Using text from: "The Concealed Face of God"

BY STEPHEN H. ARNOFF

HTTPS://WWW.MYJEWISHLEARNING.COM/ARTICLE/THE-CONCEALED-FACE-OF-GOD/

"Many of the serious messages of Purim are encoded in word play and irony, and the Book of Esther’s seemingly absent God is no exception. The centrality of the concept of hester panim or 'the concealed face of God' to Purim is recognized in the fact that Esther is the only text in the Hebrew Bible, except for the Song of Songs, that does not mention the name of God explicitly.

In the case of Purim, hester panim’s importance is also intimated by the name of the heroine of the central narrative of the festival, Esther." "The Concealed Face of God" BY STEPHEN H. ARNOFF

HTTPS://WWW.MYJEWISHLEARNING.COM/ARTICLE/THE-CONCEALED-FACE-OF-GOD/

"The name Esther is interpreted as an extension of the phrase for a 'concealed God.'

Discussing the verse in Deuteronomy, the medieval commentator Abraham ibn Ezra suggests that the term 'turned to' or panah should actually be read as 'whored with' or zanah. Here, the blame for the broken relationship between God and Israel lies squarely with Israel’s assimilation and worship amongst the gods of the nations, a circumstance apparent in the story of Purim as well. There seems to be no distinction between Esther or Mordechai and the non-Jewish Persians until the Jews themselves reveal who they are.

Furthermore, Esther’s moniker is doubly ironic, because her name is a Hebraization of the name of the Near Eastern goddess Ishtar, and her Uncle Mordechai’s name is a Hebrew version of the name of the Near Eastern god Marduk. Through the lens of a nitty-gritty melodrama of sex, deception, and violence, the Book of Esther openly critiques the possibility of a 'secular' world of blind fate and challenges the nature of assimilated Jewish life. Without God at its center, Jewish life and Jewish heroes merely become a poor imitation of the world around them. The Diaspora Jews depicted at Purim’s core can be seen as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy of divine abandonment resulting from Jewish assimilation to the cultural norms counter to a Jewish center." "The Concealed Face of God" BY STEPHEN H. ARNOFF

HTTPS://WWW.MYJEWISHLEARNING.COM/ARTICLE/THE-CONCEALED-FACE-OF-GOD/

"....The circumstances alluded to in this verse from Deuteronomy are applied to the days of Esther and Mordechai, perhaps implying God's abandonment of the Jewish people and their eventual destruction. Similarly, much of what is apparent on the surface of the narrative masks a different reality." - Playing Dress Up

Rabbi Turetsky: (https://www.yutorah.org/togo/purim/articles/Purim_To_Go_-_5771_Rabbi_Turetsky.pdf)

One perspective is to view hester panim as necessary in order to allow the punishment to occur. Rashi writes that God will make it “as if” He does not see their pain. According to Rashi, God is less distant than “oblivious”, pretending as if God does not see what is happening. Possibly working with this general orientation, Ohr HaChaim explains that if God were to make Godself aware of the pains of the Jewish people, God's mercy would prevail and God would not allow these events to occur. Apparently, hester panim allows tragedies, for God would stop them if God were “aware” of them. Chizkuni notes the relationship between God’s hester panim and the atrocities that follow but views hester panim as a function of God’s love for the Jewish people, not as a facilitator for the punishment to occur. Though the Jewish people need to be punished, God does not wish to witness it. Instead, God instructs others to carry it out away from God's presence. A third view may emerge from Rashba (Responsa 1:19). He argues that it is through the act of hester panim that God removes God's special providence over the Jewish people, thereby leaving them susceptible to the hands of other forces. For Rashba, it appears that hester panim is what allows this unique form of punishment, for so long as God’s providence is present and protecting the Jewish people, such an intense form of punishment is not possible.

If we had in our possession the Tanakh without the Megillah, we would know God only in every place and situation where God can be directly named. The Megillah comes to complement this deficit and to teach us that God is found secretly also in those places where God cannot be named.

