A man arrives at work one morning, late for an office meeting. “Where’ve you been?” asks his boss. The man answers, “I got distracted; I just saw a clown outside in front of the building.” A colleague pipes up, “Well, was it a real clown, or just a person dressed up as a clown?” (Tara Brach, Trusting the Gold, pp.135-136).
American Buddhist author Tara Brach teaches Mindfulness Meditation around the world. She often shares the joke in her classes while exploring identity and masking. We all wear masks. How do we know when someone is being authentic? “The word ‘person’” she reminds us, “is derived from the ancient Greek term persona, which referred to the masks actors wore to represent certain humans, animals, or gods. In our daily lives, we habitually put on our own personas to suit particular situations.”
Think about your own lives. What masks do we wear? Who sees when we’re angry, disappointed, excited, curious? How often and in what contexts do we reveal the real us? How much energy do we exert hiding? In our parasha it’s none other than God who grapples with how much to reveal to Abraham. The KBH is planning on destroy S’dom and Amora. And the verse tells us: “Now the LORD had said,
הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ מֵֽאַבְרָהָ֔ם אֲשֶׁ֖ר אֲנִ֥י עֹשֶֽׂה “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do?”
The Holy One takes Abraham into His confidence (as it were). God asks and then answers the question: “…Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do, since Abraham is to become a great and populous nation and all the nations of the earth are to bless themselves by him? For I have singled him out, that he may instruct his children and his posterity to keep the way of the LORD by doing what is just and right צְדָקָ֖ה וּמִשְׁפָּ֑ט…” (Gen 18:17-19). In other words, God reveals the divine plans for Sodom and Gemorrah because to charge Abraham to be a man of justice is to demonstrate that the Source of justice is, in fact, just. When Abraham cries out:
הֲשֹׁפֵט֙ כׇּל־הָאָ֔רֶץ לֹ֥א יַעֲשֶׂ֖ה מִשְׁפָּֽט “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do justice?”
It is because God has shown God’s hand. Abraham understands that God isn’t just dressed up as a god. Hashem is the real God. In so much of history, according to our Sages, God is hester panim, hiding the divine face. But here the Holy One says,
“?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙, shall I hide? No. Let’s be real with one another.”
?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ It’s hard to chew on this question, “shall I hide?” without considering the inverse, “shall we seek?” Relationships, whether egalitarian or hierarchical, turn on this push and pull, this negotiating the boundaries of other and self. Another interesting question here is not simply, “why does God remove the mask?” but “how surprised do we think Abraham is when God does?” How much of that confession is information Abraham already assumes about God? – that God seeks justice, that God welcomes dialogue and debate, that God wishes to be a teacher with curious and motivated students?
The question of whether to seek is, at its core, a question of how much we believe we already know about another. So often we simply assume we understand and appreciate the person sitting across from us – what she’s thinking, what they care about, whether his still waters are shallow or if they run deep? This is important, because relationships demand obligation. We’re accountable to our partners, our parents, our children, our colleagues, our fellow congregants, our rabbis – and they to us. The nature and contours of those obligations grow out of these connections.
My teacher Elana Stein Hain, Rosh Beit Midrash of the Shalom Hartman Institute, considers the nature of obligation in an essay from last year’s spring edition of the journal Sources. “My second model of obligation,” she writes, “comes from thinking about the very possibility of maintaining a relationship with God or with another human being or community.” She references sociologist Adam Seligman who makes a distinction between the “sincere self” and the “ritual self” (“Ritual, the Self, and Sincerity,” Social Research 76, no. 4, 2009, 1082–83). “The sincere self,” says Hain “is what I subjectively think or feel at any given time: it is the self that is sometimes tired, sometimes happy, angry, in love, bored, etc. We can ask this self: how are you feeling about this? The ritual self, on the other hand, is found in what am I doing: I might be dancing or eating or reading or sleeping, etc.”
Considering this framework, I would suggest that if you are someone who craves sincerity, if you wear your heart on your sleeve, if you are the type of person who when asking yourself, ?הַֽמְכַסֶּ֤ה אֲנִי֙ Shall I hide? your inclination is “no,” than you are probably disappointed with (and maybe surprised by) people whose performative “ritual” selves are misaligned with their “sincere selves.” To you they’re just dressing up. On the other hand, if you are someone who is skeptical, maybe even cynical, about most people’s ability or inclination to harmonize these selves, if you yourself are not what our Sages call tocho k’varo, if you personally feel disinclined to reveal your more authentic self to others, then you likely have fewer expectations that others would do so.
Seligman, though, offers a different perspective on this question of obligation, suggesting that healthy relationships actually require us to create space for both selves, that it is a fools errand to strive for absolute harmony, that performing, even with our most intimate partners is a necessary investment in deep connections we wish to maintain and further develop.
