Not Knowing: Preparing the Ground for Liberation

Many people are familiar with Alan Lew’s (of blessed memory) book, This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, which offers a spiritual arc of the Jewish year from Tisha B’Av through Sukkot.  Rabbi Lew guides the reader on a journey home, starting from the point where everything falls apart, and then moving, step by step, through reconciliation and rebuilding from a place of greater vulnerability and wisdom. 

Less has been written about this time of the Jewish year, the period between Purim and Shavuot.  But it too has an unmistakable spiritual arc, from a place of secrets so hidden we don’t even know they are there to a place of opening up and revealing essential truths and insights that inform our lives moving forward.  Over the next few months, I will share some thoughts about this journey.

Let’s start with Purim, that puzzling holiday that we just celebrated.  Purim is a time of great hiddenness. The story of Purim is topsy turvy, where things seem to just happen, terrible acts of destruction and great acts of salvation, based on the whim of men in power.  The whole story unfolds without a single explicit mention of the Divine.  In fact, many commentators link the name of Queen Esther with the devastating “hester panim,” or the hiding or turning away of the Divine face. 

And our observance of Purim emphasizes the confusion.  We hide our identities by putting on costumes and masks.  We are commanded to get so intoxicated that we can no longer tell the difference between good and evil.    We go to great lengths to embody “nahafoch hu,” everything turned upside down.  There is a sense of letting go, of revelry, of carnival.

But underneath the celebration lurks a real sense of terror.  After all, what happens when the order of things is upended and any kind of meaning is hidden?  All we have to do is turn on the news of the savagery in Ukraine or reflect on where we were two years ago when the pandemic began to remind ourselves of how terrible these kinds of disruptions can be.  It is not surprising that R. Simchah Bunim of Peschishah commented that Purim is “greater” than Yom Kippur because Yom Kippur is only hard on the body.  Purim is much more difficult because it is hard on the mind.

Why, then, do we have a whole holiday focusing on chaos and the hiddenness of Divine order?  One answer is that one of the biggest obstacles to spiritual growth (and growth in general) is thinking that we know.  When we approach something with the sense of knowing it, we are less open, less curious.  We are less connected to what is actually happening in the moment.  Spiritual secrets cannot be revealed to someone who already knows.  They can only be shared with someone who knows they don’t know. 

So Purim comes to destabilize us, to force us into the experience of not knowing.  It is a way of preparing the ground for a different kind of liberation that will come in just three weeks with Passover.  Stay tuned for more on that…