“I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.”
T.S. Eliot
The sun breaks above the razor horizon, a pink sliver at first, peeking, sheepishly, as if testing the landscape's response.
The clouds part like a curtain for the day's visitor.
She cares not what we think or feel. She gives her radiance and the world benefits — the pastures, the canopies, the fauna warmed in lakes and rivers, the mating season owing its loves to her.
And she cares not if she also burns, parches the deserts, kills millions in a heatwave.
Oblivious to pole or equator she is just there, punctually, daily, predictably, calculably, years ahead, her entrances and her exits fixed — while we argue incessantly over the exact moment she enters the vilon.
It is up to us, the receivers, to enjoy her and to shade from her, never to gaze directly for fear of blindness.
It occurred to me this morning that my metaphor of the divine has been faulty all along, soiled by philosophy, theodicy, history, and my people's victimhood (look at us, mere decades ago) — that for a moment I might step into nature instead and look back at this azure globe from out there, propelled through the dark with its sisters in an orbital dance around her, a precision of distance and nearness just sufficient for life and love.
Moses warned the people not to come too close. Fire leapt from the Tabernacle at those who did. And in the sinful future, he said, the face would hide — hester panim — and every calamity would follow.
But the eclipse is built into the very fabric of the orbit. It is bound to occur, calculably, through no fault of our own, the sun hidden, patiently waiting to re-emerge and take charge once again.
Order proceeds.
Chaos is forgotten.
The world returns to where it was — the wasteland, the trauma, burnished in the soul of the he who recovers — and once she reigns it is as if nothing had happened.
The day comes.
The day goes.
Sunrise and sunset resume.
Is it possible this sun reflects the divine not only in nature but in her relation to history — to us?
“Eclipse of the light of heaven, eclipse of God-such indeed is the character of the historic hour through which the world is passing. But it is not a process which can be adequately accounted for by instancing the changes that have taken place in man’s spirit.
An eclipse of the sun is something that occurs between the sun and our eyes, not in the sun itself….But when, as in this instance, something is taking place between heaven and earth, one misses everything when one insists on discovering within earthly thought the power that unveils the mystery.
He who refuses to submit himself to the effective reality of the transcendence as such—our vis-à-vis—contributes to the human responsibility for the eclipse.”
Martin Buber