told that is of a completely different quality than night. It was a sense of hopelessness, of immobility, of futility and aloneness.
The Torah tell us that when we left slavery we didn’t leave alone. We had felt alone and even embattled, but the text says that when we left, a large mixed multitude left with us. We often feel alone but I think we are not as alone as we feel because the loudest voices are not always those that decide the future.
As a people, we have been around for a very long time, to see great empires rise and fall, and so we know, already in our oldest stories about ourselves and who we are, that times when the world undergoes sweeping changes are never neat. Things are not clear. We don’t always know what to think or who to trust. We might think we know where things are going, but do we? Do we know how things will look in the rearview mirror in 50 years? In 100? It is likely that some of what we think now we prove to be true and some will prove us wrong.
These are confusing times. We want to act and need to feel something other than powerless.
But as our Torah portion this week points out, and our history also reminds us, as a small minority, we only have so much power, and we are also at the mercy of much larger tides of history that wash over us and have washed over our people since we were in Egypt.
It is interesting to me that in the very midst of such upheaval in Egypt, with darkness and panic all around, the Torah commands a ritual, a time to stop and come together and make sense of the situation by retelling it. This is the first Passover.
While Reform Jews like myself have a tendency to make Passover about our own power to work for freedom in the world, it is pretty clear that the Passover in the Torah is meant to remind us that we don’t have all, or even most of the power. Rituals like the seder, or Shabbat are meant to help us stay grounded and as rooted as possible when things around us are stormy, not to keep us from the world, but to help remind us to have humility, to have faith, and to hold on to one another.
Shabbat Shalom.
