When I was a child, Purim was the highlight of the Jewish year. The costumes, the ridiculous plays, the hamantashen, sometimes a carnival; what fun!

 

But this year, we have to take Purim back from the kids, or at least establish an adult beachhead at the fairgrounds. The devastating attack of October 7, the war, and the resurgence of antisemitism resound with the archetypal themes of Purim, and so we do ourselves a favor by exploring those themes and drawing out the lessons that will serve us in these times.

 

Our Sages of the Talmud lead us into the field by asking a question:[1] “Where in the Torah do we find a reference to Esther?” The Book of Esther, the megillah, was the last book of the entire bible to be canonized and it faced some issues in gaining that place, so the rabbis were trying to anchor it in the more established texts.

 

They find an allusion to Esther in the Book of Deuteronomy (31: 17-18) where God is conversing with Moshe just before he dies, and promises fearful consequences if the people forsake God for idol worship and break the covenant. The verse the Talmud highlights is: “I will surely hide My face.” The Hebrew is, “v’anochi haster astir panai.”

 

The word “to hide” – l’hastir – and the name “Esther” are linguistically related. When Esther was vying to be queen, she hid the truth of who she was. The custom of wearing masks on Purim can be traced back to the same source.

 

But there is something much more profound at work here than a masquerade. The warning in the Torah is that there would come a time when God would be hidden from us, and on this very verse Rashi, basing his teaching on the same section of the Talmud, tells us that this “hiding of God’s face” will be in the time of Esther. And, indeed, throughout the entire Megillah that relates the story of Esther, Mordechai and the miraculous salvation of the Jewish people, the name of God does not appear.

 

The teaching here is that there are times in human history when God is present – because God is always present – but has “turned away.” These are times characterized by “hester panim,” which means “hiding of the face” and refers to situations in which God’s presence is hidden and as a result, we are seemingly on our own.

 

God’s hidden face has been invoked to explain every tragic chapter in Jewish history: the destruction of the Temple and the long, arduous exile that followed, the Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, and more happened because God stood back and turned aside.

 

Why would God conceal the divine presence from us, and allow evil to befall us? The traditional answer is because we sinned. The verse in Deuteronomy tells us that first the people turned to idol worship and broke the covenant, and only after that did God look away.

 

I’m unhappy to leave things with just this explanation. It opens the door for too much blaming the victim. The conclusion is that the destruction of Jewish communities in the Crusades happened because we sinned. The 1.5 million innocent Jewish children who died in the Holocaust endured hester panim because the Jewish community assimilated and turned their collective back on God.

 

Whenever something bad happens, the cause can be tracked back to our own errant behavior, so God remains blameless, and we are always at fault.

 

But the notion of the hidden face has a subtlety in it that helps us out here. We make an error if we think Divine Providence was absent even when negative things were happening; it is not absent, it is concealed from sight.

 

We can see that principle at work in the Purim story, where God played God’s role on behalf of the people, but in a hidden rather than open way. We might think that an open miracle like the splitting of sea or the stopping of the sun for Joshua are much greater miracles than what we find in the Megillah, but Rav Yerucham Levovitz, the great Mussar teacher from the Mir yeshiva in the early 20^th century, says the opposite: