It’s Dark, It’s Scary, and It’s the Place Where the Light Gets In

If we allow ourselves to feel fear and angst, we can embrace the possibilities present in chaos and challenge.

by Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone

All the rapid changes afoot in the world today can easily overwhelm us.

Wherever we call home on this glorious planet, there exist forces that threaten to destabilize the very elements that give us life and freedom. Yet being a spiritual warrior at this time in world history means calling upon the many spiritual tools available to us to offset the chaotic influences affecting us now.

I have found it helpful to remind myself what the philosophers and mystics of so many spiritual traditions teach: None of us is here by accident. While we might feel lost, or drowning in the daily barrage of breaking news alerts, or helpless to affect change, the Perennial Wisdom tells us: No, our souls intentionally chose to come here at this time.

Moreover, each of us has some unique contribution to make that can help tip the balance toward more love, light, and life on our planet.

I love the paradoxical wisdom of my own ancestral tradition. In the ancient Jewish teachings, we learn that all beginnings emerge from chaos and darkness.

For example, the Jewish New Year begins in the dark of the autumn new moon, just as the light of the northern hemisphere has begun to wane. Creation itself, the biblical myths tell us, comes out of utter chaos and void. And even the mystical origin stories in the Judaic tradition teach us that a colossal cosmic event (not unlike the Big Bang) birthed our world, which is inherently dark and broken.

You might be asking: But why are we here in a benighted world so full of loss and breakage? Especially when our natural inclination is to turn to the light and the warmth of sunshine, to illuminating feelings like love and friendship! Why do our spiritual practices give us glimmers of bliss, experiences of ancestral love, the inherent unity of creation? How are we to make sense of a world that is turning increasingly disconnected, polarized, and bleak?

In the Kabbalistic myth I mentioned above, our world is described as a place full of broken vessels. But paradoxically, it is through the very breakage in this world — “the crack in everything” that poet Leonard Cohen sings about — that the light gets in and can shine through into our world.

Imagine broken clay pots everywhere, and a place full of sharp shards. Or closer to our current reality, visualize a town where a bomb has fallen, now full of fallen walls and rubble. The Kabbalistic myth tells us that our soul work is to look behind the broken outer layers — the shattering traumatic events of our lives, our family’s history, our terrifying world. It says: Don’t be afraid or deterred! Behind every broken fragment, there are hidden sparks of light waiting to be found and liberated.

The 13th-century mystical text called The Book of Splendor, The Zohar, reminds us: “There is no light that can exist without darkness, and no darkness without light (Zohar I 31b-32a).” The dark parts of life cannot be skipped or bypassed.

These are the hard initiatory edges of growth that we must visit on our human journey if we are to grow. These places are scary because the ego is not in control, but they are the places of possibility within ourselves, hiding some new, still unseen beginning from our eyes. If we don’t run from them, but allow ourselves to feel our fear, our angst, our total loss of understanding, they will reveal themselves in due time and bring forth new light.

I remember being pregnant with my daughter some three decades ago. The impenetrable mystery, or as St. John of the Cross put it, “the cloud of unknowing” that hovered over those nine months felt insufferable. What felt like an alien force that had taken over my body — the loss of control, the need to trust what I did not know, and on and on — threatened my ego to an insane degree. How had women done this (and some even enjoying it) since time immemorial?

I use this common example as one of the deep internal processes we must go through as human beings when we encounter — and ultimately must surrender to — the unknown.

Our egos do not like it. In fact, we might feel like we are going to die.

The Jewish, Sufi, and Hindu mystics taught that sprinkled along the spiritual path are experiences of radical surrender. A kind of “mini-death,” if you will, when we are unable to see the path ahead but when we must hold faith.

These are the experiences that we must seize — a kind of practice ground, to trust that light is hidden and will re-emerge.

“Die before you die, so that when you die, you will not die,” Rabbi Jonah of Gerondi of the 13th century taught. If we can hold a tiny candle of faith at such times, and move forward, sparks of light will inevitably show up, glittering in the hard places.

The modern prophet Audre Lorde wrote about the ancient dark places within us as places of possibility.

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through darkness. Within these deep places, each one of us holds an incredible reserve of creativity and power, of unexamined and unrecorded emotion and feeling (Lorde 1984, 36–37).

Our world needs spiritual warriors now, those who are willing to penetrate the darkness and clamor of our outer world, and liberate their creativity and power.

This work is both inner and outer, dark and scary yet — as the mystics all tell us — can yield a new chapter of wisdom for humanity and for our earth.

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Rabbi Dr. Tirzah Firestone is an author, Jungian psychotherapist, and renowned Jewish scholar and teacher. Widely known for her groundbreaking work on Kabbalah, depth psychology, intergenerational trauma healing, and the re-integration of the feminine wisdom tradition within Judaism, Rabbi Tirzah lectures and teaches globally about spiritual and ancient wisdom practices that are honed to assist us at this critical time in world history. Her publications include With Roots in Heaven: One Woman’s Passionate Journey into the Heart of Her Faith and The Receiving: Reclaiming Jewish Women’s Wisdom.