Hello, Shadow.
The Work Within
When Do You Meet Your Shadow? Not the one that greets you in the space between light and shade but the other one. I’m talking about the one that lives inside you and surfaces in moments you’d rather it didn’t. When it appears, what do you do?
Do you run? Pretend it isn’t there? Or do you greet it with a guarded curiosity, wanting to understand where it came from and what it wants?
This process of uncovering these interior parts of ourselves is called shadow work, and it was pioneered by Carl Jung as the central mechanism through which we come to understand our own wholeness. By integrating the conscious and unconscious dimensions of the psyche, what Jung called individuation, we stop living in fragments and begin living wholly.
We often move through the world asking, who do I want to be? That question, by definition, pushes us to identify who we don’t want to be. The problem is that this posture puts us in a perpetual stance of avoidance, and avoidance has a cost. As Jung observed:
The shadow is that hidden, repressed, for the most part inferior and guilt-laden personality whose ultimate ramifications reach back into the realm of our animal ancestors… it can now be ascertained on closer investigation that the unconscious man, that is his shadow, does not consist only of morally reprehensible tendencies, but also displays a number of good qualities, such as normal instincts, appropriate reactions, realistic insights, and creative impulses.
Our shadows contain not only what we fear about ourselves, but what we’ve suppressed that might actually serve us.
Here’s a personal example: I tend to be quiet in group settings, telling myself I don’t want to take up too much space. But when others speak freely, I sometimes feel resentment, a quiet voice inside me thinking they’re taking up too much space. My shadow, then, holds both the potential for healthy assertiveness and a festering resentment. Unless I get curious about that, the assertiveness stays buried and the resentment keeps growing. As my own therapist always reminds me, choose guilt over resentment!
I was genuinely surprised to find a shadow-like allusion in this week’s Torah portion. As the spies continue their anxious report about the Promised Land, Caleb and Joshua offer a counter-voice in Numbers 14:7–9:
The land that we traversed and scouted is an exceedingly good land. If pleased with us, God will bring us into that land, a land that flows with milk and honey, and give it to us; only you must not rebel against God. Have no fear then of the people of the country, for they are our prey: their shadow has departed from them, but God is with us. Have no fear of them!
אַ֣ךְ בַּיהֹוָה֮ אַל־תִּמְרֹ֒דוּ֒ וְאַתֶּ֗ם אַל־תִּֽירְאוּ֙ אֶת־עַ֣ם הָאָ֔רֶץ כִּ֥י לַחְמֵ֖נוּ הֵ֑ם סָ֣ר צִלָּ֧ם מֵעֲלֵיהֶ֛ם וַֽיהֹוָ֥ה אִתָּ֖נוּ אַל־תִּירָאֻֽם׃
The phrase is meant as reassurance: we can do this; their shadow has departed from them. On the simplest level, this is military language; the enemy lacks protection, and they’re exposed. But several commentators push deeper, in a distinctly psychological direction.
The Sfat Emet quotes a striking teaching from his grandfather, the Chiddushei Ha’Rim:
“Their shadow has departed” means that the power of the Sitra Achra, the forces of evil, is merely an illusion, like a shadow with no substance.
Those who strengthen themselves for spiritual battle come to see that the “evil” they feared was only a shadow all along. The sin of the spies, in this reading, was a failure of recognition. Caleb and Joshua declared their shadow has departed and stepped forward. The other spies watched, and still couldn’t move. They clung to their initial fear, and that fear sealed their fate.
The Sfat Emet’s lesson: every person faces this confrontation with their own inner darkness. But that darkness is not a monster, it’s an illusion. To flee from it gives it enormous power. To face it is to see it for what it is: a shadow. It’s an ephemeral entity, dependent on the light you’re willing to cast.
What the Sfat Emet intuited, Jung later theorized: it is a universal human experience to carry things within us that we perceive as bad. But the attempt to excise those things inherently limits us. The shadow doesn’t disappear when we look away; it grows. When we look at it directly, we often discover it holds not simply our fears, but our unexpressed potential.
Shadow work begins with an inward turn and a moment of recognition. What are the parts of you that make you want to run? What might be hiding inside them worth recovering?
The spies who failed to ask that question lost far more than a military campaign. They lost the chance to lead their people into the future. Caleb and Joshua, who could look at fear and name it as shadow, inherited that role instead.
What would you do?
Shabbat Shalom and Happy Weekend
Wild