Rabbi Lea Mühlstein is Senior Rabbi of The Ark Synagogue. This sermon was delivered at The Ark on Erev Rosh Hashanah. You can watch it here.
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This evening, as we enter a new Jewish year, it feels impossible not to notice the date. Twenty-five years ago today, on 11 September 2001, the world watched in horror as planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and another crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Nearly three thousand people were killed. For those of us old enough to remember, the images from that day remain frozen in our mind.
But 9/11 was more than a day of terrible loss. It became a turning point. The wars that followed changed our lives profoundly. More profound than the changes that happened at airports was the fact that fear entered public life. Suspicion of Muslims hardened into Islamophobia and the language of terrorism became part of the vocabulary through which governments and societies understood threat.
History rarely offers us a single moment from which everything else follows but there are moments after which the landscape looks different. 9/11 was one of them.
The most vivid image that remains with me from that day is of the people who were fortunate enough to escape the collapsing towers, staggering to safety covered in ash. Staring at the thick layers of ash, I remember asking myself: where is God?
Of course, the question is not unique to 9/11 – as a people we have asked the same question at many moments in our tragic history: during the waves of persecution in the Middle Ages, after the Shoah, after October 7th, after last Yom Kippur, when a terrorist murdered our fellow British Jews at the Heaton Park Synagogue in Manchester.
And we have asked the same question in circumstances that will never become dates in the history books: when the diagnosis comes, beside a hospital bed, when someone we love dies too soon.
Our Jewish tradition has a name for that experience: hester panim – the hiding of God’s face.
We first encounter the phrase towards the end of the book of Deuteronomy when Moses recounts God’s warning for the Israelites that a time will come when they turn away from God and that, in that moment, when terrible things will happen, God will respond: V’anochi hasteir astir panai bayom hahu – “I will surely hide My face on that day.”
The theology of Deuteronomy is deeply challenging: God’s hiddenness is punishment for the behaviour of the people.
I struggle to believe in the God of Deuteronomy, who responds to human wrongdoing by abandoning people to catastrophe but I recognise the experience that the Torah is trying to describe: moments when the world feels so dark that we simply cannot discern the divine presence within it.
Martin Buber, the great twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, slightly refines the image of hester panim, of God’s hidden face. Instead, he speaks of an “eclipse of God.”
I love the metaphor of the eclipse: the recent eclipse visible in the UK reminded us that during an eclipse nothing happens to the sun. It doesn’t disappear nor does its light go out. Rather, the moon has come between us and the light so that, from where we stand, we can no longer see it.
I tend to be suspicious of theological answers that try to explain suffering. I do not want a theology that tells the person sitting beside the hospital bed that there is a reason. I do not want to tell the bereaved parent that this is somehow part of a divine plan. And I certainly do not want to make sense of terrorism by assigning it a place within God’s purposes.
Sometimes darkness is simply darkness. Buber’s image of an eclipse on the other hand resists the simple explanation. It recognises the presence of darkness without attributing it to a change of the divine presence. God might be hidden from sight but that doesn’t mean God is absent as a punishment.
In his Tales of the Hasidim, Buber shares a beautiful story (and I want to thank Rabbi Naomi Efrat who reminded me of the story during her recent visit to the Ark):
Rabbi Barukh’s grandson Yehiel was once playing hide-and-seek with another boy. He hid himself well and waited for his playmate to find him. When he had waited for a long time, he came out of his hiding-place, but the other was nowhere to be seen. Now Yehiel realized that his playmate had not looked for him from the very beginning. Crying, he ran to his grandfather and complained of his faithless friend. Then tears brimmed in Rabbi Barukh’s eyes and he said: ‘God cries out too: “I hide, and no one wants to seek me.”
It is a remarkably relatable story: just two weeks ago, while I was on holiday in the Lake District with Josh and several of our friends, I watched as the kids played hide-and-seek and the older kids, who were supposed to be looking for the younger ones, just decided not to look.
Instead, they suggested that it would be much easier to wait till the little ones got bored of hiding and then they would emerge so that they could claim they had found them!
But I also love the theology of the story: it reverses the logic of hester panim: until now, we have imagined ourselves crying out: “Where are You, God? Why have You hidden Your face from us?”
But Rabbi Barukh imagines God crying too. And suddenly the question is no longer simply: where is God? The question becomes: are we still looking?
