The Portion of Bo is about darkness, the kind that breaks systems. The Torah describes a cascade when a civilization confuses its source of light. Locusts cover the land until [Shemot 10:15] “it is darkened,” stripping Egypt of green and hope. Pharaoh finally begs Moshe to remove [Shemot 10:17] “this death,” a famine on a blackened horizon. Next comes darkness [Shemot 10:21–23]: “[The Egyptians] did not see one another and no one rose from his place for three days, while Israel had light in its homes.” The sequence culminates at midnight when the firstborn die [Shemot 12:29–30]: “There was a great outcry, for there was not a house without someone dead.” Read together, this is a progression from degraded visibility to paralysis to the termination of life. Egypt’s own officials warn Pharaoh [Shemot 10:7]: “Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?” When the instruments say the system is failing and you still cannot see it, darkness is already in the machine. This is not random punishment but pedagogy aimed at Egypt and at us. The Torah tells this story in the language of sight so that we will audit our own sources of light before the cascade begins.

To understand what is going on, we must speak Egyptian for a moment. In their cosmos, light meant existence and order; darkness meant chaos and the edge of nonbeing. Each night the sun‑god Ra sailed the Duat and battled Apophis, the world‑encircling serpent. If Apophis prevailed, dawn would not come. Now let’s return to the eighth plague: the locusts do not merely eat, they darken the land until not a green thing remains. Pharaoh’s “remove this death” confesses that in a world where light is life, a blackened landscape is death already moving. The Torah also reminds us from the outset that light is not solar property but [Bereishit 1:3–4] a spoken word of G-d.

The ninth plague makes it explicit [Shemot 10:21]: “A darkness that can be felt” means more than vision loss. Orientation and relationship are cut off. People do not see one another and do not rise for three days. When a society’s supposed light fails, movement stops, communication collapses, initiative dies. Then comes a verse that changes........

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