Tatti Torah: Hester Panim + Sleep Training
It took my wife and I over a month to sleep train Asher for the first time. Sleep training teaches children to self-soothe to sleep through the night by allowing them to cry for a predetermined amount of time before receiving external comfort. The goal is to train him to happily sleep through the night. In effect, the process involves Asher crying alone in his dark room. What he doesn’t know is that my wife and I are sitting right outside his door crying along with him.
There is a rabbinic concept called ‘hester panim.’ It says in Deuteronomy 31:18: וְאָנֹכִי הַסְתֵּר אַסְתִּיר פָּנַי בַּיֹּום הַהוּא - On that day I will surely hide my face.” Hester Panim is the experience of the absence of G!d, and the experience of prayers not unanswered. The idea is discussed often in post-Holocaust theology and in Jewish answers to theodicy.
It is, however not only a post Holocaust issue. The Talmud (Chagigah 5a) teaches that all Jews experience Hester Panim at times. It recalls a famous Rabbi named Rava of whom it was taught that each of his prayers seemed to be magically answered. The sages were so confused by this that they suspected that he might not actually be Jewish. When confronted, Rava explained that he regularly was forced to pay exorbitant secret bribes to the local authorities in order to have success in his business and political life. Still the Later, Rava was jailed by these extorting bureaucrats. It was only after his fall from perfection that sages were reassured that Rava was in fact Jewish. No one has all of their prayers answered. To appear in our tradition to have this power is, in our tradition, suspect.
Knowing that G!d is sometimes absent does not make the experience of distance less painful or traumatic. I am not apologizing for it. I hate it. Still, according to many traditional Jewish sources, one of the essential qualities of God, in addition to being forgiving, slow to anger and loving truth, is that G!d often hides.
There are various theories of hester panim:
Rabbi David Wolpe writes , “Hester Panim is necessary for G!d's self limitation. If G!d overspills the universe, there is no room for humanity. Therefore, faced with this problem of theological physics, G!d withdraws.”
Chizkuni, a 13th century French rabbi, has another explanation for Hester Panim. He argues that G!d’s absence is actually a result of G!d’s love. G!d can't bear to see his beloved people being punished. G!d thus hides G!d’s face to avoid encountering the pain of those G!d loves.
In the 18th century, the Maggid of Mezritch compared hester panim to an encounter between him and his grandson. “He asked me to play hide and seek with him and I agreed. I closed my eyes and counted and he went to hide. I was suddenly distracted by a friend and forgot all about the child. Soon I heard him crying from his hiding place, "No one has come to look for me.” Perhaps G!d is still playing hide and seek and we have gotten distracted from our search. As, the psychologist Winnicott said, “It is a joy to hide and disaster not to be found.”
I wonder if this divine game of hide and seek is related to our practice of covering our eyes when we recite the Shema. Like Moses at burning bush and on Mt. Sinai, We can’t see G!d so we cover our eyes and enter into a divine game of peekaboo. G!d hides when we have our eyes open. G!d appears when we close our eyes and leave room for G!d to come out.
