The Cave

The British physicist Thomas Young conducted an experiment that amazed all of Europe. He took a beam of light [music] and passed it through a very narrow slit. According to all the laws of Newtonian physics, the light should have gone straight ahead [music] and cast two stripes on the wall opposite it. But what happened was completely impossible. The light spread in all directions. The narrower the slit [music] was, the farther the light scattered, reaching deeper into the surrounding darkness. The most compressed, [music] most pressured, most limited point was the very point from which the greatest expansion emerged. Young showed [music] that light has wave-like properties. A wave does not stop at an obstacle, but spreads around it. This is called diffraction, and it has a precise law. The narrower the slit is relative [music] to the wavelength, the greater the spreading. Narrowness is not a limitation, it is the mechanism [music] of distribution. Friends, this physics is the story of our lives. We stand before a narrow slit, a disease, a disappointment, years of stagnation, a period we did not choose, and we are certain that this is the [music] end, that this narrow place defines us and will define us forever, that we are small because the place is small. We don't understand that we [music] are light, and that light, precisely when it is compressed into the narrowest slit, begins to shine in all directions. 2,000 years ago, a single Jew sat in the narrowest slit imaginable. A cave, 13 years, pursuers outside, total darkness. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and his son. And from there, from that very slit, emerged [music] the holy Zohar, which has illuminated the entire Jewish world to this day. And Rabbi Shimon [music] bar Yochai himself wrote in the Zohar, Parashat Tazria, the fundamental principle, "If not for the darkness, the light would not be recognized." If not for the darkness, the light would not be known. He did not say that darkness is an evil that must [music] be endured. He said that darkness is the physical condition for the appearance of light. Without the cave, there is no radiance. Without the crack, there is no expansion. This is not philosophy, this is the physics of the soul. Every limited situation we find [music] ourselves in now does not define us, it propels us. The pressure of the cave did not break Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, [music] it turned him into a wave that reaches us 2,000 years later. Lag BaOmer is not a day of joy for the end of troubles. It is the day when we celebrate the greatness of expansion. So the next time things [music] get tight, when life squeezes us into a crack we didn't choose, we won't be afraid. We'll remember the physics, and we'll remember the cave. The narrower the crack, the farther the light that comes out of it will reach.