A Soft Mystical Light Shines Brightly in Anthony Doerrs All the Light We Cannot See
Just finished reading All the Light We Cannot See. About a month ago, one of my aunts, visiting from New York borrowed it. Unbeknownst to her I had only twenty pages left to the end. I found myself unwilling to complete the downloaded Kindle version. Even after it was returned, it took a while to resume reading. Eventually I picked it up again, randomly backing up about a hundred pages or so. I ended the book, strangely, on Simchat Torah, coinciding with the time that we read the final portion of Deuteronomy and the completion of the annual Torah reading cycle.
For me the gift of a good book is in the ways it moves me, stirring me upward toward the places I know I must go, to be an improved version of me. This book achieved that, and much much more.
The parallels end here though, with the simultaneous endings.
As good as this or any book is, when I’m done, it gets returned to the shelf. It might catch my eye, causing me to grin momentarily, I might even pull it off the shelf, but I won’t stand, head bowed, chanting a solemn tribute song to it beforehand. I won’t scroll back to page one, to learn about the very beginning of it all, nor will I read a different paragraph from it, each week for the rest of the year, certainly not for the rest of my life. I will not softly brush its pages lovingly with the tassels on the fringe of my prayer shawl, nor will I close my eyes, as I bring those Tzitizit to my lips, kissing and praying, blessings of graditude for the gift of having a sacred vocabulary, words unlike others, resonating with otherworldliness, yet still utterable by me, by my mouth, audible to my ears, understandable to my mind, words very much here in my world; and then head lowered in humility as I am prayed for, the soft earthiness of a “Mi Shebayrach” surrounds me, first a blessing for my wife, then each child’s name mentioned in association with mine, part of my name, each one individually, a compact blessing that manages somehow to span a lifetime, as my whole personal history stretches out in front of me, reading like my personal extension of the very same scroll waiting patiently on the Bimah, offering its own silent consent of Amen, while the Gabbai scans the room for the next person to be called, so the reading can resume.
Still, this book resonates with an ancient sense of familiarity, reading like a prayerful passage from my childhood, stirring me into the forging of an unexpected, but fully welcomed kinship, one reserved only for the most sacred books of my tradition. A book that should it fall, I might kiss upon picking it up.
As I prepare to finally transition away from over a month of being in the hot glare of the Jewish High holidays, the Yamim Noraim, the days of “Awesomeness,” are abruptly shelved as well. The pilgrimage must come to end, the big lights are suddenly turned off, signaling that its finally time to go back home.
The first Torah portion after the holidays, sets that precise tone. As we read the creation narrative yet again, we too are IN the narrative, left to navigate a world suddenly thrust into an existential Tohu Vavohu, mirroring the primordial chaos, as well as one in which darkfall actually sets in, earlier and earlier each week, a return to “Choshech” (darkness) and a crossing over the threshold, into the Hebrew month of “Cheshvan,” both words beginning with the hebrew letter Chet, a letter which unlike the Hay, traps the light that it receives, till suffocated, it is stripped of its brightness, and only then re — released from beneath the Chet, is cast out “Al Pnai Kol Haaretz” (“upon the face of all the earth) a blackness that envelopes and encompasses the full landscapes of all our lives.
Last Wed, — at about nine pm, we too lost our light as the entire town was plunged, briefly, into utter darkness, some sort of surreal actual blackout, a perfect prop for the existential tapering off of the high octane spiritual energy of the last sixty days, the last flickering flame of the holiday slowly dances itself out, as if it was presiding ceremoniously over its own demise.
This multi dimensional blackout, is also described by the Kabbalists in the creation narrative read on the very first Shabbat after the holidays. G-d creates a light in the very beginning, but quickly “realizes” that its glare is simply overwhelming, and would certainly shatter the frail human awareness, so he withdraws the light and he too “shelves” it in Olam-Habah, the “World to come” where only the “righteous” can gaze at it safely.
In the “blink of an eye” we are all young Marie-Claire, trying to adjust to what feels like a darkness. Suddenly thrust into a new world where the light is there, but has been hidden, requires the summoning of a different kind of adroitness, one needed to maneuver through a world whose light we cannot see.
This rush of so much that is ANTI — climactic, carries some powerful life truth. The cycle of experiencing a period of joy, followed by a plunge into sadness, or knowing a string of failures following in the wake of success, or the way a person who sees things with a stunning clarity, always possessing a deft sure-footedness, is suddenly and inexplicably plagued by doubt; can be challenging, but need not be paralyzing.
