by Sherri Mandell, February 22. 2002

This Purim, I understand God. I don't mean that egotistically. I understand God because I feel that the deepest part of me is hidden, a theme found throughout the Purim story.

To look at me, you would probably not know that I am a bereaved mother and at the central core of my being I am in loss, in pain. You wouldn't know that my oldest child had been viciously killed by terrorists at the age of 14.

How can I tell the truth of my experience? It is like unleashing a volcano. To share the depth of my being requires intense energy and pain. I can't go there all the time, and I don't want to overwhelm others with my grief. So recently, on a few occasions, I have disguised my identity so as not to be forced to reveal the truth inside of me.

Concealing the truth is sometimes thought of as a kind of lie. Before this I was the kind of person who never lied. I had a teenager's anathema for hypocrisy. Yet now I find that my thinking was naive. I understand now that lying is not necessarily dishonest. As the biblical Sarah lied so as not to offend Abraham, in concealing my identity I am in deeper truth. I don't want others to feel for me all the time. I don't want to be related to as a bereaved mother every second of every minute of my life.

I have greater insight now about the issue of concealment. God has to conceal Himself to offer us a deeper truth. If He were to reveal His light at all time, we couldn't live with it; it would be too overwhelming.

The motif of concealment is central to the Purim story. God's name is not mentioned in the Megillah and traditionally we wear masks to conceal our true identities.

On Purim we learn that evil is a temporary concealment of good. The symbol of evil, Haman, and the symbol of good, Mordechai, are interchangeable. The evaluations we give to the events in the story become meaningless because God tells us that good and evil are one and the same in some deep way. In other words, the true nature of the world is usually concealed from us.

I must acknowledge that I have a lot of trouble with that concept. Having your son stoned to death brutally by Palestinian terrorists is not the kind of event about which you can say gam zu la tova- this, too, is for good.

The other day, eight months after his big brother Koby was killed, my 6-year-old son asked, "Mommy, if everything God does is for the good, how can Koby being dead be good?"

He got it, right to the heart of the problem.

I told him that it's not good for us, but maybe it's good for the world, maybe they needed a great kid like Koby to die so good things could come out of it. For example, parents have told me that they've become better parents from hearing my story.

I will never say that my son's death is good. I miss him and mourn him too much. But I don't want to carry death like the bird that last week caught on the hood of my car, thumping up and down, in and out of my vision, a symbol of pain and captivity. I want to carry death as an awareness of a bird that is free, soaring beyond the horizon of what I can see. The only way I can do that is to believe in my incapacity to know. I have to believe that God has a plan, even if this plan hurts us.

The other day I saw a glimpse of God's plan. I rode on the bus with a woman from my town, the secretary at the school my younger children attend. She had been on a school trip with one of my sons the day Koby was murdered, and it was left to her to tell my son and the other children the awful news, and to comfort them.

I learned that she is intimately acquainted with loss. She told me that her mother had died in childbirth with her 35 years ago. She grew up as an only child with a difficult life. She was the person who had the capacity to contain the pain, to comfort and help a busload of frightened, crying children, maybe even to help her heal herself.

Sometimes we are formed more by what we are missing than by what we are given. Our courage and our compassion are built from pain.

And if that is the case, then to say gam zu la tova, even to the evil and pain in suffering in our life, is a truer way to live. The pain we feel is extraordinarily powerful and overwhelming. But the pain can be an impetus for depression or a spur for growth, depending on how we handle it.

On Purim, we drink so that we can see the deepest truths in the world - even Haman can be seen for the good. We acknowledge that some truths are beyond the measures of our minds, some are beyond the confines of language, and some are best borne in silence, the true language of concealment.

Perhaps our very bodies are disguises for the soul within, and we make the choice to allow the language of the soul to speak in the world or to keep the soul imprisoned like a dead bird thumping against our windshield.

"There is no rung of being on which we cannot find the holiness of God everywhere and at all times," say the chasidic masters (Martin Buber, "Ten Rungs").

It's hiding. But it's there. We just have to keep looking. n

Sherri Mandell, whose 14-year-old son Koby was murdered in a cave last May, is a writer living in Tekoa, Israel.

© 2000 - 2002 The Jewish Week, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published with the permission of the Author