Treasures of Darkness Day 23: Job 3:5
“Afterward, Job began to speak and cursed the day of his birth. Job spoke up and said:
‘Perish the day on which I was born,
And the night it was announced,
“A male has been conceived!”
May that day be darkness;
May God above have no concern for it;
May light not shine on it;
May darkness and deep gloom reclaim it;
May a pall lie over it;
May what blackens the day terrify it.
May obscurity carry off that night;
May it not be counted among the days of the year;
May it not appear in any of its months;
May that night be desolate;
May no sound of joy be heard in it;
May those who cast spells upon the day damn it,
Those prepared to disable Leviathan;
May its twilight stars remain dark;
May it hope for light and have none;
May it not see the glimmerings of the dawn —
Because it did not block my mother’s womb,
And hide trouble from my eyes.
Why did I not die at birth,
Expire as I came forth from the womb?
Why were there knees to receive me,
Or breasts for me to suck?
For now would I be lying in repose, asleep and at rest,
With the world’s kings and counselors who rebuild ruins for themselves,
Or with nobles who possess gold and who fill their houses with silver.
Or why was I not like a buried stillbirth,
Like babies who never saw the light?
There the wicked cease from troubling;
There rest those whose strength is spent.
Prisoners are wholly at ease;
They do not hear the taskmaster’s voice.
Small and great alike are there,
And the slave is free of his master.
Why does He give light to the sufferer
And life to the bitter in spirit;
To those who wait for death but it does not come,
Who search for it more than for treasure,
Who rejoice to exultation,
And are glad to reach the grave;
To the man who has lost his way,
Whom God has hedged about?
My groaning serves as my bread;
My roaring pours forth as water.
For what I feared has overtaken me;
What I dreaded has come upon me.
I had no repose, no quiet, no rest,
And trouble came.” (Job, chapter 3, NJPS)
Even for those completely uninitiated to the Judeo-Christian scriptures, the central themes of this famous text are likely familiar-who among us has not known the bone-crushing despair that drives us to our knees and causes us to curse the day we were born? Who among us does not know how it feels to beg G-d, or the universe, or whatever unnamed and unknowable forces might be “out there” to just end our suffering, to envelop us in a black cloak of unknowing, where we might finally be at peace?
As universal as this experience is, it is also profoundly specific. The history of darkness in the Western World has been, since its very beginnings, one in which darkness of skin virtually ensured a life of inescapable suffering. This suffering has been, throughout most of that history, perpetuated by the church and bolstered by its teachings around darkness and light, holiness and evil, purity and sin. One need never to have picked up a bible nor set foot in a church to know that for Christians, White is Right.
Some of that guilt cannot be shouldered by the church, of course. Some of it is hard-wired. For hominids, darkness equals a diminishment of safety. It’s a simple fact of our physiology. When we can’t see, we stumble over furniture, we get eaten by animals whose night vision is superior, we quake at monsters, real or imagined, lurking under our beds. And I always wonder, was that simply a design flaw, or was that intentional on the part of our creator? Why do we have this deeply ingrained association between darkness and fear? Why, if scripture is G-d breathed, is it full of language designed to convince us that the way in which more than 2/3 of the global population was created is somehow faulty? If darkness is so damn terrible, why the hell did you make us like this, O Adonai!?!
The older I get, the more convinced I become that it wasn’t a mistake. That perhaps darkness was supposed to be connected to suffering, and loss, and fear, and death. Perhaps we Black and Brown people-our lives, our terrors, our very physical beings, are emblematic for a characteristic of the cosmos. And what if, because it was ordained by The One who ordains all things, this caliginous existence of ours is as much of a blessing as it is a curse?
One inescapable feature of darkness is that, for humans, it tends to fix us in place. If you can’t see, you can’t travel very far unassisted-this is not to disparage in any way the profound abilities and independence of blind and visually impaired people, but simply to assert that lack of visual acuity often brings with it a requirement for restrictions of unaided movement. As a severely visually-impaired person myself, I am learning this more every day. As I examine my own reactions to my degenerative corneal condition, I recognize more and more that my terror at going blind is really about the fact that it would force me to acknowledge that I’m not actually totally in control of the world around me. Much as we might try to escape that reality with ever-advancing technology, the simple fact remains that darkness does a pretty good job of removing our illusions of independence and control. And maybe, just maybe-that’s as it should be?
In addiction recovery communities, there is a well-known adage-’If you don’t know what to do, do nothing.” Perhaps that’s what darkness does. Perhaps that’s what we, as the people of darkness, are here to do-to teach the world how to shelter in place and to confront the fact of our utter helplessness. To finally recognize and accept the fact that we are so fucking alone, and frightened, and helpless that the only thing we possibly could to is to Trust in The One who can see when we cannot.
So. If we, the Black and beautiful children of Adonai are destined to suffer, if we are destined to serve as visual representations of the helplessness of all mankind, what can be gained from our witness? Perhaps it is none other than complete union with the Divine, that state of being in which we, finally driven to a state in which we “behold naught, without light or guide, save that which burns in our hearts,” might finally see, not with our eyes, but with ecstatic souls, in which light has been extinguished, that we might be forced to caress our way to Holy Truth.
