The Light that stays on even after the power is switched off

In our house, in the great room where we have our dinner table, sit down and study table, the ‘everything’ or ‘all purpose’ space, there is a light fixture with three lights and a ceiling fan attached.  To turn on the lights, or the fan, you first have to make sure that the ‘power’ switch is on, then you can turn on the lights, turn on and adjust the fan.  By some quirk of wiring, if I turn off the lights and leave the ‘power’ switch on, the lights will usually flicker.  It seems that some current still flows in the electrical veins, almost as though the lights do not want to go out.

My quirky light fixture makes me think about tefillah/prayer and Talmud Torah/Torah study and what happens when we are done with these activities.  When we close the Siddur, when we close the book we are reading, do we stop thinking about what we explored?  Do we push it aside and move back into our day, or does something from the prayer or the study still flicker inside of us and give color and texture to the way we live out our day?

Ideally, I believe that something will stick with us, will give us a way of seeing that is sharper than before we opened the books, and opened our souls, even if we cannot point to one specific idea.  It may simply be that we feel ‘opened up’ by the possibility that there is something to learn, that there is something out there that can challenge us to grow, to be a more sensitive and thoughtful person today than we were yesterday.

Nighttime is only a shadow on the earth; the light of creation still shines even though we cannot see it, it is ‘or zarua’, hidden light that cannot be squelched by the shadow, a light that is shining all the time from the sparks of holiness that are all around us, and inside of us.  The prayers we say and the words we study are like charcoal and wood for the fire that keep it burning, and the ‘oxygen’ of God’s breath fans the flame.