The Not-So-Hidden Future History of the Jews

When Jews of all peoples don’t realize they are in history, then they inevitably drown in it.

This week’s section of the Torah, Vayelech, the shortest of the year, lays it all out in front of us as a simple straightforward, unambiguous deal. It is Moses’ last day. He has been delivering his final, long speech to the Jews as they are about to enter Israel and conquer it. His passion and concern for the Hebrews transcends the pathos of his impending punishment: he is not allowed to enter Israel with the people he liberated and guided for forty years. His focus in his 35-day exhortation is on reminding them over and over of the terms of the deal: if you abandon G-d, then G-d will abandon you to the predations of other nations. To make it even simpler, Moses in this last day doesn’t demand obedience to all 613 commandments. He cautions against violating only one: worshipping something other than G-d. Betray Him, and He will stop paying attention to you with the special care He has shown you. He liberated you from Egypt, made you literate, gave you the Torah, fed and clothed you in the wilderness, and now brought you to this Promised Land, despite the many times you’ve tested His patience. He’s kept his end of the bargain. All you have to do is avoid worshiping the petty gods of other nations.

And then he’s done with his speech. But before Moses launches into his famous song, a soaring bit of inspired poetry and love song to the relationship between G-d and Israel, G-d takes him aside. He tells him, confidentially, I know these people. They are going to betray me and follow the gods of other nations, even ones they don’t yet know. 

• Cain cries out when he realizes his awful fate for killing Abel: Cain realizes G-d will hide His face from him as he roams the Earth as a vagrant. (Gen 4:14)
• As Jacob finally parts from his uncle after twenty-one years of deception, Laban, the paragon of deceit and distrust, erects a monument to make sure Jacob will hold up his end of their treaty, “So G-d will watch between you and me even when we can’t see each other.”
• Moses hides his face on Sinai as G-d reveals Himself as the same One who made a deal with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. (Ex 3:6)
• If a wife commits adultery “undetected” but her husband becomes suspicious, it initiates a serious breach in the social order (in primitive societies it is still the source of revenge or “honor” killings) that can only be healed by a special judicial process for the sotah. (Num 5:13)
• G-d will send hornets to destroy those who hide from (abandon) Him, a poetically just punishment since hornets are so personal and particular when they sting. (Deut 7:20)
• Hidden (private or secret) sins are [to be left] to G-d. (Deut 29:29)

Together these uses of the root “S-T-R” – hide – resonate with each other across the tapestry of the Hebrew Bible and the history of the Hebrews. Every partnership, relationship, marriage has an aspect of distrust in it. That’s the nature of relationships, and that’s why we have contracts and ketubahs spelling out responsibilities and penalties for not fulfilling those responsibilities. As in human relationships, the contract between Israel and G-d requires both parties paying attention to each other. “Hiding your face” and therefore your gaze from the covenant, turning to foreign gods and idols, breaks it. The consequence is G-d will hide His face from you.

This would be a mere academic exercise in clever wordplay around the root image, except that G-d’s use of the word transcends the text, and history, to prophesy the future unmistakably.  Until now it was sprinkled sparsely through the rest of the Torah, but now it occurs three times in two verses and twice, emphatically, together, like trumpet blasts demanding our attention. To what?

A secret vision is revealed to Moses, signaled in this word for hiding. The Talmud nails it. Rav Mattana tells his students that G-d is alluding to the events “involving Esther” and Purim centuries later.

“The verse states… “And I will hide [haster astir] My face on that day for all the evil which they shall have done by turning to other gods.”[1]

Though R. Mattana doesn’t elaborate, we see immediately what he means. Esther’s name derives from the same root, hidden. She’s a crypto-Jew. Even her own husband, King Ahashveros,  doesn’t know. Further. G-d Himself is famously hidden in the Megillah. He is never mentioned.

With this key, we see G-d sketch the entire story of the Jews of Persia for Moses. Haman has sent a decree to all the 127 satraps (states) of Persian Empire telling the citizens to kill all the Jews, man woman and child. We don’t tend to pay attention to it as we focus on the genocidal Haman, but the premise for his plot must be that the Jews were in fact living in all those paces, spread out across the Persian Empire.

In other words, if not completely assimilated, Jews were surely well-integrated and mixed with the host culture freely. And they were doing so willingly. Before the events of Purim, Cyrus liberated the Jews from their Babylonian captivity and sent them back to Jerusalem. He even helped erect the Second Temple there. By definition many, maybe the majority, Jews rejected Cyrus’ lovely invitation and chose to remain behind in Persia. They were too comfortable, too settled to go back to Zion. Was it any accident that after inviting them to leave, Persia threatens to completely eliminate them? Or is it fulfillment of G-d’s dire consequences to the Jews of forgetting their deal, one we see over and over again whenever we assimilate: “They will be easy prey …”? Disguised as the oldest, deepest hatred erupting in historical events, it may be hard to see G-d’s actions hiding beneath the surface, the Megillah and this prophecy in Torah tell us He’s there.

Whether by sloth or lack of spirit or lack of faith, Persian Jews broke the covenant with G-d. We don’t know how steeped in idolatry they were. We can only imagine. Epicurus, who invented the idea of a moral, secular atheism in sophisticated Greece, hadn’t yet been born.[2] So it is hard to imagine the Jews there just believed, as many do now, in no god at all. Even if it was just material comfort and assimilation they were after, they chased after other gods.

On the threshold of the fulfillment of His promise to the Hebrews, G-d brings Moses into His confidence and shows him a vista not only in space but in time. He predicts the far-flung, even eternally-recurring future drama of the Jews wherever they are in exile, not just in Persia. Esther’s hidden identity as a Jew foreshadows the status of Jews many times in the Diaspora, even in America. Here we find ourselves more free to identify as Jews anywhere ever since the fall of the Temple, except Israel, but too many of us simply don’t care to. By now, wouldn’t you think we’d know how this is going to work out for us?

When G-d hides His face from the Jews, we have no protection from the forces of hatred and Haman and Hitler that inevitably erupt in our host nations. History is the teacher here. We don’t need to resort to mystical explanations, or the rationalization G-d Himself predicts we will use: “Oh, He broke the deal. Our troubles came because He withdrew.”

As I write these words, it is the afternoon before Shabbat Shuvah, 5780. I am racing the clock. Yom Kippur is next week. So let me end on a note of redemption.

Purim and Yom Kippur are mystically connected, flip sides of the same spiritual coin. R. Joseph Soloveitchik notes the holidays are only superficially different. Beneath, they are the same:

 “Purim is a call for Divine compassion and intercession, a mood of petition arising out of great distress…. The pur, the goral of Purim and the casting of lots [for choosing the goats] on Yom Kippur both speak to man’s basic condition of vulnerability, insecurity, and fickleness.”[3]

The two holy days also speak to our ability to choose which way we turn our psyche. I hope and pray that individually and collectively we find the conviction, if not from transcendent words of Torah then from the lessons all around us, to turn back, to do teshuvah, to the covenant we made with G-d. The message of Yom Kippur is that it is never too late to turn our faces to Him so He will keep His loving, indulgent, forgiving face turned to us.

 

Porush

Simchateo, CA 5780

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ENDNOTES

[1] Chulin 139b

[2] To this day, Persian culture doesn’t have a sophisticated idea of secularism. You are either Muslim, Zoroastrian, or identified with another religion.

[3] Quoted in R. Eliyahu Safran, “Purim and Yom Kippur: An Odd Couple?” OU [https://www.ou.org/holidays/purim/purim_and_yom_kippur/]