WHEN

SUCH A ONE HEARS THE WORDS OF THESE SANCTIONS, HE MAY FANCY HIMSELF IMMUNE,

THINKING, "I SHALL BE SAFE THOUGH I FOLLOW MY OWN WILLFUL HEART"- TO

THE UTTER RUIN OF MOIST AND DRY ALIKE. THE LORD WILL NEVER FORGIVE HIM; RATHER

THE LORD'S ANGER AND PASSION RAGE AGAINST THAT MAN, TILL EVERY SANCTION

RECORDED IN THIS BOOK COMES DOWN UPON HIM, AND THE LORD BLOTS OUT HIS NAME FROM

UNDER HEAVEN. THE LORD WILL SINGLE THEM OUT FROM ALL

THE TRIBES OF ISRAEL FOR

MISFORTUNE, IN ACCORDANCE WITH ALL THE SANCTIONS OF THE COVENANT RECORDED IN

THIS BOOK OF TORAH. AND LATER GENERATIONS WILL ASK – THE CHILDREN WHO WILL

SUCCEED YOU, AND FOREIGNERS WHO COME FROM DISTANT LANDS AND SEE THE PLAGUES AND

DISEASES THAT THE LORD HAS INFLICTED UPON THAT LAND, ALL ITS SOIL DEVASTATED BY

SULFUR AND SALT, BEYOND SOWING AND PRODUCING, NO GRASS GROWING IN IT, JUST LIKE

THE UPHEAVAL OF SODOM AND GEMORRAH, ADMAH AND ZEBOIIM, WHICH THE LORD OVERTHREW

IN HIS FIERCE ANGER – ALL THE NATIONS WILL ASK, "WHY DID THE LORD DO THUS

TO THIS LAND? WHEREFORE THAT AWFUL WRATH?" THEY

WILL BE TOLD, "BECAUSE THEY FORSOOK THE COVENANT THAT THE LORD, GOD OF

THEIR FATHERS, MADE WITH THEM WHEN HE FREED THEM FROM THE LAND OF EGYPT; THEY

TURNED TO THE SERVICE OF OTHER GODS WHOM THEY HAD NOT EXPERIENCED AND WHOM HE HAD

NOT ALLOTTED TO THEM.

(Devarim 29:18-25)

Know

that the judgment of Sodom was

due to the superiority of the Land of Israel since

Sodom is part of the inheritance

of the Eternal (II Samuel 20:19), and

it does not suffer men of abominations. And just as it later vomited out a whole

nation on account of their abominations, so it now anticipated and saw that

this entire people behaved worse than all nations towards Heaven and mankind. It

thus laid waste heaven and earth for them, and the land was destroyed forever, never

to be restored, since they became haughty on account of the goodness that was

bestowed on them. The Holy One, blessed be He, thus made Sodom a token

against the rebellious children (Bamidbar

17:25),

that is, against the children of Israel who were destined to inherit it, even

as He warned them: , all

its soil devastated by sulfur and salt… just like the upheaval of Sodom and Gemorrah, Admah and Zeboiim, which the Lord overthrew in His fierce anger (Devarim 29:22). For there have been among nations

those who were evil and exceedingly sinful, and yet He did not do to them as He

did to Sodom. However,

it was all on account of the superiority of this land for there is the temple

of the Eternal (Jeremiah 7:4). I plan to explain this in Seder Aharei Mot, if He Who taketh

life and giveth life will sustain me in life.

(RaMBaN on Bereishit 1:7, based on

Chavel translation)

The Double

Concealment

Ariel Rathaus

Even while the Israelites were granted

a Divine revelation at Mount Sinai, and

God spoke to their rabbi, Moses, face-to-face, the Torah increasingly emphasizes

the clear connection between hiddeness and the divine

sphere.

In parashat Nitzavim, we read the verse; the concealed things

concern the Lord (Devarim 29:28),

which is usually understood as referring to hidden transgressions (as against

public transgressions – see Rashi and Seforno ad locum). In parashat

Vayeilekh, (which, as is often the case, is read

together with Nitzavim this year), we find several

passages that depict God, under certain circumstances, as being hidden. To a

large degree, this notion of Divine concealment is constitutive of the way

people relate to the Divine. These verses proclaim that the Divine face that

was revealed at Mount

Sinai may also disappear

behind an impenetrable screen. In effect, this is dependent on the person

himself, on how worthy he is of Divine revelation. The more the Israelites sin

and clamor after the strange gods of the land (Devarim 31:16), the more impenetrable the screen

becomes and the more profound the concealment. To formulate it in the Torah's

own words:

Then my anger will flare up against

them, and I will abandon them and hide My countenance

from them. They shall be ready prey; and many evils and troubles shall befall

them. And they shall say on that day, "Surely it is because our God is not

in our midst that these evils have befallen us. Yet I will truly hide [haster astir] My countenance on

that day, because of the evil they have done in turning to other gods. (Devarim 31:17-18)

These verses, which serve as the origin

of the graphic and powerful theological expression, "concealment of [God's]

face," contain an exegetical challenge: what is the message of the

repetitive phrase haster astir in verse

18, a repetition that is all the more striking since the verb-root seter [conceal] already appears in the word vehistarti [and I will hide] in verse 17. Of

course, a purely literalist exegete might brush this off as a mere matter of

literary convention, as Ibn Ezra said ("such is

linguistic custom, and grammatical scholars will understand"). However, I

shall present the views of several sages who were not satisfied with

syntactical explanations, and who tried to draw far-reaching conclusions from

the verse's repetitiveness. It is clear that these writers did not solve the

problem of the repetition as a textual issue, but, as we shall see, they shed

much light from various directions on the concept of concealment as an integral

part of the religious experience of the individual Jew.

