The Deep Paganism of the Solar Eclipse

Judaism is mute on the most phenomenal astronomical event an earthling can ever witness. For four minutes, that's okay.

A solar eclipse, as photographed by Carleton Watkins in 1880.

For a religion as voluble as ours, Judaism has almost nothing of interest to say about the solar eclipse.

Let’s preemptively forgive it: We write about what we know. This is not to say that Judaism does not think the sun is worthy of note. Our Sun Blessing (birkat ha-ḥamah) is said once every 28 years, ostensibly the time it takes for our star to return to the exact place in the sky where it appeared when God first created it on the world’s fourth day. The truth is that this cycle is based on math so shaky that the Talmud itself is divided on its accuracy.

When Jews did discuss the eclipse they almost always gave it a slight frown. There are no blessings to say upon seeing an eclipse, as there are for hearing thunder and seeing lightning. The medieval German Pietists suggested that a fast might be in order, at least for the lunar version, but even the scorn is mild. There is just ferocious disinterest.

But despite the absence of sacral symbolism, the modern eclipse frenzy is deeply religious: the masses of people, the long and expensive pilgrimages, the brief shared moment of something greater, the momentary convergence of the sky’s two looming spheres.

Not just religious—idolatrous. Now that we can predict eclipses we’ve moved towards them with an atavistic impulse, the same one that huddles us together at the winter solstice and makes us call for rain, the same one that so many religions have overwritten with symbolism that, try as it might, is always less universal than the very movements of the sun and moon. The solar eclipse should have been overwritten, too; this tiny night has been saved from culture by its extreme rarity. For the time to takes to brush one’s teeth or play a single song, we can experience the sun, moon, and earth together, unbounded from all theisms and the spiderwebs of studied theology and even the emanating sefirot.

And yet: the solar eclipse feels like an idealized Jewish moment, really a Judaism-above-Judaism. Because the human fascination with the eclipse has never waned, each instance of awe is linked to the awe of the last, and thus to the constant noteworthy wonder that humans have felt for thousands of years under the moon’s tiny shadow, whether expected or unexpected. Like a real-life Brigadoon, the totality’s short time links us to the duration of decades now gone, and centuries before that, like a play being told in slow motion in tiny spurts across eons, with intermissions that far outstrip the play itself. Eclipse don’t feel the “decline of generations,” the slow normalization and loss of wonder. There are not enough eclipses in a lifetime for jadedness to set in. It is always new and awesome. Our precision astronomy affects the awe not at all; the anticipation is only heightened.

I will never make the hajj, and I will never ascend with the Jewish masses to sacrifice the Passover offering in Jerusalem’s Temple. The eclipse is my only pilgrimage, and on this long drive into the path of totality I feel, increasingly, that the other cars on the road must be sharing in this deep mission, this primal desire to be at a certain place at a certain time. Judaism has no blessing for this moment; to force one feels almost small, limiting. It would be like saying a blessing on mathematics itself.

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At the climax of Yom Kippur’s mid-day liturgy is a poem exalting a sight that no one alive has ever seen: the appearance of the High Priest upon exiting the Holy of Holies, having just completed the potentially lethal rituals that will atone for the entire nation’s misdeeds, and the face of a man whose soul has been scrubbed of every flaw and who is possessed with an inner energy beyond compare. We sing:

Truly, how glorious was the appearance of the High Priest when he emerged from the Holy of Holies — safe, without incident.

It was this face, more than anything else, that captivated the throngs who gathered at the Temple; it was for this face that they craned their necks, each to get a better view. That the poem was written long after the Temple burned to the ground (update: though it was modeled on a similar earlier depiction) only increases the power of that glimpse, like the power of seeing the back of God’s head—for no one may see me and live—like the God who, as the Song of Songs has it, “peers between the cracks,” peering at us as we peer, back through our fingers in the daily shema. The memory of a memory of a glimpse: it is enough for us.

Some experiences are seeds; they are almost nothing in the moment, but the progress of life nurtures them and makes them bigger. Sacred moments are often like that; eclipses are like that. Some moments are big enough that we reset a mental timer and measure our aging by how far we feel from them. Religious and cosmic moments are often like that, too.

On Monday, if you can, enjoy this brief shadow, this glimpse of pagan bedrock. Look squarely at it—and say nothing.