This carefully crafted [ambivalence] is best explained as an attempt to convey uncertainty about God’s role in history. [There is a reason that the author of Esther has not made God a more prominent actor in the story and has drawn God, if at all, below the surface of the story, with just a hint of presence]. The author is not quite certain about God’s role in these events (are you?) and does not conceal that uncertainty. By refusing to exclude that possibility, [i.e. that God is indeed in control behind the scenes and is directing the action], the author conveys his belief that there can be no definitive knowledge of the workings of God’s hand in history. Not even a wonderful deliverance can prove that God was directing events: nor could threat and disaster prove His absence.

When we [search carefully] the text of Esther for traces of God’s activity, we are doing what the author made us do. The author would have us probe the events that we witness in our lives in the same way. He is teaching a theology of possibility. [He wants us to be aware, all the time, of the possibility that behind the world there is indeed a benevolent God that works in mysterious ways]. https://www.hartman.org.il/two-modern-thinkers-on-why-god-is-hidden-in-megillah/

Noam Zion & Steve Israel (2008)

"....Purim's masks may seem to conceal, if just for a moment, the chaos and pain of our present lives and enable us to escape this reality, but they may really offer us the chance to don serious masks of conscious determination to bring the light of the Divine into our world. Yes, God may not be mentioned in the entire book of Esther, and some have seen this as an intimation of the existence of sheer chaos in the world, where anarchy is at play. Yet, we may ask what lies beneath a story that intimates the absence of God and meaning, and the holiday of Purim, which is about frivolity and play. Underneath the garment of the story is perhaps a glimpse of the existence of a force in the universe that can help us move beyond who we are and what our lives presently are, and enable us to become who we aspire to be. What may be necessary is for us to recognize that, unlike the Exodus story, in which God is recognized through redemptive miracles, the Purim story demands that we come to recognize the Presence of the Divine through the ability to hear the hidden voice of God. The redemptive paradigm of Esther is to see the camouflaged Divine in the darkness of our lives. Purim bespeaks the existence in the world of the light of the Divine, sparks of which are hidden beneath the surface of our lives, and ours is the task to sew those sparks into a full garment of splendor that will enhance the majesty of our souls. Perhaps that is the reason why Maimonides stated that 'all prophetic books and sacred writings will cease to be read in the messianic era except the book of Esther.'" -Playing Dress Up

Esther was said with the inspiration of the Divine Spirit –

אֶסְתֵּר בְּרוּחַ הַקּוֹדֶשׁ נֶאֶמְרָה : A question is raised: From many

of these sources, proof may be adduced that Mordecai was inspired by the Divine Spirit, as he was privy to matters that he could not have otherwise known. However, these sources do not prove that the entire book of Esther was divinely inspired. Some answer that it would have been inappropriate to publicize the Divine Spirit in the book of Esther had the book itself not been divinely inspired (Ye’arot Devash). (From Koren Talmud, Megilla, 7a)

Passover

Yom Kippur

"Amidst practices of drinking and bawdy entertainment, Purim contains a serious undercurrent that carries the responsibility of repentance to mend a broken relationship with the divine. Jewish teachers note that etymologically, Purim is partnered with Yom HaKippurim, the Day of Atonement. Yom HaKippurim is said to be a day k’purim — a day like Purim. This linguistic and thematic connection reflects on the tone of both days, Yom Kippur giving a sense of life’s random absurdity and Purim a feeling that even the most outrageous celebrants are in fact approaching the work of reconciliation with God. The terminology of the hurt and concealed face provides a particularly strong link between these two festivals.

The concept of the concealed face appears initially when Adam and Eve hide themselves “from the face of God” after eating from the Tree of Knowledge (Gen. 3:8). Then, as part of his punishment following Cain’s murder of his brother Abel, God asks Cain, “Why has your face fallen?” (Gen. 4:6). Having admitted his guilt, Cain summarizes his punishment: “Here, you drive me away from the face of the soil, and from your face must I conceal myself” (Gen. 4:14). The concealed face represents a violent rift between people and God, a burden of great wrong that is an ancient, shared vocabulary of pain and disappointment.

