Vigils Reading – Holy Saturday

A Flash in the Darkness7
From the writings of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel

There is a loneliness in us that hears. When the soul parts from the company of the ego and its retinue of petty conceits; when we cease to exploit all things but instead pray the world’s cry, the world’s sigh, our loneliness may hear the living grace beyond all power. We must first peer into the darkness, feel strangled and entombed in the hopelessness of living without God, before we are ready to feel the presence of His living light…When ignorance and confusion blot out all thoughts, the light of God may suddenly bust forth in the mind like a rainbow in the sky. Our understanding of the greatness of God comes about as an act of illumination… “like a lightning that all of a sudden illumines the whole world, God illumines the mind of man, enabling him to understand the greatness of our Creator.” This is what is meant by the words of the Psalmist: “He sent out His arrows and scattered [the clouds]; He shot forth lightnings and discomfited them.” The darkness retreats, “The channels of water appeared, the foundations of the world were laid bare”.

…Reminders of what has been disclosed to us are hanging over our souls like stars, remote and of mind-surpassing grandeur. They shine through dark and dangerous ages, and their reflection can be seen in the lives of those who guard the path of conscience and memory in the wilderness of careless living. Since those perennial reminders have moved into our minds, wonder has never left us. Heedfully we stare through the telescope of ancient rites lest we lose the perpetual brightness beckoning to our souls. Our mind has not kindled the flame, has not produced these principles. Still our thoughts glow with their light…

Every one of us stood at the foot of Sinai and beheld the voice that proclaimed, I am the Lord thy God. Every one of us participated in saying, We shall do and we shall hear…Then the startling moment occurred: God appeared to Moses “in a flame of fire out of the bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush wasburning, yet it was not consumed”. In the face of that startling fact, Moses said: “I will turn aside and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.”… A new element was brought into being: fire that burns but does not consume. It indicated a new order in God’s relation to man, namely, that to reveal He must conceal, that to impart His wisdom He must hide His power. It made revelation possible…

Unless we learn how to appreciate and distinguish moments of time as we do things of space, unless we become sensitive to the uniqueness of individual events, the meaning of revelation will remain obscure… Two stones, two things in space may be alike; two hours in a person’s life or two ages in human history are never alike… Absurd it must be to all those who have no sense for the uniqueness that is in time, for the uniqueness of what happens in time. Why indeed, should one hour out of an infinite number of hours be of particular importance to the history of man?…

The lack of realism, the insistence upon generalizations at the price of a total disregard of the particular and concrete is something which would be alien to prophetic thinking… Theirs is not a timeless, abstract message; it always refers to an actual situation. The general is given in the particular, and the verification of the abstract is in the concrete