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“I still have night,” said Rabbi Schneur Zalman Polaroff, 34, standing beside a folding table he has not yet been forced to occupy for six months straight. “Night is doing a lot of work for me. In a few weeks night gets fired, and I am supposed to be glad, because a little light expels much darkness. That is easy to say in Crown Heights. Here the light is about to expel my shift change.”
Polaroff arrived for the coming summer season with two pairs of tefillin, laminated cards, hand warmers, and the standard briefing that a shaliach goes to the ends of the earth because that is where the sparks fell. Antarctica, he was told, is a serious end. Humanity must facilitate Dirah b’tachtonim, God's "abode in the lower realms," and Antarctica is as low as realms get. The Creator wants a dwelling in the physical world - and this is as physical as the world gets without becoming a mineral.
“I believe it,” Polaroff said. “I do. The farthest place has the highest sparks. I also believe a glaciologist at what used to be 3 a.m. is going to see a table and think, now is when we wrap.”
McMurdo’s population is already swelling in anticipation of summer. A few of the new arrivals are Jewish. A few more will be Jewish for the length of a strap. Polaroff can quote the part about tefillin binding mind and heart so the animal soul sits down for a minute. He is less prepared for the part where the sun refuses to sit down at all.
He recalled a moment last season when he tried to close. A contractor pointed at the sky. “You cannot tell a man the stand is closed when the creation itself is still open,” Polaroff said. “I sounded like a maamar. He still wanted the tefillin.”
There will be no dusk in which to wrap up and stow away the boxes. Shabbat will arrive by calendar alert and a fight about sunset at 77 degrees south. Headquarters was encouraging: a shaliach is a shaliach, "Ufaratzta" means spread forth, and you do not close on light.
His wife wrote from Crown Heights: “Remember, darkness is only so the light can be revealed.” He has the message above his bunk, which he will miss as much as he misses his wife and seven children.
“That is the whole teaching,” he said. “Elevate the sparks. Reveal the light. I came here for the darkness. The darkness was the job. Soon the job becomes six months of day, and every spark on this continent is going to walk past my table because it can see the table. I am going to miss night. Night never asked me to put tefillin on a man who thought it was weather equipment. Night at least let the sparks sleep."
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