Afraid of the Dark

When I was four, I walked into my parents' bedroom after dark, weepy and frightened. My father quickly walked over to me, his voice gruff and reassuring, as it always was.

"Don't be afraid of the dark," he said, listing all the reasons calmly and reasonably:

Dark was not a punishment; it was what happened to the earth when turning round the sun.


Nothing would appear in the dark that wasn't already in the light; it was only a matter of what we could see.

If you wake up in the night and it is dark, there is still enough light to see your way to the bathroom and back to bed. Your eyes adjust to the light, or lack of it. 

Your eyes can also play tricks on you in the dark so shadows look more menacing. But shadows are shadows. They are not ghosts and even if they were, they could not harm you.

These words come back to me after the shooting this week in a Pittsburgh synagogue. Another instance of the ugly antiSemitism that seems never to disappear, no matter how dark it gets.

Another instance of prejudice and hatred of "the other" - because of different religions or races or beliefs.

On Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, Jews ask forgiveness for a variety of sins, not only for ourselves but for the community of people standing around us. Xenophobia is one of those sins.

As defined in the Merriam Webster dictionary:

Xenophobia = fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign

To me, that is another way to be afraid of the dark. Because anything unknown to us may feel like it is covered in darkness. The only way to get past that is to look more closely, and realize the familiar is right there in front of us, whether or not there is enough light to see it.

We are all but a step away from the dark, until we let the light in. 

Being afraid of the dark is something we are supposed to grow out of -- and not growing out of it is deadly to all of us. Christians, Jews, people of all races, people everywhere.

In the 1950s, America went through a trial where its own citizens were persecuted through something called the Blacklist. I wanted to shed some light on this time with my new book Fool's Errand, book two of the Beat Street trilogy to be published in early December. Fool's Errand is about a young girl growing up in Greenwich Village in 1958 who encounters the prejudices of her time.

Seeing this weekend's news makes me feel even stronger about writing it. More importantly, it makes me look again with fresh eyes at the word xenophobia and understand in a more visceral way why it is considered a sin -- not just a problem.

If anything is dark, it is fear itself. If anything can kill us, it is the hate and fear we feel, unchecked, as we go through our daily lives. 

My hope is that our eyes will adjust and we will see through the darkness. See each other's faces and erase the hate and fear in them.

Because we can't keep stumbling around out here.


Shadow photo: August Brill

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