“Then There was Only Darkness”

I want to share an unbelievable excerpt from an interview with Or Levy, a released hostage from Hamas captivity. In a recent interview he said:

“Before October 7th, I wasn’t really a big believer, and one should assume that when you’re there in a living hell, you would lose the little belief that you had, but for me it was the opposite.

At first, when we were in an apartment, I used to talk to a crack in the ceiling, pray for it, and I used to call it ‘the crack.’ Then we got into the tunnel and I switched this crack with an LED light, a small LED light that was on. Then we got to a different tunnel, then there was only darkness.

And this is when I first said the word God. From that point I spoke to God, and when it was very hard, hard wouldn’t cut, but whenever it became too hard, whenever I told myself ‘enough,’ I would talk to God, asking Him for something to save us, something. And you know, that was mostly every time that I said it, that I really felt like enough, something good happened. It could be one pita divided by four, it could be a cup of tea, which means nothing to most of you, but when you’re there, it can change how you see a day, from the worst to the best.”

What does faith in the dark look like?

When the prophet Elijah fled into the desert, he was certain he knew how God would speak to him. He waited for a sign as the wind howled through the mountain. But the verse says: (1 Kings 19:11–12).

Kol demama daka, the still small voice, holds an entire theology. God was not in the roar of power, not in the destruction or the blaze. He was in the quiet that followed. Or Levy’s tunnel is Elijah’s cave. Both men entered a place of suffocating darkness and waited for a God who did not thunder. In the silence, they both heard something that was not sound at all, a presence, a nearness, a whisper of life that refused to die.

We often mistake faith for noise, for sermons, songs, proclamations. But the deepest faith lives inside the whisper. Kol demama daka is not dramatic. It’s trembling. It’s the breath of a person who still speaks to God when all reason says He isn’t listening.

When Or Levy says, “I used to talk to a crack in the ceiling,” he’s describing a human instinct as old as the Psalms, the need to direct our hope somewhere, anywhere, when the world feels sealed shut. When he says, “Then I spoke to God,” that’s the moment of revelation, the same shift Elijah experienced when the fire went out and the mountain stood still.

That is what faith in the dark looks like.

The Hebrew word demama means silence, but also stillness. It’s not the silence of absence; it’s the silence of attention. God’s presence is not always heard in speech but felt in restraint, in the world holding its breath and continuing anyway.

There is something unbearably beautiful about Or Levy’s line: “At first, I talked to the crack, then the LED light, then God.” That is the entire story of human prayer in miniature. It begins physical, almost superstitious, a reaching toward anything that feels stable, and slowly becomes relational. The crack becomes light; the light becomes God. That is the journey of every believer who has ever prayed without knowing if anyone was listening.

In the world’s deepest silence, Or Levy found a companion. His prayers were not answered with escape but with endurance. Each small mercy, a crumb of bread, a drop of light, became a covenant between a man and his Creator.

When Elijah left the cave, he did not find peace; he found purpose. God told him to return to the world. So too with Or Levy. His survival is not the end of his story but its message, that even in tunnels dug for death, the voice of life can still speak.

Kol demama daka is that voice, the soundless sound that says, You are not alone.

In the end, faith in the dark is not about seeing God. It’s about speaking anyway, and realizing, against all odds, that the silence is speaking back.