Perceptual Darkness

In this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Bo, we are nearing the end of the plagues. But long before the final blow, the Torah signals that Egypt is already unraveling. Pharaoh’s authority is no longer solid. His servants openly challenge him—“How long will this be a snare to us?” they ask (Exod. 10:7)—a stunning crack in the façade of absolute power. Pharaoh himself vacillates, offering partial concessions, bargaining, retreating, hardening again. The structures that once felt immovable are fracturing from within.

And the Israelites are almost free—but not yet. We are inhabiting that charged, liminal time where the old world has lost its grip, but the new one has not yet taken shape. And it is precisely here, just before the final rupture, that the Torah gives us one of its penultimate, strangest, and most unsettling images: the plague of darkness.

חֹשֶׁךְ עַל־אֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם—darkness over the land of Egypt.
And then, וְיָמֵשׁ חֹשֶׁךְ—a darkness that was felt.

This is not an ordinary darkness, not nightfall or shadow. It is something far stranger and more destabilizing—a darkness that interferes not with the world itself, but with how the world is perceived.

Our commentators are immediately unsettled. This is not how darkness usually behaves. Rashi brings a midrash that links vayamesh to mishush—groping, feeling one’s way forward. The 15th–16th century Italian commentator S’forno goes even further, describing a darkness so dense that light itself could not interact with it. Even a flame would make no impression. Light could not penetrate. It did not reflect.

This description sounds like something close to absolute darkness—a total erasure of light. But here’s the startling thing: scientifically speaking, absolute darkness of this kind does not exist. Astronomers tell us that even in the vast, cold expanses of space there is no place in the universe completely devoid of light. Even in the deepest cosmic voids—far from the glitter of stars, swallowed by dust clouds—there is still radiation left over from the birth of the universe itself. A faint, ancient echo. The residue of beginning.

The cosmos is never truly dark. There is always something moving, something arriving, something reaching us—it’s just that we are not always able to perceive it, or receive it.

And this is precisely the situation the Torah describes with this plague. This is not cosmic darkness—not a natural phenomenon at all. It is perceptual darkness: a darkness that exists not because light is absent, but because the capacity to receive it has been lost.

Light is there.
But there is nothing there to take it in.

The plague of darkness, then, is not about the world losing light—it is about Egypt losing sight: its capacity to see, and to relate to, what is already present. The text itself underscores this when it tells us, “לֹא רָאוּ אִישׁ אֶת אָחִיו”—no one could see one another.

Whether consciously or simply out of habit, humans tend to treat vision as the dominant sense. Neurologically, large portions of the brain are devoted to visual processing, and many of the systems we build—social, political, architectural—assume sight as the primary way of orienting in the world. Vision allows assessment from a distance: the ability to scan, to measure, to categorize, to control. 

And this is exactly how the Torah describes Egypt. A civilization of scale and oversight. Store cities built for accumulation. Taskmasters appointed to watch bodies and enforce quotas. Bricks counted, tallied, demanded in exact number—“the same number of bricks as before.” Pharaoh’s fear itself is visual and numerical: the people are “too many,” too visible, too expansive. Enslavement depends on the ability to oversee human beings from a distance—to count them, track them, manage them. Sight enables mastery.

Of course, not all bodies rely on vision in the same way—and blindness reminds us that the world has always been knowable through other senses—but Egypt has organized itself as though sight alone were sufficient.

And then, with this plague, a darkening of vision descends—and sight no longer works.

The darkness is such that people cannot orient themselves in space or toward one another. Their primary mode of knowing the world collapses, and they have no alternative ready. The verse continues: “וְלֹא קָמוּ אִישׁ מִתַּחְתָּיו”—no one rose from their place for three days. The result is not chaos, but stasis. It is the moment when a familiar way of seeing reaches its edge, and no other way of navigating has yet come forward.

This is the terrain artists know well—not simply darkness, but the unknown. How to move without a map. How to stay present when the outcome cannot yet be seen. How to work at the edges of perception, when sight no longer leads and other forms of attention must take over.

In art, darkness is rarely just absence. It is often the space that allows form to emerge. Negative space defines shape. In photography, images are born in a darkroom, not in the light. In blind contour drawing, artists do not look at the paper on which they’re drawing at all; they look intently at the subject and let our eye guide the hand without visual evaluation, often producing a greater accuracy. The goal is actually not accuracy or control, but attunement—staying in relationship with what is unfolding, even before it can be fully understood.

In this way, art trains a different response to the unknown. Not paralysis, but patience. It produces a more intimate and nuanced sense of the form. Rather than mastery, art cultivates presence, learning how to move while form is still arriving.

Egypt, it seems, cannot function in this space. A civilization organized around visibility, measurement, and control depends on the world remaining quantitatively legible. When clarity precedes action and mastery comes before motion, darkness does not invite exploration—it halts movement altogether. The plague of darkness does not free the Egyptians; it disables the perceptual regime that makes enslavement possible.

And only once that regime begins to break down can Israel begin to move. The liberation of the Israelites does not begin with a map, but with movement into the unknown; not with sight, but with trust. We mark our doorposts in the dark. We step into a wilderness across which we cannot see, we embark on a journey that cannot be planned for, predicted, or perceived in advance.

The darkness does not harm the Israelites. It does not destroy Egypt. It simply reveals which bodies and systems can move when certainty disappears, and which cannot. A system built entirely on oversight freezes when perception fails. A people learning to live with mystery are able to move.

We often imagine that the opposite of darkness is light. But here, the opposite of this kind of darkness may actually be mastery. And what is being stripped away is the illusion that we must fully see—that is, to know —in order to go forward.

This feels deeply relevant right now. Personally. Communally. Collectively. We are living in a time when old structures no longer hold, but new ones are not yet visible. When insight does not immediately translate into action. When clarity lags behind necessity. Often, our instinct is to yearn, to pray, to beg for the light to return.

But Parshat Bo suggests something else. That sometimes the inability to see is not a failure, but a condition of transition. That some thresholds cannot be crossed by vision alone. That freedom may require learning how to feel our way forward in the dark.

So perhaps the question this parsha leaves us with is not: How do we bring back the light?
But rather: What kind of perception is being asked of us now?
What senses are we being invited to practice using and develop when our familiar ways of knowing no longer work?

Because even in the vast darkness of space—between distant galaxies—light has never disappeared. The residue of beginning still vibrates through the universe, even if we cannot see it. And so, too, in the course of history, in our personal lives and our collective life as a people, there are moments when light is present but cannot yet be made visible—moments that cannot be illuminated on our terms or in ways we have become accustomed to. They must be entered in the dark: without mastery, without guarantees, without sight.

And that, the Torah seems to suggest, is not the opposite of redemption.

It is how redemption begins.