Drash – Bo

Rabbi Dean Shapiro

Beth Shalom, Auckland, New Zealand

It’s the longest night ever.

“In the middle of the night YHVH struck down all the [male] first-born in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the first-born of the captive who was in the dungeon, and all the first-born of the cattle (Exodus 12:29).”

Why does the Death of the First Born take place at night?

Night is that mysterious time when darkness cloaks the earth and boundaries blur. Our eyes aren’t designed for darkness; we fear most what we cannot see. That’s why night is so unpredictable, so terrifying. Night is when predators – both real and fantastical – hunt, making the world dangerous to us human beings. We pray for God to watch over us through the night, because that’s when we need it most. But we also know that God’s protection can be like a sukkah – that is, incomplete.

Nighttime has long been a symbol of endings, of death. “Lights out,” we say.

The “Dark Night of the Soul” describes those times in our lives full of seemingly unbearable anguish, turmoil, and confusion. After an especially difficult loss or unexpected change, we are challenged in the most profound, even existential ways. Can I survive? What’s left for me? What’s left of me? The Dark Night of the Soul feels like death because it is a death. It is the death of identity, of possibility, of our understanding of the world and our place in it. In our pain, something of us is purged.

If we can endure the Dark Night of the Soul, and allow ourselves to feel our feelings, to pray, to wait, something new might emerge. Indeed, we can become stronger for having borne and integrated the pain. We are unmade and then, if we survive, remade. Even as night devours day, so too does it give birth to light, life, and the stirrings of possibility.

“Min hametzar karati Ya – Out of the depths I cried out to Ya,” David sang. “Anani bamerchav Ya – Ya answered me and brought relief” (Psalm 118:5).

The Death of the First Born is a Dark Night of the Soul. It’s when four hundred years of pain inflicted on others by Egypt returns to its source. It’s when the nation realizes at last who it’s been and how it’s behaved. The old system can no longer hold. It must die, but it will not go gently. A penalty must be paid.

Psychologically, the Dark Night of the Soul marks the death of Ego – that powerful sense of self as master over all it surveys. During the Dark Night of the Soul, the Ego must confront the limits of its power. It is not a fortress, not in control of the world. It is not even in control of itself. The Ego’s false sense of totality must die.

Reading the Torah with a Psycho-Spiritual lens, Pharoah personifies the Ego. Pharoah bends the world to his wishes. He asserts his will over humankind, even over values like Justice and Fairness. Like the sun, Pharoah sees himself as the singularity around which all else must orbit. This is what children and narcissists do, their egos unchecked.

The vanquishing of Pharoah at midnight is a mythopoetic description of the dissolving of Ego into the greater Consciousness that is God. God is the Everything, the great unknowable mystery, the vast and awesome wonder of which we are all part. God subsumes the transient and intransigent “I” that imagines it exists both separate from everything else and at the centre of it all.

The story is a metaphor for the Ego’s hopeless quest to assert its dominance, and of the painful realisation that it is “outmatched by something grander” (Fatimi, Valeon, 27.10.2025).

As the poet Rainer Maria Rikle describes it,

You, darkness, of whom I am born 

I love you more that the flame
that limits the world
to the circle it illuminates
and excludes all the rest.

But the dark embraces everything:
shapes and shadows, creatures and me,
people, nations–just as they are.

It lets me imagine
a great presence stirring beside me.

I believe in the night