The Concealment of God
To be Jewish and to believe in God means to live with an abstraction. Think about it, what exactly did Abraham bring to the world? Civilization at that time envisioned whimsical gods who were all powerful, who had physical manifestations on earth.
But Avraham Avinu brought an incredible idea to civilization: A different construct. The notion of a Divine Being who is Over All. Who is the Supreme Judge of what is right and wrong. That there is an ethical and moral fabric to the universe. Plus, you can have a relationship with, and communicate with this Being, but whom you will never see. For whom there is no physical representation. Nothing to hold, bow down to, treasure, or fetishize.
Right. Yet, hundreds and thousands of people in his day were compelled to follow his and Sarah’s path. Because they knew, in their innermost being, that this felt true.
Our sages tell us that God is unknowable, unfathomable. So how do we live in our intensely physical world, while yearning to connect with the Divine? Our human struggle is to sense that we are made of both the finite and the infinite.
Soon, we’ll be celebrating Purim, a story in our Tanach [Torah, Prophets and Writings] of incredible antisemitism. The entire book [Megillah] does not mention God at all. And this holiday sets the stage for our modern times. Events occur through the agency of human beings, while we all know that God’s presence is palpable. Hidden. Concealed. But there are clues. Esther’s very name in Hebrew means concealed. The very name “Megillah” means revealed. A paradox?
There is only one time in the Torah where we read that God will be hidden from us. In Deuteronomy / Devarim 31:18 we are told that God will be hidden precisely because of our urge to create a physical representation of God.
Yet I will keep My countenance hidden on that day, because of all the evil they have done in turning to other gods.
But we can choose to discover God.
A story I love is from Rabbi Dov Baer of Meziritch:
He once found his young child crying. “I was playing hide and seek with my friends,” the child explained, “and I hid so well that they stopped looking for me and went away.”
Dov Baer mused, “This must be how God feels, hiding the divine countenance from us to the point where some of us stop looking —and start living our lives without God.”
When we deny the existence of God, we pull ourselves away.
We seem to know this story’s truth. We know in the physical world, that sound waves exist, but are not heard until an instrument taps into it. Electricity is a ‘thing’ but a plug enables its existence.
God is concealed, but not away. Hidden, but ever-present. Many of us have stopped looking.
The acrostic prayer “Ashrei” says that God is near to all who call upon Him, to all who call upon Him in truth.
The burden is on us to find God. God is near, always, we just have to be ready.