On a clear day, you can see forever. I remind myself of that in wintertime when the sun rises late and goes down early. With daylight hours painfully short, and too many of them overcast anyway, even sunny dispositions lose their immunity to gloom. I don’t personally suffer from clinical winter depression, but I know people who do. I dimly sense their plight, as whatever sun we have glances off the northern hemisphere, elongating our shadows like the tall, skinny forms of a Modigliani painting.

With the winter solstice passed, days are getting longer. But January and February exceed December in despair. If nothing else, a month ago gave us Hanukka, with mounting numbers of candles spreading a growing glow of clarity in which to see forever. “To see forever” —what a concept! What if we could? Especially in the dark.

The first two readings in Exodus suggest we can. They begin the book that anticipates Passover seders not too far off, raising hope for the redemptive light of spring. But we need not wait for spring. Every day we recite blessings that name God melech ha’olam, “ruler of the universe,” and applied to God, “universe” means both space and time — what scientists call the space-time continuum. God is ruler of the universe, but also of the “forever” that we dimly glimpsed on Hanukka and yearn to see fully when a clear day dawns. Perhaps redemption is “forever” before us, if we seek it out.

Moreover, “Forever” is the kabalistic image of God, who, more than just the ruler of it all, is it all. Precisely now, on these most somber of days, redemption is available in a personal glimpse of God. This week’s haftara gets it right, when it says, “Now Jacob shall not be shamed.” Shame is the essence of darkness, darkness of the soul, which disappears only with a glimpse of Forever in the now. Yesterday is gone, and who can promise what tomorrow will be? We live in the now.

This week’s Torah portion also emphasizes now, as — at its very end — God promises Moses, “Now you will see.” But see what? For that, we turn to next week’s reading, Va’era, where God announces, “I will appear.” God appears every moment, in the now — if we choose to see it.

Precisely when things seem darkest, says the medieval commentator Kli Yakar, light breaks through. So precisely now, in our darkest winter moments, we may see Forever, the Foreverness that is God.

I make no empty claims. Think of Elijah’s being hunted down by King Ahab and Queen Jezebel. Finding his way to the wilderness, he sinks into his own internal darkness, the morbid suspicion that God is absent. The problem is, he has been looking in all the wrong places: storms, earthquakes, and fire — the way we might hope to find God blossoming only in the final burst of spring. But being Forever, God is present always. So Elijah discovers God in “a still, small voice” that must have been there all along. We hear God best in a single moment’s echoes of eternity, and we see God clearest in the recesses of our hopes. Both are right before us in the now.

There is nothing more human than the capacity for eternity’s echoes and recessed hopes. No other species manages that. Dogs and cats and dolphins do not even know there is a now. And humans forget. Like Elijah, we look for God “in all the wrong places” — an end to war, all sickness banished, hurricanes tamed, and hunger dispelled. These are wonderful dreams that we must pursue with God as our partner; they take time, however, more time than any of us will have on this planet. But every moment along the way, if we take deep breaths, hold each other’s hands, and look deeply into one another’s eyes, it is possible (as William Blake says) “to see a world in a grain of sand, and a heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour.”

I will be happy when Passover arrives; I wish I could be around when the Messiah comes. But meanwhile, I will not allow the gloom of winter to do me in. I look instead to this Shabbat and next, from the twilight of Shemot to the dawn of Va’era, to direct my gaze beyond the winter darkness to Forever. I treat each winter moment as a “now,” letting God’s still, small voice and vision of Forever pierce the clouds. Redemption need not wait for spring. I watch and listen for it in every moment’s recessed hopes and echoes of eternity. They are there, precisely “now.”