Furthering the link between repentance, God’s concealed face, and Purim, another medieval commentator, Nachmanides, notes that the curse of God’s concealed face in Deuteronomy — to which Esther is most likely related — is a burden of the sin of idolatry punishable by exile, not relieved until the Jewish people demonstrate profound remorse through vidui [confession] and teshuvah [repentance]. These are terms essential to the ritual process of reconciliation between people and the divine on Yom HaKippurim. While Purim theology is by its nature at turns serious and ridiculous, the link between Purim and unfulfilled atonement makes thematic sense." "The Concealed Face of God" BY STEPHEN H. ARNOFF

HTTPS://WWW.MYJEWISHLEARNING.COM/ARTICLE/THE-CONCEALED-FACE-OF-GOD/

....Purim, considered by some the most electrifying day of the Jewish year, instructs us to [search for meaning and comfort or surrender to the meaninglessness]. For one day, we come face to face with the chilling reality that no matter how hard we work to control our lives, how diligently we plan and prepare, life is dramatically and inescapably unpredictable. “Life changes fast,” Joan Didion writes. “Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.” Or, in the language of the megillah, on a whim the Jews of Shushan saw their whole world turn upside down—“grief turned into joy, a day of mourning into a day of celebration.”¹

The reversibility of fortune, the capriciousness of life, is a message Purim shares with Yom Kippur. Known in the Talmud as yom k’purim, “a day like Purim,” Yom Kippur compels us to reflect on the unavoidable uncertainty of our lives. But on Yom Kippur we dive into this terrifying reality with austerity, reflection and spiritual wakefulness, whereas on Purim we respond by celebrating, imbibing and masquerading....

So Purim is simultaneously an acknowledgment of life’s meaninglessness and unpredictability and a wholehearted last-ditch effort to pierce the chaos and shatter the darkness. “There is no greater or more wonderful joy,” says the Mishnah Berurah, “than to make happy the heart of a poor person, an orphan or a widow. This is how we become God-like.”⁵ Even from the heart of darkness, we refuse to cede agency. We make up for God’s absence in the Purim narrative by redoubling our capacity for God-like living in our own. We respond to the threat of emptiness by pouring more kindness and sweetness into the world....

¹ Megillat Esther 9:22.

⁵ Mishnah Berurah, Orach Chayim 694:3.

AJWS Rabbi Sharon Brous (Purim 5771: Masks and Flasks, Love and Light | Sefaria)

Professor Michael Fox in Hartmann Insitute's 2008 article "Two modern thinkers on why God is hidden in Megillah" by Steve Israel and Noam Zion

God in Esther is indeed veiled, as the popular metaphor puts it…a veil suggests that there is something behind it and invites us to look through. But when we look through this one, we do not see the sturdy old faith that so many readers assume must be back there somewhere. We see a light but it shimmers...

The story’s [ambivalence] conveys the message that the Jews should not lose faith if they too are uncertain about where God is in a crisis. [Since it is impossible to know for sure whether God is present, you should never discount the possibility even when things look very bleak, as they did for the Jews of Persia in the story]. Israel will survive - that is the author’s faith – but how this will happen he does not know. Events are ambiguous and God’s activity cannot be directly read out of them: yet they are not random...[The author might not be sure what to believe but he is sure that there is some kind of pattern in the world and that things such as the events of the Megillah have not happened for no reason at all]. When we [search carefully] the text of Esther for traces of God’s activity, we are doing what the author made us do. The author would have us probe the events that we witness in our lives in the same way. He is teaching a theology of possibility.

Parable shared, in memory of Rabbi Harold Schulweis, by Rabbi Naomi Levy in her book Einstein and the Rabbi: Searching for the Soul

“When God was creating the world God shared a secret with the angels. Human beings will be created in the image of God. The angels were jealous and outraged. Why should humans be entrusted with such a precious gift when they were flawed mortals. Surely if humans found out their true power, they will abuse it. If humans discover they are created in God’s very image, they will learn to surpass us! So the angels decided to steal God’s image.

