A day is coming that is neither day nor night / קָרֵב יוֹם אֲשֶׁר הוּא לֹא יוֹם וְלֹא לַיְלָה
In 2017, as I began working as a geriatric chaplain, the world was on fire as those newly elected to power in America began dismantling already weak protections for vulnerable populations and places. My heart sank as the seniors I worked with, though they lived through so much tumult - war, genocide, economic catastrophe – began to express cynicism about our collective future.
The headlines I read projected and detailed the doom and gloom scenarios many of us began to believe were imminent. The stories I internalized offered me strident surety where, in fact, there was none. Like many, I found myself beginning to trade hope for certainty as a way to cope with the discomfort of prolonged uncertainty.
Interrogating our drive to know our future, even if our predictions are bleak, and the task itself, impossible - Rebecca Solnit, in her book Hope in the Dark, writes,
“Authentic hope requires [not only] clarity – seeing the troubles in this world – [but also] imagination, seeing what might lie beyond these situations that are perhaps not inevitable and immutable.”
Though we continue to move through turbulent times - and horrible things we never could have predicted did happen - it is also worth noting many of the worst case scenarios we imagined back in 2017 never actually took place.
Solnit argues, in our fantasies of what is to come, for keeping our eyes open not only to worst case scenarios, but to equally unimaginable positive outcomes: “We cannot forget the hopeful possibilities that are often hidden away in the twilit margins until the very moment they are most needed.” How do we open ourselves to the world not only as it is, not only as we worry it might be, but as we hope it could be? The answer, Solnit suggests, waits for us in the twilight.
In Jewish tradition, the period beyn ha’shemashot (literally, “between the suns”), is the rabbinic legal term for the period between sunset and nightfall, when the day has not yet ended and the night has not yet begun. A lesser known meaning of twilight refers to the time between the end of the night and sunrise, when the night has not yet ended and the day has not yet begun.
Jewish tradition considers twilight an in-between, transitional time separate from day and night, with mystical rules and characteristics entirely its own. Most notably, twilight, and specifically the twilight on the sixth day of creation, just before Shabbat, is when G-d created ten wondrous things, including the staff that parted the Red Sea, the Shamir, a miraculous worm that could split wood and stone, and the Tablets the Ten Commandments were written on, which were extremely heavy, but miraculously got light enough for the Israelites to carry them through the desert for 40 years (Pirke Avot 5:6).
At the very last moment before creation was complete, G-d deposits ten seemingly ordinary objects on earth for the eventual time humanity would come to need them. Rabbeinu Yonah, a 13th century commentator, says about these objects:
“all the Holy One created, was created on condition that it changes its nature…at a time when it is needed.”
“…כל מה שברא הקב"ה על תנאי…שישתנו טבעם בשעת הצריכה”
Though creation was complete, its full potential was waiting to be unlocked.
From an ecological perspective, these objects, though by all appearances common – sticks, worms, stones – respond creatively to their environment when the system they are situated within needs to undergo a radical change in order to go on existing. As mycologist Dr. Sheldrake observes: “In difficult times, organisms find new symbiotic relationships in order to expand their reach.”
But just as mushrooms’ magic is inscrutable without people like Dr. Sheldrake documenting their behavior, and the wondrous relationships they form with their environment, these twilight objects are nothing without our capacity to notice them. In this way, G-d partners with us by inviting us to creatively activate the objects around us by becoming sensitive to, curious about, what is around us.
As awake as we may become to our surroundings, that there are three other slightly different lists of twilight objects in Jewish tradition (Mekhilta DeRabbi Yishmael Shemot 16:32, Sifre Devarim 33:21, Bavli Pesachim 54a) suggests, in addition to mushrooms, there are likely more twilight objects out there than we may ever know, things that become animated by new purpose, new life when they are needed in new ways – waiting to reveal themselves in moments we believe we’ve run out of options.
What else around us is yet to have its creative potential unlocked? In order to find out, we need to peer into the twilight – the murky, ungraspable space between day and night. We attune to this space by activating it within ourselves, tapping into our own inherent creativity in order to open our eyes to the world of the in-between so we might begin to see the supernatural within the natural, the sacred shimmering through the seemingly ordinary – and draw out what is waiting for us at the world’s twilit margins.
Pen to paper, brush on canvas, fingers working knitting needles or clay, wood or stone, we awaken something from its slumber, dormant from the dawn of creation until this moment. As we engage in the creative process, we ask the materials before us “what else can this be?” We begin by gathering our materials, working them – until the moment we hardly notice, when we free our hands to be moved by what wants to come through, carrying us beyond our limited conceptual framework that had us locked in the binaries of self and other, day and night, ending and beginning.
This process allows us to step into a state of flow, famously described by psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz.” In this state we open up to other possibilities that can only be found in the twilit world of the in-between.
Ancient ideas and materials take on renewed vitality when we are in flow, images, shapes, textures, light and dark pouring out of us through whatever medium we work with. As it gains definition and form, we recognize in it our connection to something bigger and beyond ourselves, to generations before us that crossed seas, worked land, built homes – people we may never know who created options for us they could hardly imagine for themselves.
Only through practices like this, which allow us to relax our grasp on our habitual way of knowing our world, can something new happen, new life and creativity emerge. This is how we partner with G-d – the ultimate Creator – to bring transformation and healing to our world. As we attune to the creative potential around us, the symbioses and adaptations all creation undergoes, despite our limiting expectations of it, we strengthen and are strengthened by the way it continually course-corrects to move, wondrously, toward life.
This is how we bring about the world as it could be, a day, according to a 6th century liturgical poem by Yannai, אֲשֶׁר הוּא לֹא יוֹם וְלֹא לַיְלָה / “that is neither day nor night.” A day where binaries dissolve, and all life is finally able to unfold as one vast vibrant organism. At this potent time of year as the days grow longer, may we each, in our own way, heed the call to remember the love and transformation that is hidden in the invisible margins of this world, and to renew our commitment to ground our lives in care for ourselves and the more than human world of which we are part, and in partnership with our Creative Source.