The Moon Demands Stars for Her Stolen Light

Click for full size

She Told the Truth and Went Dark

The lights were still being measured when the moon spoke out of turn, and the ruling came down before she had finished making her case. She would shine with borrowed sunlight and nothing of her own. She went dark where she stood.

"I told you the truth," she said, "and for that I am made small?"

God answered with a date instead of a reversal. In the days of the messiah her own light would come back and stand equal with the sun, the way the prophet has it. But the days of the messiah are not a span anyone can count to, so the promise sat out past every night she would have to cross before she reached it. She apologized for the way she had spoken. He forgave her.

That should have ended it. It did not. An apology accepted settles what she had said, but it does not hand back what was taken off her, and she could feel the difference in her own body every time she came up over the rim of the world wearing light that belonged to somebody else. So she did not thank him and go. "How will I know you mean it?" she said.

The Lights Were Handed to the Earth

She had a hard position to argue from, because she was not a party to the arrangement. She was one of its terms.

When the lights were set in the firmament to give light on the earth, the word used for setting them there is the word for giving, and Rabbi Yohanan counted what that gift contained: the Torah, the lights, and the rains. Guidance, light, water. Three things the world cannot run without, handed down to it and not asked for. The moon was in the middle item on that list, on the given side of it, going out to the earth along with the rain in its season.

So she could not ask to be taken back. She could only argue about the terms of her own delivery, and she did, for as long as it took.

A Title She Could Not Get Out From Under

God gave her rule over the day as well as the night. She pushed it straight back at him. What is the use of shining at noon, when the sun is already standing there drowning her out, and the words were written down where anyone could read them: the great light, and the small light. That is her, written into the record.

So he bound her name to men who carry the same word. Jacob the small. David the small, the youngest of eight, left out with the sheep because nobody thought to send for him when his brothers went to the war. Good company, and diminished company, though none of it gave her back a single degree of brightness. A shared adjective is not light. She went on grieving, and the grief did not wear itself out the way grief is supposed to, because nothing in the arrangement had moved.

He Gave Her a Procession

The Mishnah counts ten utterances that made the world, and the counting is harder than it looks, so the sages argued about which sentences belonged on the list. One answer puts this on it: when God looked at the first man standing by himself and said it is not good for the man to be alone, that sentence was one of the ten that built the world. Loneliness had been ruled on while the foundations were still being laid.

When he saw that her sorrow would not settle, he gave her an escort. A multitude of stars came out to walk beside her through the dark, the whole crowd of them moving when she moved, the way nobles come out behind a ruler and take their places. She had not asked for company. She had asked for her light, but she took the company, since it was the first thing offered to her that she could see the same night.

She still comes up wearing somebody else's light, and the promise about the messiah is still in the future tense where he left it. The stars come out behind her anyway. They hold their positions across the whole crossing, and they go down when she goes down.