Or are we like the big kids during my holidays, who were too lazy to seek, hoping that God would emerge, like a little child who got bored in their hiding place.
Buber’s Hasidic tale doesn’t pretend to answer the question of where God is when the world becomes dark, but it suggests that during an eclipse, our task is to discover what might stand between us and the light, not to tire of seeking that which is hidden.
And perhaps that is why another text has accompanied Jews through this season for centuries.
Psalm 27, traditionally recited throughout the month of Elul and into the festival season, imagines an extraordinary exchange between human beings and God.
L’cha amar libi: bakshu fanai. Et panecha Adonai avakeish. My heart hears God saying: “Seek My face.” And I respond: “Your face, Eternal One, I will seek.” But then, in the very next verse, the psalmist pleads: Al tasteir panecha mimeni. “Do not hide Your face from me.”
Seek My face. Do not hide Your face. – perhaps the whole spiritual struggle of this season is contained in those two short sentences.
We want God to be visible. We want goodness to be obvious. We want to live in a world in which justice triumphs, in which innocent people do not suffer, in which hatred does not flourish, in which we can point to the events around us and say with confidence: there is God. But that is not the world we inhabit.
Far too often, the light is eclipsed, the face is hidden. Jewish tradition does not require us to pretend otherwise but it asks us to continue seeking.
And perhaps this is especially important during this High Holy Day season: throughout Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we repeatedly call God HaMelech — the Sovereign. We speak of God as ruler and judge of the entire world. And yet we do so while living in a world in which divine sovereignty is anything but obvious.
If God rules this world, we might reasonably ask, why does it look like this?
I do not have the answer.
But I humbly suggest that it is a mistake to think that Rosh Hashanah asks us to provide one. Perhaps proclaiming God as HaMelech is not a statement that everything that happens in this world must therefore be God’s will.
Maybe it is something much more defiant than that. It is our insistence that the world we see is not the only world that is possible.
That terror is not sovereign. That hatred is not sovereign. That fear is not sovereign. That the forces which reduce human beings to enemies, numbers, categories or collateral damage do not deserve our ultimate allegiance.
When we proclaim God as Sovereign, perhaps we are declaring where our loyalty lies even when God’s face remains hidden.
We are saying that there are values greater than power. That every human life carries infinite worth. That justice matters even when injustice appears victorious. That compassion remains sacred even when cruelty seems easier. That the eclipse is not the sun.
And perhaps that helps us to hear Rabbi Barukh’s story differently. “I hide, and no one wants to seek me.”
What if seeking God does not mean searching for some miraculous sign that will suddenly make sense of suffering but rather that it means learning to look for the places where the eclipse is not complete:
The moments when someone chooses compassion rather than cruelty. When a stranger becomes a neighbour. When someone refuses to allow fear to turn into hatred. When a human being who could so easily have become an It becomes, even for a moment, a Thou.
Those moments do not explain where God was when the towers fell. They do not explain the suffering of 7 October or everything that has followed it. They do not explain why innocent people suffer. But perhaps they tell us where to look.
Because a theology which explains suffering can become morally dangerous. It can tempt us to justify what should never be justified. But a theology which teaches us where to look might change the way we live.
And so tonight, as another year begins, I find myself returning to the image of those people emerging from the ash twenty-five years ago. At the time, I looked at them and asked: where is God?
I still do not know how to answer that question. But tonight I invite each of us to ask another question alongside it. Where should I look?
Where might the divine face become visible if I train myself to see it? Where has fear clouded my vision? Where have I allowed another person to become merely a category? Where have I stopped seeking because I assumed there was nothing left to find?
The eclipse is real. The darkness is real. But our tradition asks us to resist the conclusion that darkness is all there is. Bakshu fanai. “Seek My face.”
That is the invitation with which I want to enter this new year. Not with certainty, nor with easy answers but with the willingness to keep looking.
To look for the divine image in the face of another human being.
To look for justice even when injustice seems overwhelming.
To look for compassion even when fear would be easier.
To look for light even while acknowledging the darkness.
And perhaps, if we continue to seek, we may discover that God has not ceased to be present. Perhaps something has simply come between us and the light.
May 5787 be a year in which we learn to see more clearly. A year in which fewer faces are hidden from one another. A year in which, even during the eclipse, we do not stop seeking.
Shanah tovah.
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