Our Passover Seder may celebrate God s liberating our ancestors with a strong hand and an outstretched arm. But we realize that all of those expressions are metaphors, reflecting the paucity of our imagination more than the reality of the Divine. It has been pointed out that the four letter Name of God, YHWH, is not a noun but a verb. Jewish theology has never been about what God is, but about what God does, creating the world, freeing the enslaved, sustaining the poor, comforting the grieving, etc. When, by means of God s light, we see the beauty and intricacy of our world, when we see acts of courage and nobility, when we see the sick recover, whether due to the resilience of their bodies or the marvels of modern medicine, we know that we have seen God.
Light is security, safety.
It has the power to banish fear. We are afraid of the dark because we cannot know what dangers may be lurking there. But all we have to do is turn on a light and we dispel those fears. The dangers may indeed lurk out there, but we will not be facing them alone. Light, especially the light of fire, works as a metaphor for God because fire is not an object.