רבי שמעון בן פזי רמי כתיב (בראשית א, טז) ויעש אלהים את שני המאורות הגדולים וכתיב את המאור הגדול ואת המאור הקטן אמרה ירח לפני הקב"ה רבש"ע אפשר לשני מלכים שישתמשו בכתר אחד אמר לה לכי ומעטי את עצמך אמרה לפניו רבש"ע הואיל ואמרתי לפניך דבר הגון אמעיט את עצמי אמר לה לכי ומשול ביום ובלילה אמרה ליה מאי רבותיה דשרגא בטיהרא מאי אהני אמר לה זיל לימנו בך ישראל ימים ושנים
§ Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi raises a contradiction between two verses. It is written: “And God made the two great lights” (Genesis 1:16), and it is also written in the same verse: “The greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night,” indicating that only one was great. Rabbi Shimon ben Pazi explains: When God first created the sun and the moon, they were equally bright. Then, the moon said before the Holy One, Blessed be He: Master of the Universe, is it possible for two kings to serve with one crown? One of us must be subservient to the other. God therefore said to her, i.e., the moon: If so, go and diminish yourself. She said before Him: Master of the Universe, since I said a correct observation before You, must I diminish myself? God said to her: As compensation, go and rule both during the day along with the sun and during the night. She said to Him: What is the greatness of shining alongside the sun? What use is a candle in the middle of the day? God said to her: Go; let the Jewish people count the days and years with you, and this will be your greatness.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., The Death of Evil Along the Seashore
This would be a miserable, terrible and unbearable world if God had only one light. But we can be consoled by the fact that God has two lights—a light to guide us in the brightness of the day when hopes are fulfilled and circumstances are favorable and a light to guide us in the darkness of the midnight when frustrations are real and the slumbering giants of gloom and hopelessness are on the verge of rising up in our souls. Therefore we never need walk in darkness.
Rabbi Julie Adler
According to this reading, darkness isn’t just the absence of light, but an entity of its own; it has substance and power. It immobilizes people, traps them, holds them down. If darkness were simply the absence of light, Egyptians could have lit candles to liberate themselves from it. But if the plague was not just an absence of light, if it had power over people as described by the midrash, it must be something altogether different from what we call “darkness”.
Rabbi Sharon Brous, IKAR High Holy Day Sermon 2018
The image of the moon, rising in the dark of night, gave me a God I could believe in, a source of unending hope. And it helped me understand why we, Jews, are moon people. Why we orient time around the lunar cycle. But there is a problem with the moon as a beacon of hope, a source of divine promise. The moon is not always visible. Sometimes it’s radiant and full bellied. Sometimes, it’s only partially visible. Some days, when we look into the night sky, we see no moon at all. Only darkness. What does it mean to orient your heart around a great light that you sometimes can’t even see? The moon plants in our hearts an eternal message: the light of hope that emerges in the dark of night is not steady and consistent. It’s fluid. Sometimes, it’s brilliant and bright and ambitious, and sometimes, it’s but a sliver of light.
And that’s not all. Rabban Gamliel taught already 2000 years ago: םימעפו הכוראב אבש םימעפ אבש הרצקב - sometimes the moon comes by a long path and sometimes it comes by a short one—which is why some months are shorter and some longer than others. From this we learn that sometimes the cycle of pain and healing will be very quick, and sometimes, it will feel interminable.
The important thing is to remember: the moon, like our spirits, is an object in motion. It will always come back around. For moon people, that is the essence of our spiritual mobility. Finally, the moon teaches us that even when no light is visible at all, even in the deepest darkness, our hearts trust and remember that the light will shine once again. Maybe even tomorrow. And—though it seems impossible to imagine today—it will even eventually reemerge in its fullness. Orienting our calendar around the moon means that hope is a muscle we practice month after month, year after year, generation after generation. It is a muscle that gets stronger as we use it.