Hidden God, Hidden Jew
Calling in Leviticus and Esther
So Haman took the garb and the horse and arrayed Mordecai and paraded him through the city square; and he proclaimed (vayikra) before him: This is what is done for the man whom the king desires to honor! (Esther 6:11)
The Lord called (vayikra) to Moses and spoke to him from the Tent of Meeting, saying…(Leviticus 1:1)
Vayikra, to call or proclaim, implies distance. You don’t call to someone right in front of you. The word, which begins the third book of the Torah, and emphasizes the distance between God and humanity, appears once in Megillat Esther. Strangely, we find vayikra in the scene in which Haman parades Mordechai through the city square. As Purim is a holiday centered on inversions, this is quite the inversion. Instead of God calling out to Moses, we find Haman calling out to the Shushanites. Instead of God sharing instructions for the sacrifices, we find Haman sharing instructions for giving esteem. Note that Haman doesn’t simply parade Mordechai around to give him praise; he uses Mordechai as an illustration of a general principle. “If you want to give esteem to someone, look at me, this is how you do it.”
Why does Haman phrase it this way? One possibility is that it enables him to disassociate from Mordechai. He isn’t actually praising him, just using him as a prop to teach the steps for praising. He is mentioning Mordechai’s name, not using it, to borrow a famous distinction from the philosophy of language. Another possibility is that the text, in a comedic turn, effectively turns Haman into a lawgiver. The laws of the Levitical sacrifices are contrasted with the laws of Persian status games. In the Israelite system of sacrifices, you lower yourself before God. In Persia, you seek to position yourself as more deserving than the next person. The one is a culture of piety and humility, the other one of competition and jockeying. The law of the sacrifices serves to effect atonement and transformation, while the law of reality TV serves to effect escapism and diversion. The one culminates in authentic catharsis, the other in upholding a facade.
Purim, being a masquerade holiday, takes the view that we unmask the facade, not by removing the mastk, but by making it explicit that we always wearing one. In the absurdity of the scene we view the status game for the game that it is. The point of the Purim Spiel is to reveal that life itself is one big Purim Spiel. “All the world’s a stage.”
Perhaps the textual parallel between the two vayikra moments also points to a parallel between the hiddenness of God and the hiddennes of the Jewish people. A God who is distant, which is what vayikra implies, is not easily or obviously approached, not easily understood. The origin of God’s hidden face (Hester Panim), which is one of the central themes of Purim, is expressed in the word Vayikra: we hear the call of God, but do not see God. God is here, present, and yet only as an echo, a trace. In the story of Esther, it is not just God who is concealed in the action, but the identity of Esther. Nobody knows that she is Jewish. Thus we find two things hidden in plain sight: the presence of God and the presence of the Jew. And perhaps this is the meaning of Esther’s self-revelation. In disclosing her Jewishness at the right time and place, she discloses the presence of God in the world, to which the Jewish people are called to witness.
The hiddenness or apparent absence of God is a feature of what Kabbalistic theology dubs “tzimtzum,” the aboriginal withdrawal of God during the creation of the world to make room for alterity. This difficult concept has spawned variant interpretations, but a classical one is that God did not actually withdraw from the world. God withdrew from the world, only from our experience. To invoke Kant, God withdrew from the world of appearances, but not from the world of things in themselves. Why does God apparently withdraw? Why does God speak via Vayikra and not via Va’yedabr? Why do we see God’s back, not God’s face? A common answer is that this enables to seek God, to desire God, and to cultivate our own independent view. More importantly, it enables us to become partners in Creation, rather than mere recipients of God’s grace. The hiddenness of God is a familiar idea, but what we need to appreciate is how it connects to the hiddenness of the Jew. “As above, so below.”
Why do Jews hide their Jewishness? A sociologist will give answers like “anti-semitism” or “assimilation.” A psychologist will give answers like “shame” or “guilt.” But there is also a theological answer. The Jew hides, because God hides. The Jewish soul is hidden because the divine face is hidden. The Jews conceal their light because it would overpower the world. We Jews can give only traces of our being; we can call to the world spiritually only with the call of Vayikra. Sometimes our power is revealed inadvertently through our enemies; as in Haman, calling out to the Persians, about how one might honor a man like Mordechai.
Haman complains that we are a non-categorical people. “There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom” (3:8). In contrast to other peoples, which have their designated province, the Jews are defined by being scattered. We stand out for being scattered, but we also blend in because of it. Haman makes a two-fold antisemitic appeal. The Jews are mongrelizers who don’t keep to their type, and, the Jews don’t assimilate and stay apart: “Their laws are different from those of all other people and they do not observe the king's laws, so it is not in the king’s interest to let them remain.” Haman advances the antisemitic arguments of both the Nazi right (Jews are a pernicious race) and the Communist left (Jews put themselves before the common interest). These antisemitic canards correlate to two theological complaints about God: jealousy (Nietzsche) and irrelevance (Marx). The one seeks to banish God for being superior (“If God exists, how could I bear not to be God?”) the other for directing energy away from the universal cause (“Religion is the opiate of the masses”).
Just as God is only apparently absent, the Jew is only apparently absent. The Jew is only apparently gone. Neither assimilation into left-wing Shushan nor expurgation by right-wing Shushan, can destroy the Jew, any more than Marx or Nietzsche can abolish God. The Jew is hidden to grant the people of Shushan free-will. But whether the Shushanites decide to be God-fearers or not, eventually the light of God’s hidden face must be revealed, just as Esther must make known her Jewish light. God can pretend to be just part of the furniture, and Esther can pretend just to be another pretty lady in the harem of Ahashverosh. But not forever. The soul is calling. It has something to share. Vayikra.
Shabbat Shalom & Chag Purim Sameach,
Zohar Atkins