Now that the divine image was in the angels’ hands, they needed to pick a place to hide it so that man would never find it. They held a meeting and brainstormed. The angel Gabriel suggested that they hide God’s image at the top of the highest mountain peak. The other angels objected, saying, “One day humans will learn to climb and they will find it there.”

The angel Michael said “Let’s hide it at the bottom of the sea.” “No,” the other angels chimed in “humans will find a way to dive to the bottom o the sea and they’ll find it there.” One by one the angels suggested hiding places, but they were all rejected.

And then Uriel, the wisest angel of all, stepped forward and said “I know a place where man will never look for it.” So the angels hid the precious holy image of God deep within the human soul.

“Where is God? Wherever you let Him in” - R. Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

Purim, then, is about searching below the surface—the invitation to pierce through randomness, vulgarity, and violence in order to uncover meaning and God’s Presence. The play back and forth between these ideas is constant in the text. Vashti refuses to reveal her beauty to the King’s feasting guests; Esther’s Jewish identity is hidden from the King; Haman hides his true plan for the Jews; King Achashverosh is in the dark about the plot to kill the Jews; and finally, the character of God is hidden in the text.

Rambam here claims that the highest joy is the joy of helping another human being. Perhaps the best way to spend the Holiday of Purim might be to volunteer at a soup kitchen? The Rabbis teach us that just as God clothes the naked and visits the sick, so too we are meant to do the same (See Sifrei Ekev Piska 49, Bavli Sota 14a, Rambam Positive Commandment 8). One of the core values of the religious personality is to walk in God’s ways. What Purim offers us is an opportunity to fulfill this central aspect of our religion.

מגילה=Megillah=To reveal

"Many of the serious messages of Purim are encoded in word play and irony, and the Book of Esther‘s seemingly absent God is no exception. The centrality of the concept of hester panim or “the concealed face of God” to Purim is recognized in the fact that Esther is the only text in the Hebrew Bible, except for the Song of Songs,that does not mention the name of God explicitly....he name Esther is interpreted as an extension of the phrase for a “concealed God.”... Discussing the verse in Deuteronomy, the medieval commentator Abraham ibn Ezra suggests that the term “turned to” or panah should actually be read as “whored with” or zanah. Here, the blame for the broken relationship between God and Israel lies squarely with Israel’s assimilation and worship amongst the gods of the nations, a circumstance apparent in the story of Purim as well. There seems to be no distinction between Esther or Mordechai and the non-Jewish Persians until the Jews themselves reveal who they are.

Furthermore, Esther’s moniker is doubly ironic, because her name is a Hebraization of the name of the Near Eastern goddess Ishtar, and her Uncle Mordechai’s name is a Hebrew version of the name of the Near Eastern god Marduk. Through the lens of a nitty-gritty melodrama of sex, deception, and violence, the Book of Esther openly critiques the possibility of a “secular” world of blind fate and challenges the nature of assimilated Jewish life. Without God at its center, Jewish life and Jewish heroes merely become a poor imitation of the world around them. The Diaspora Jews depicted at Purim’s core can be seen as a fulfillment of biblical prophecy of divine abandonment resulting from Jewish assimilation to the cultural norms counter to a Jewish center... Yet despite God’s vow in Deuteronomy, it is not clear if the Jewish disconnect with the divine in Esther is the result of God’s withdrawal from protection of Jewish religious sanctity during the destruction of the First Temple–from which Mordechai and Esther’s ancestors as said to have fled–or if God withdraws from the Jews only gradually because of their assimilation in Persia. Whether God or the Jewish people initiate the break in this relationship, the result is that the Jews can no longer mirror God because God is no longer a face to be experienced and reflected upon. The world of the Jews of the Purim story is one of physical and spiritual exile." (https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/the-concealed-face-of-god/)