Consider the words, “I love you.” Seligman writes, “We can in the end distinguish two forms of the words ‘I love you.’ The emotionally wrought confession by the star-struck young man appeals to the sincere mode…. On the other hand, we also have the ritual ‘I love you,’ whose performative aspect is more important than its denotative function.” Dr. Hain explains it this way: “[While] there is a sincere form of ‘I love you’ that means ‘I am feeling love for you right now,’ there is also a ritual ‘I love you’ that is said as a means of maintaining relationship: ‘I am in this loving relationship with you.’ It is tempting to value the former and to disregard the latter, but Seligman argues that the sincere self and the ritual self are both necessary forms of the self. Both are not only legitimate but needed when we want to be connected with others.”
But there’s a final layer to explore here, because the assumptions we make about others, whether and how they are masking, suggests we can know not just who someone is, but who they will become. I do think intuition and curiosity, real engagement, go a long way toward understanding and appreciating someone, but who among us is a finished product? The very nature of existence is formation, evolution. We are learning, adapting, and growing all the time. We are beings, becoming. The trap we so often fall into is to believe we ourselves are capable of growth, but others are trapped by their own past, their preconceptions, some algorithm that shapes their future.
There’s a midrash that considers the future of an important character in this week’s parasha. Sarah and Abraham have just exiled Hagar and her young child Ishmael, a child Abraham loves and had hoped would become his heir. Wandering the desert near Be’er Sheva, their skin of water having run dry, Hagar leaves Ishmael alone under a bush and bursts into tears. She cannot bear to watch him die. The Torah tells us:
יִּשְׁמַ֣ע אֱלֹהִים֮ אֶת־ק֣וֹל הַנַּ֒עַר֒
“God heard the cry of the boy,” which is already interesting because the text said Hagar was the one who cried. And the verse continues, “an angel of God called to Hagar from heaven and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Fear not, for God has heeded the cry of the boy where he is.”
“Where he is,” בַּאֲשֶׁ֥ר הוּא־שָֽׁם, three words that seem unnecessary. Most commentators assume the verse means God responds to Ishmael in the place where his mother had left him, out of earshot from her, under the bush. But the midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 53:11) implies the text is not concerned with where he is but when he is – and who he will become someday.
The ministering angels rose to accuse Ishmael. They said, “Lord of the Universe, here is someone who will one day slay Your children with thirst. Will You now provide him with a well?” God said to them, “What is he now, righteous or wicked?” They said, “righteous.” God responds:
אֵינִי דָן אֶת הָאָדָם אֶלָּא בִּשְׁעָתוֹ.
I judge people only as they are in this moment.
What an extraordinary statement! God knows that Ishmael would become an enemy of Isaac’s descendants, of the Israelites. God knows that Ishmaelites would one day sell Joseph into servitude in Egypt. The prophecy in last week’s parashah even stated he would be a “wild ass of a man, his hand against everyone, and everyone’s hand against him” (Gen 16:12). He will not simply dress up as a clown. He will become that clown. But here, right now, he is none of those things. He has no descendants. He has done nothing wrong. He is a dying child, and God insists that means his life ought to be spared.
While in Israeli custody, three years before he was released along with 1,026 other prisoners in the Gilad Shalit deal, Yahyah Sinwar had a terminal brain tumor. Israeli doctors operated and saved his life. Fifteen years later, Sinwar planned and executed a terrorist rampage that saw the worst violence done to the Jewish people since the Shoah through which he also further advanced his reign of terror against Palestinian civilians. Were those doctors wrong to perform that surgery? With the benefit of hindsight, we might say “yes.” My point here is not to argue that Sinwar should or should not have been saved given what the Israeli government knew about him at the time. That’s a different conversation. My point is that the vast majority of people are not Sinwar, they are not irredeemably monstrous. They’re decent, flawed people, stumbling through life like the rest of us. And who can say with any certainty who any of us will be in the future?
The fundamental problem with how too many of us think about others is that we make a thousand calculations as to whether we should act in one way or another toward someone and expend much less energy meeting them where they’re at.
אֵינִי דָן אֶת הָאָדָם אֶלָּא בִּשְׁעָתוֹ.
I judge people only as they are in this moment.
What would it be like if we committed right now to judge our fellow human beings not as we fear they might be but ba’asher hu sham, as they are? People are not personas, they are people, created in God’s image. Some portion of us lose or never had the ability to access that divine goodness. But most of us do. We are beings, becoming. Who are we to rob someone of that possible future by insisting we know better what it might behold?
“Shall I hide?” It’s a personal choice and a situational one. The ritual and sincere selves each have value in our relationships. “Shall we seek?” My hope is that, if nothing else, more of us will do a bit more of that.