The shifting of outer circumstances, should not spell an automatic shifting away from, nor a shelving of ones soulfulness — to the contrary, approached with the correct Kabbalistic mindfulness, the sudden loss of the light that we are accustomed to, can facilitate a pointing to, and a switching on of an inner refracted shade of that original light, allowing for a new way of seeing, a different way to stand in the world.
The way each of Doerrs carefully wrought characters plunge head on into the heart of the circumstances that led to the hiddenness of their light in the first place, helps us understand an underlying truth about the dynamics of redemption, the nature of light, and the paradox of needing to befriend the very darkness, that acts as the dubious guardian of our light. Much like the way the Menorah was stolen by the “Vandals” in the sacking of Rome in 455 CE, and taken to their capital, Carthage, for protection. Often the places that hold our deepest trauma, the places that we instinctively run from, that cause us to recoil in terror, are precisely the direction we need to head back to, they are the “Carthage” in possession of our light. We go there in order to wrest power from the “vandals,” we go back to unlock and retrieve our hidden light, to reclaim the very best of who and what we used to be, and can still be again.
For example, if we, like Werner, are burdened with guilt, then we can choose to allow our light to remain in the captivity of our shame. This however begins a vicious cycle, one in which our imaginary guilt compels us to actually act guilt worthy. For him it was the crime of remaining on the sidelines, filled with ambition, he chose moral ambivalence.In this way he too was buried, existentially, in the “coal mines of Zollverein” alongside his dead father. Or, we can choose to dig out from under the accumulated debris of time, and circumstance, and learn to live again.
For Werner, that meant accepting the possibility of an alternative way of narrating his life as he measures his failure, beginining to see what his sister sees naturally — “…the only person who could see through all that stage craft was his sister. How? How did Jutta know so much more about the world about how the world worked? While he knew so little?” …” To be sure, the only thing worse than being unhappy, was the unbearable realization of how close he was to experiencing that happiness all along. He was free to live without taking on needless guilt for his fathers tragic death — the guilt that held the keys to his light. He also knows that though difficult, it is possible to act heroically, like his friend Frederick; he’s seen it, “his heart is being crushed slowly like in a vise” — but he turned his face, and went along with what he knew was evil, the voice of His conscience, coming to him in the innocent voice of his sister Jutta, “….he thinks, I will never be able to talk to her about this…”) is heard, but doesn't register — in blocking out her voice, she becomes part of the light that he CHOOSES, not to see, smothering his own innocence, under the the coal mines of his guilt.
Ultimately he finds himself at a crossroads. Like his father, he lies barely alive, gasping beneath the rubble. Beneath the collapsed hotel, and beneath the existential weight of his guilt as well, he has finally descended into his own coal mine. Still, in the end He chooses to break free. He is able to do so only after he suddenly catches a glimpse of his own soul. The light that begins filtering through the rubble, was not visual, it was a light too sublime too see, a light that could only be heard! Only through sound, in this case, the voice of Jutta, “…but Jutta has laid a hand on his shoulder and is whispering him awake” combined with the voice of Marie broadcasting over the radio, does he gradually begin his surface. She is reading about Captain Nemo, she is as trapped as he was, “We were suspended in the water, but ten meters on each side of the Nautilus rose a shining wall of ice. Above and below there was the same wall.” Then she “switches the dial” to her own entrapment, “He is here. Right below me. He hears her reading the final lines of her Braille book “Thus is that question asked six thousand years ago by Ecclesiastes, “That which is far off, and exceedingly deep, who can find it out?” only two men have that answer now Captain Nemo and myself.” Those lofty sentiments traveling toward him, encased in invisible particles of sound waves, begin to break through, as he asks himself, and answers the same question. Finally the light begins to surface, from all the different burial grounds of his life, from beneath the sadness over the loss of his father, his guilt over the way his ambition “blinded him” as well, from beneath the weight of all the ghosts trailing after him through the countryside, slowly with the surprising assistance of Volkheimer “Go says Volkheimer again. Werner looks at him a last time: his torn jacket and shovel jaw. The tenderness of his big hands. What you could be.” …he starts to squeeze through the rubble and the cracks, guided by the sounds, he begins to wind his way through the narrowness, gradually beginning to loosen all the accumulated emotional tightness of his life.
