The Mental Health awareness Shabbat was chosen to be marked by JAMI, the Mental Health service for the Jewish Community in the UK, on this particular Shabbat because of its Torah reading. One of the 10 plagues, with which the Egyptians were afflicted, was the plague of darkness. We read at the end of chapter 10: “Then God said to Moses, “Hold out your arm toward the sky that there may be darkness upon the land of Egypt, a darkness, that can be touched, a darkness, that you can feel.”[1]
As the modern biblical scholar Nahum Sarna noted: “The blotting out of the light of the sun for three days would have carried a powerful symbolic message for the Egyptians, for the Sun was their supreme god, and its worship was pervasive in the official palace ritual…The plague of darkness therefore, would have had a devastating psychological impact.” [on the people][2].
It would have been horrible enough to be in complete darkness for one day. But the plague lasted for three days – can you imagine that? Being in total darkness, darkness that was so thick that people could not see each other and people could not get up from under it – the Torah says[3].
Professor Sarna concludes that the thick and heavy darkness, which covered the country, threw people into a state of trauma, and consequently, mental illness.
My colleagues, Rabbis Monique Mayer and Miriam Berger think that it was the other way round: the darkness was the mental state the people were plunged into after the first eight plagues. Rabbi Mayer thinks that “emotionally battered by forces beyond their control, the Egyptians were plunged into deep, deep desolation, unable to lift themselves and get on with living. They didn’t hear or see anyone around them. They couldn’t reach out to hold anyone. No one was there to reach out to them. They sat in their places for three days, in suffering and isolation.”[4]
People suffering from depression often lack the energy to move about or to be concerned with anyone other than themselves, precisely as the Torah describes the Egyptians – Rabbi Berger concludes as well.[5]
And we all can relate to the Egyptians in their state of darkness because we all have those dark places in our souls, to which we descend in our hours of anxiety, despair, depression, hopelessness, stress or loneliness.
Rabbi Jonathan Wittenberg expands even further: “One descends inside oneself to places where one’s terrors and persecutions become one’s dominant reality; down to the basement of the soul, where the words above the entrance read like the sign over the portal to Dante’s hell: ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’. There one may sit, beset by the inconceivability of any escape, mentally locked in, staring at the grey-brown walls, entertaining in the bleakest hours the thought that maybe there is only one way out…one feels utterly, unreachably alone: as the Torah says, ‘no one could see his brother’[6]…
Rebbe Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger (known as the Sefat Emet) understands this inability to see or to be seen, the fact that no one notices each other, as the very cause and essence of the plague: Since “no one could see his brother” or realise what those around him lacked, since no one could be bothered to be concerned about other peoples’ needs, the result was that “no one could move from his place”: that is, the people were stuck in the same low state and couldn’t get themselves out of it.
Mental illness isolates the people experiencing it from other people and can destroy their relationships with the people that love them.
Some people find themselves in darkness for years and some, for shorter periods in their lives, depending on what life throws at them.
I’ve never experienced mental illness myself, but I have worked and supported many people on that journey. Most of them continued their lives but a few of them – suffered a tragic end. This made me a passionate supporter of a mental health awareness Shabbat.
I am really pleased that due to the efforts of many organisations and our society, mental health issues have come out into the public domain and the stigma of shame has been lessened, just in time for me to suffer from “survivor’s guilt” syndrome two years ago.
As you know my family and I left Ukraine just on time. Yes, we ended up living in a car for a week but we were so lucky on our journey. No one in our family was killed and we came back to the safety of our homes and communities.
But I couldn’t shake that feeling of guilt in my mind. I remember so well, sitting in the café, on my own and not being able to connect to the people and the world around me thinking how can all these people be so relaxed and chatty and happy while over there, far away from us, people are dying. How can I be sitting here in peace rather than helping all those suffering and dying in Ukraine.
From the outside I looked like any other person but inside I was sinking slowly but surely into the abyss of mental darkness.
My recovery came from working with the refugees in Poland and the support and understanding I received from my family, friends and community while I was “not myself”.
It is such an important achievement for us as a society and as a community to celebrate the seriousness and openness with which we discuss mental health issues and address them.
And with the state of the world at the moment, the shared trauma of October 7th massacres and fears of antisemitic attacks, it is important to remind ourselves that being a community means we are not there on our own. It means supporting each other while we struggle with our darkness. It means giving our more vulnerable members a hand in an attempt to lift them from their dark place. Whether by being there with them or being understanding and showing a non-judgmental attitude. We often don’t know what other people are going through in their lives and their unusual behaviour might be a sign of struggle so let’s be kind to each other. Without darkness, we don’t appreciate light as much. Let’s share light with each other in the time of darkness.
[1] Exodus 10:21
[2] Nahum Sarna, The JPS Torah Commentary, p.51.
[3] Exodus 10:23
[4] Sermon on Parashat Bo for the Mental Health Awareness Shabbat in JAMi’s, p.50.
[5] Ibid, p.55.
[6] Ibid, p.57