First of all, I should mention a

well-known drasha from the Babylonian Talmud on the

expression haster astir, a drasha that connects those words with Meggilat

Esther, seeing in them a kind of prophetic foreshadowing of the events

commemorated on Purim: "The townspeople of Pefunyah

said to Rabbi Matnah: …Where do we find Esther in

the Torah? He told them: [From the verse] I will truly hide [haster astir]" (Hullin 139b).

At first glance, Rabbi Matnah seems to be making a simple play on words, replacing

haster with Esther; perhaps it

was just a half-joking answer to a deliberately annoying audience. Further

consideration clearly demonstrates that Rabbi Matnah's

answer fits closely into a general appreciation of Purim's deeper significance.

According to a well-known opinion, the

Israelites accepted the Torah a second time in the days of Ahashveirosh

– this time by free choice, which was not the case at Mount Sinai, where God is

said to have threatened them by lifting "the mountain over them like a

basin" (Shabbat

88a).

One might naturally ask why such a crucial event is attributed precisely to the

generation of Mordekhai and Esther. Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh Leib

Alter of Gur, known as the Sfat

Emet, explains that on Purim the Jews accepted

the Torah without experiencing Divine revelation, without signs and wonders. This

"natural" acceptance, which occurred in a period of Divine

concealment, completed the earlier acceptance, which had occurred at Sinai

under supernatural circumstances that "forced" the Israelites into

compliance. At Mount Sinai ‘the Israelites literally and physically saw that it

is impossible to stray from God, who is the Life of Life," but in the days

of Ahashveirosh, "they saw the miracle within

nature, and understood that nature is just concealment, but its inwardness is

simply the vitality of Torah" (Sfat

Emet Shavuot, as cited in Y. Hassidah,

Biurei Ha-Hassidut

la-Shas, Jerusalem 1975, pg. 105).

He who saw the face of God is incapable

of choosing it,

but can only cleave to Him absolutely. In contrast, Meggilat

Esther – Rabbi Matnah's "Meggilah

of Concealment" – points to a unique spiritual condition, that of choice. According

to this approach, Divine concealment is not simply a punishment, as implied by

the sources cited earlier; it also offers a test of true faith. The Jews of Mordekhai and Esther's day accepted the Torah in a world

without manifest miracles. They had to exercise the power of their faith to

recognize the hand of Providence

working behind the screen of seemingly natural and arbitrary historical events.

They only had access to the natural, but they understood that nature is only a

form of concealment wrapped around the vitality of the Torah. That was their

greatness.

The RaMBaN

approaches our verses from a different vantage-point. His interpretation

concentrates o the difference between the two expressions of concealment, I

will hide My countenance as against I will truly

hide [haster astir] My countenance. He believes

that the repetition involved requires us to associate each of the phrases with

a different kind of concealment.

He posits that the first expression

refers to God's concealing the "face of his compassion" from the

Israelites (i.e., He stopped watching over them), in order to punish them for

turning to idolatry. In contrast, the second expression, haster

astir, concerns the period after they have already disavowed idolatry (as

seen from the verse: and they shall say on that day, "Surely it is

because our God is not in our midst that these evils have befallen us"

– Devarim31:17) in which

God will continue to punish them because of the enormity of their sin, but in a

gentler manner: "It is not like the first concealment, in which He

concealed the face of His compassion and they met with many evils and troubles;

rather, the face of redemption shall be concealed from them" (RaMBaN on Devarim 31:18).

In other words: After the Israelites

repent, God will return to watch over them, but will not redeem them

completely. Concealment continues in a different form, and throughout the

generations, the Jewish People persists as a nation living under God's

providence, yet which is unredeemed. God will only reveal the face of

redemption as the result of a process of general spiritual renewal. Salvation

will not come, claims the RaMBaN, "until there

is added to the mentioned disavowal [of idolatry] complete confession and

repentance" (loc cit).

