The Womb of Catastrophe in Jewish Time

Every great moment in Jewish history has emerged from the broken ribs of disaster. This is

not irony. This is not misfortune. This is not cruelty. This is mystery.

The mystery of how light does not flee darkness, but gestates within it.

From the first breath of creation, we were taught this truth:

“And there was evening, and there was morning—day.”

Not light and then dark, but dark before light. Always, the day begins with night.

This is the rhythm of redemption.

Before Abraham heard the call, he wandered among idols and fires.

Before Sinai trembled, Egypt groaned under whips.

Before the Temple rose, there was blood and wilderness.

Before Purim, there was decree.

Before Hanukkah, desecration.

Before the Six Day War, the world held its breath at the edge of annihilation.

Before the Holocaust, silence.

This is not coincidence.

This is how birth works.

The Jewish soul is not naïve. It has looked death in the face too many times to speak of redemption lightly. But it knows that pain does not have the final word.

It never has.

It never will.

Every catastrophe is a contraction. A tightening of the world’s breath. A tzimtzum.

The mystics knew this. That in order to create, God withdrew—collapsed inward—so the finite could emerge within the infinite.

From the void came existence.

From exile, Torah.

From tears, song.

Even the greatest collapse—the breaking of the vessels in the primordial world of Tohu—was not an accident. It was a shattering by design. Because there are lights too vast for their first containers. Because to make a world that can hold God, even God had to allow something to break.

And we, the descendants of dust and breath, continue this pattern.

We wander. We fall. We are exiled. We are scattered. We are wept over by prophets. We are bound on altars by history.

And yet we rise. Not in spite of the fall, but because of it.

We rise bearing sparks from the depths.

We rise with language forged in silence.

We rise with eyes that have seen the underside of the world and still look upward.

This is not optimism.

This is not resilience.

This is prophecy fulfilled in the marrow of our being.

That from every descent, there will come ascent.

That even the exile is for the sake of redemption.

That even the serpent will one day be lifted on a staff and turned to healing.

The light that emerges from darkness is not a timid flicker.

It is a flame that knows what it cost to burn.

It is messianic not because it rescues us from suffering,

but because it redeems suffering itself.

This is why the Messiah is born at midnight.

Why he waits at the gates of Rome, among the ruins.

Why he is covered in wounds.

Because he does not come from heaven untouched.

He comes from within history’s wreckage,

carrying our sorrow like a secret name.

And so we are taught not to despise the darkness.

We are taught to walk into it.

To gather what has fallen.

To hold the fragments like seeds.

Because every great moment in Jewish time was planted in night.

And we are the children of morning.

Not born in light,

but born through it—

rising from dust, from graves, from ghettos, from fire.

This is the unbearable beauty of our history:

That no darkness has swallowed us.

That no silence has silenced us.

That no fall has ended the story.

Because light, real light,

does not begin in brightness.

It begins in the heart of what was broken.

And then it speaks, gently but without end:

Let there be light.

And there is.

And there will be.

And it is good.

~ YCM Gray, 7 Tammuz 5785