A perfect symbol for the place in each of us where that light lives, and always shines, is the light of “Ner Tamid,” (eternal lamp of the ancient Temple) a light that can never be extinguished, even when we too are in the Nautilus, trapped by the same “ten meters of ice rising up like a shining wall on each side of us, ..from above and below as well” — In that moment we are Nachshon Ben Aminadav, and Captain Nemo, in the ways we learn to discover the Ner Tamid, that burns within us as well. A light that cannot be snuffed out by any act or experience. A light that, unlike the others, is so sublime, that it can never be hidden, even by G-d himself, the master hider; for even G-d can run only to a certain point, after which he can longer hide, or he forfeits his right to call himself G-d — he can only camouflage himself to the point where more hiddenness would mean he is himself extinguished, ceasing to even BE G-d.
Even as G-d hides, he too, walks the fine line between a hiddeness that, ultimately, furthers his purpose, and one that defeats it.
Ultimately, we cling to a faith, that somewhere, there is a light that he has left on.
A light of joy that cannot be extinguished by the deepest sorrow, an innocence that cannot be dimmed by even the most severe guilt, a hopefulness that is stronger than even the most unfathomable hopelesness, and a light of love and passion that remains aglow, burning deep in the heart of each of us.
That light, so exalted, that it cannot be seen, comes to Werner, shines in him, appropriately, from Marie-Claire, who has rediscovered her light as well. Till now she had relied on her father to be her surrogate eyes, “Papa.. you had the keys to everything” but now up in the attic of Saint- Malo, her hand on the dial of the transmitter, she has found her keys, “To shut your eyes is to guess nothing of blindness…Beneath your world of skies and face and buildings exists a rawer and older world…”. She had finally found that world. she has finally her light in the continuity of the Voice of Ettienne, as he too, years ago reached upward to the skies, reaching for soul of his dead brother, hoping for some sort of connection, hoping that his love was felt up there somehow, above the skies of Saint-Malo.
In the the voice of her uncle, she herself BECOMES the very light that she cannot see, beaming out the hopefulness of Captain Nemo, who NEVER loses hope even from his entrapment 20,000 leagues beneath the sea.
It is the aggregate of all these sounds that moves Werner to act heroically and decisively, saving and protecting Marie- Claire. In this way he finally confronts his guilt head on, acting the way Jutta expected him to all along.
Though there is no conventional happy ending, there is a discovered goodness, that for Werner signals the begining of an atonement. Though he wasn't directly responsiblee for the killing of the young girl in Vienna, he is nonetheless haunted by her. In saving Maries life, he finds some measure of solace and peace from those demons.
Ultimately he had to face the reality of what he had been part of. His death, for me, represented more than being blown up in the minefield. Stepping on the mine, symbolizes the trickiness of navigating a terrain littered with the irreversible sins of the past, with the lives that once taken, can never be brought back to life
Still his true light shined at that moment. THESE are the lights that are the most meaningful to Doerr.
The ending of the book is merely a continuation of that theme. Though he doesn’t survive, he has, from the depths of his narrowness, fashioned a cathedral of spaciousness, within which he has lived — albeit momentarily, but gloriously none the less.
The book ends with the same celebration of all that is anticlimactic, paying a tribute to the small rays of light that we are able to coax out of hiding, into the safety of a moment warmed by the heroism of a singular noble choice. A moment where light feels sheltered. The way the inside of this moment looks, might be similar to what the “world to come” housing the light reserved for the righteous, might have looked like, to the Kabbalists as well. Only in the interior of such a moment can the precious gem “The Sea of Flames” — be stored safely. All the rest is a replica of that stone, the false stones, the only ones the Nazi officer Rumpel, could ever hope to find.
It is only in the tender, prosaic, uneventful exchange between an elderly Marie- Claire, now a grandmother, and her grandson, that we finally understand the profound wisdom transmitted by a father to his daughter.
Hiding the gem in the house, was his way of continuing to take his daughter by the hand. The gem lives, and can always be found in the small things, in the love of a family, greeting us eagerly in the aftermath of our pilgrimages.
Though the big lights are switched off, we can still hold on to them, recognizing their traces, in the still small voices of our homecomings.
Only there, away from the glare, in the acceptance of how truly sublime the low watt lights can be, can we hope to once again hear the soft sounds transmitted from our souls, for they are the very sounds of joy and love that await us, when we realize that the light in the world to come, is really the the same light that shines for us when we come home, when we remember the way back home again.
Much Love
Rabbi Yossi
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