Rabbi Nahman

of Bratzlav understands Divine concealment to mean

more than a break in Divine providence or a postponement of redemption; he sees

it as a complete disappearance of the Divine from human view. He pays special

interest to the expression haster astir,

giving it an original and profound interpretation, thus relating to the search

for God as a uniquely dramatic spiritual experience:

For there are two concealments. When

God hides in one concealment, it is very hard to find

Him. Even so, since one is aware that God is hiding from him, it remains

possible for one to exert oneself and struggle until He, may He be blessed, is

found. But when blessed God hides in a concealment

within a concealment, that is, when the concealment itself is hidden from view,

then it becomes entirely impossible to find Him, since then one knows nothing

of blessed God. That is the aspect referred to by I will truly hide [haster astir]; i.e., I will hide the concealment, so

that they will not even know that blessed God is hidden. Then he will certainly

be unable to find Him, may He be blessed, since he will not know that he even

has to seek Him, may He be blessed, since he does not know at all that blessed

God is hidden from him, since the concealment is itself hidden, as is explained

above. (Likutei MoHaRaN, 1:56, 3)

What conclusions may we draw from these

sharp words, which so powerfully describe alienation-unto-blindness from which

there is no escape? There is no doubt that Rabbi Nahman

was referring principally to the crisis of traditional faith, a process that

was growing at the time his words were first published (1806) and that has

become even stronger with time, until the alienation of which he spoke has

become the primary spiritual condition of recent generations. In that aspect,

his words are directed towards the modern secularists, who have been emptied of

all religious-metaphysical content, and who are not even able to notice that they

have lost something of significance. Just as a person can only gain knowledge

when he recognizes his ignorance, so too a person can only find God when he

realizes that he is without God. According to Rabbi Nahman's

approach, the tragedy of modern skepticism is that it has no doubts regarding

its own connection with the Divine, since the Divine has simply disappeared

from its spiritual horizon.

However, it seems that we may draw an

additional conclusion from Rabbi Nahman's concept of "concealment

within concealment" that is particularly relevant to our generation. If

God sometimes hides the fact of His concealment, then even God-fearing people

may mistakenly identify a form of concealment for a kind of revelation. Not

only will the atheist fail to seek God; so will those who believe that they

have already found Him. In this way, Rabbi Nahman's

words may be understood to be directed towards believers as well as

non-believers; to those believers who in their impudence are sure that they

have clearly understood God's intentions and plans. They are convinced that He

has revealed to them which political moves the State of Israel must make, or

exactly which human sin is being punished through deaths in traffic accidents.

It must be said to all of these people

that it was not for nothing that the prophet called the God of Israel a hiding

God (Isaiah

45:15),

and that we will only be able to try to draw near to Him when we admit, in

complete humility, that His ways are hidden from us as unsolved riddles.

Dr.

Ariel Rathaus is a literary researcher and translator

Then the Lord will restore all

the peoples (Devarim 30:3)

…or

it is said that those of Israel who, in their captivity, long for the Land of

Israel, and wish to flee the diaspora as from a pit

of captivity, will be returned early. And He will bring you together from

all the peoples – those are the Israelites who are happy in a strange land,

and whose desire for the Land of Beauty has ceased – these God will also gather

as well, and return them later.

(Rabbi

Meir Simha MiDvinsk, Meshekh Hokhmah on Devarim 30:3)

It is not in Heaven

These

three words, lo ba-shamayim hee

(it is not in heaven), are the most effective means of protection

against the pretentious claim to supernatural enlightenment or even supporting itself on some Divine revelation to

influence the Law and Teachings in Israel. Only

hokhmah (wisdom) – not prophecy – only

erudition, scholarship derived from the text and tradition, not some higher

inspiration or prompting can lay claim to any validity regarding the teachings

and keeping the commandments of the Torah since its completion by Moses.

(Rabbi

S.R. Hirsch on Devarim 30:14, Levy translation)

Arrogant Leadership Brings War

Rabbi

Yehudah said that Rav said:

When our Rabbi Moses departed for paradise, he said to Joshua: Ask me about any

doubts you may have. He said to him: Rabbi, did I ever leave you for a moment

to go elsewhere [and miss something you taught]? Did you not write of me,

and his servant Joshua, a youth, did not stir from within the Tent (Shemot 33: 11)? Joshua was immediately weakened; he

forgot 300 laws and bore 700 doubts, and all of Israel stood

ready to kill him. God told him: I cannot tell you [that which you have

forgotten], go busy them with war, for it says, and it came to pass after

the death of Moses, the Lord's servant…[that God instructs Joshua to

conquer Canaan] (Joshua 1:1).

(Temurah 16a)

Righteousness and justice are the base of Your throne; steadfast love and faithfulness

stand before You (Tehillim 89:15)

From the Selihot

It

is known that justice is the base of the Throne of Glory, for it is said, righteousness

and justice are the base of Your throne; he who establishes justice

establishes the Throne, while he who distorts justice, and damages justice,

damages the Throne. That is why he [Shlomo in Mishlei 24:23] mentions bal

tov [to be partial in judgment is not good – bal tov], he

does not merit the good which is stored away, of which it is written, how

abundant is the good that You have in store, etc. (Tehillim 31:20). Shlomo has

taught us that one who discriminates in law is punished in this world and in

the next world. Justice is the author of peace, and so we find that when Yitro made a suggestion regarding justice to Moses, he

mentioned peace, for it is written, if you do this thing – and God so

commands you …and all these people too will go to their place in peace (Shemot 18:23), and peace sustains the world. That is

why justice is left to the sages, since the sages increase peace in the world.

(Rabbeinu Behayeiy, introduction

to parashat Mishpatim.)