Last night we began a discussion of hiddenness. It seemed appropriate because part of the story of Purim is that G-d was hidden. Esther with Mordechai’s prompting rises to the occasion and saves the Jews. But we never meet G-d in the story itself. G-d remains hidden. 

With the kids we used the story, In G-d’s Hands, by Rabbi Larry Kushner (and Gary Schmidt who turns out to be a professor at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, small world). It is the story of a rich man who falls asleep in shul and wakes up thinking that G-d is telling him to bake 12 loaves of challah as a gift for G-d. He thinks this is strange but does it and doesn’t know where to put them. He settles on placing them in the ark. Hiding them, perhaps? The town’s poor man comes into the sanctuary and prays that he doesn’t know how to feed his family and unless G-d performs a miracle, his family will surely starve. He opens the ark, and wow! 12 loaves of challah! A miracle. This goes on for weeks and weeks until the rabbi spies them. At first they are disappointed. G-d doesn’t really eat my challah? G-d doesn’t really give me challah? But they realize that theirs are the hands of G-d.  

To illustrate this story, we hid Hershey kisses in the ark that we let the kids find. What fun we had. 

Today’s parsha, Ki Tisa, also deals with hiddenness. Moses has been up on the mountain communicating with G-d for a long time. He is hidden from view. The people are scared. Very scared. What if Moses doesn’t come back. What if G-d isn’t really G-d since G-d is hidden from view. They both are. The people beg Aaron to build for them a golden calf, a substitute image for G-d. An idol. For most of us, we think that Aaron who acquiesces to their demands is a bad leader because we know that idol worship is wrong, a sin we are told. But in Pirke Avot, a section the Talmud we learn something different about Aaron.  

Hillel used to say: be of the disciples of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace, loving mankind and drawing them close to the Torah. (Pirke Avot 1:2) 

So when Moses, and G-d were both hidden from view, Aaron stepped up and pursued peace.  

G-d is angry about the golden calf and the stiff necked people who needed that kind of reassurance. G-d threatens to destroy the Israelites. Moses talks him off a cliff. Quite literally. 

But Moses, too was angry when he came back down the mountain. So angry   about what had happened in his absence that he smashed the luach, the stone tablets. The Aseret Debrot, The 10 Sayings, Words, Commandments. The very thing he had been up on top of the mountain . Now G-d was angry again and demanded that Moses return to the top of the mountain to receive the commandments again.  

Moses will only go back up that mountain if G-d will reassure him. He wants to know who is going with him. G-d reassures him and says that G-d will go with him and give him rest. (or lighten his burden). Moses wants more. He wants to understand the essential nature of G-d. He wants to see G-d. This hidden G-d. G-d promises to hide Moses in the cleft of the rock and let all G-d’s goodness pass before him. But Moses cannot see G-d’s face and live. (G-d has a face?) Moses can see G-d’s backside (G-d has a back?) and we learn the 13 attributes, the essential nature of G-d. G-d remains hidden but we know so much more.  

Debbie Friedman sang, based on Psalm 29 or Psalm 102, “Don’t hide Your face from me, I’m asking for Your help I call to You, please hear my prayers, O God. If you would answer me, as I have called to You, Please heal me now, don’t hide Your face from me” 

We want to be reassured. We want to know G-d. To see G-d. Even when G-d is hidden from view. We want to know that G-d will go with us and give us rest. 

But something else happens in this portion. Moses has smashed the commandments. The people gather them together and place them in the ark, side by side with the full, complete set. Midrash? Yes. But an important one. 

It’s a about dreams made and dreams broken. It’s about reassurance and resilience. It’s about being able to pick up and begin again. And that may be the moment many of us are in today.  

Roger Kamenetz teaches, “The broken tablets were also carried in an ark. In so far as they represented everything shattered, everything lost, they were the law of broken things, the leaf torn from the stem in a storm, a cheek touched in fondness once but now the name forgotten. How they must have rumbled, clattered on the way even carried so carefully through the waste land, how they must have rattled around until the pieces broke into pieces, the edges softened crumbling, dust collected at the bottom of the ark ghosts of old letters, old laws. In so far as a law broken is still remembered these laws were obeyed. And in so far as memory preserves the pattern of broken things these bits of stone were preserved through many journeys and ruined days even, they say, into the promised land.” 

Estelle Frankel in her book Sacred Therapy asks these questions, “So what does it mean that the Torah was given not once, but twice? What was different about these two revelations? And what are the spiritual lessons we can learn from the fact that the Israelites gathered up the fragments and carried the broken tablets with them on their journey? 

First, she teaches, “In fact, failure is often a gateway through which we must pass in order to receive our greatest gifts.” At MIT’s Office of Intellectual Property, they tell their young scholars, soon to be business professionals that they expect young entrepreneurs to fail. Many business people have done just that. Tried out an idea and then made a mistake and failed. They need that trial and error before they can get it right. American pop culture epitomizes this in the song, 

 “Pick yourself up. Dust yourself off. Start all over again.” We tell kids learning to ride a horse or a bike, that if they fall, they need to get back on and ride. It isn’t easy. But this morning’s parsha teaches us it is possible. And that gives us hope. 

Frankel says it better: “It was only after Israel’s greatest single act of folly—namely, worshiping the golden calf—that they were able to truly receive and hold on to the gift of Torah, or spiritual illumination. Sometimes we only learn to appreciate life’s gifts after we have lost them. If, however, we are lucky enough to be given a second chance, with the wisdom we have acquired through our experience of failure, we learn how to cherish and hold on to what we are given.” 

“The two revelations at Sinai can also be seen as symbolizing the inevitable stages we go through in our spiritual development. The first tablets, like the initial visions we have for our lives, frequently shatter, especially when they are based on naïvely idealistic assumptions. Our first marriages or first careers may fail to live up to their initial promise. We may join communities or follow spiritual teachers and paths that disappoint or even betray us. Our very conceptions of God and our assumptions about the meaning of faith may shatter as we bump up against the morally complex and often contradictory aspects of the real world. Yet, if we learn from our mistakes and find ways to pick up the broken pieces of shattered dreams, we can go on to re-create our lives out of the rubble of our initial failures. And ultimately, we become wiser and more complex as our youthful ideals are replaced by more realistic and sustainable ones.” 

G-d may seem hidden. Like in the Purim story. Like in the cleft of the rock. Like in the story of the challah in the ark. Like with the wind. We can see the evidence of the wind but we can’t see the wind itself. But together, we can get to the Promised Land, the land of our dreams, Hold on to your dreams. G-d will give you rest.