Cinderella and Passover - the Magic of Midnight

    There is a story told across cultures, especially in Europe, of a woman oppressed by her stepmother and stepsisters, who, aided by magical or supernatural help, meets a fabulous prince at a ball. Whether her name is Aschenputtel, Cendrillon or our more common Cinderella, there is a common trope that she has to leave the ball by midnight or else all the magic becomes undone.

    At midnight the coach will turn back into a pumpkin, the horses back into mice, the gorgeous gown back into rags, and the marvelous glass slippers will disappear.

    There is this tendency in western literature to see midnight as the witching hour, the time that is most dangerous, when evil stalks abroad.

    It is no coincidence that Edgar Allan Poe’s the Raven begins “Once upon a midnight dreary” or that the Headless Horseman from Washington Irving’s ‘The Legend of Sleepy Hollow’ is described as “like a Midnight blast”. The dead of night is all that is unnerving, disquieting, unsettling, as the dawn seems endlessly far away.

    But the Pesach story is, in some ways, the opposite of Cinderella. Cinderella on the night of the ball was free and happy but at the stroke of twelve all the magic came undone - but in the Torah's description of the Exodus, in Exodus 12:29, we see that our freedom began at precisely midnight:

    29 And it came to pass at midnight, that the Lord smote all the firstborn in the land of Egypt, from the first-born of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the first-born of the captive that was in the dungeon; and all the first-born of cattle.

    At that moment the Israelites were no longer slaves - the midnight hour indeed brought danger and death (even the Israelites had to protect themselves with blood on the doorposts) but it also brought redemption.

What is the significance of midnight?

Radiance - Reflections, Plans and Revisions

Writing Radiance
Almost exactly a year ago, I first put finger to keyboard to begin to write my Kabbalistic Fantasy novel, Radiance. 35 chapters and 50,000 words later, the first draft of Radiance stands complete.

Originally inspired by my Yom Kippur resolution to be more creative, and my discovery of National Novel Writing Month (NoNoWriMo - which I slightly overshot...) it's been quite a journey, and one I've really enjoyed.

Having said that, I've had the basic story of Radiance floating around my head for about five years now, so it's rather strange that it now also exists in fully-formed words, that others have also read. It always feels good once an idea has moved from brain to paper, and yet it feels a little empty too - much of the creative work has been done, leaving the editing, the rewriting, the revising.