Is the eclipse appropriate for the Jews?

I am experiencing serious FOMO.

I am fully bummed that I may be out of the way on Monday to view the solar eclipse.

However, even more compelling is the premise that God is furthermore in eclipse. The term for that is “hester panim,” the act of God concealing the Divine Presence as a way of punishing the Jewish people.

“The LORD said to Moses: You will soon lie down with your fathers. This people will then turn aside after the foreign gods in their midst, in the land they are about to enter; they will forsake Me and break My covenant that I made with them. Then My anger will flare up against them, and I will abandon them and hide My face from them. They will become easy prey; and many evils and troubles will come upon them. And they will say on that day, ‘Surely it is because our God is not in our midst that these evils have come upon us.’ Yet I will hide My face on that day, because of all the evil they have done in turning to other gods” (Deut. 31: 16-18).

“You neglected the Rock that begot you, forgot the God who brought you forth. The LORD saw and was provoked, and rejected His sons and His daughters. He said: I will hide My face from them, and see how they fare in the end. For they are a perverse generation, children with no faithfulness in them” (Deut. 32: 18-20).

So, yes: When God hides the Divine Presence, it is a punishment — a sign of divine anger, perhaps even passive-aggressive, petulant behavior.

To perceive the hidden Presence of God used to be to perceive great alarm and danger:

“How long, O LORD; will You ignore me without end? How long will You disguise Your face from me? How long will I surely accept as true with cares on my mind, effort in my heart all day? How long will my enemy accept as true with the upper hand? Peer at me, answer me, O LORD, my God! Restore the luster to my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of loss of life; lest my enemy notify, “I surely accept as true with overcome him,” my foes exult when I totter” (Psalm 13: 2-5).

So, God is in eclipse. It is not that God is not there; it is merely that we are not able to sense God’s presence. God is still there; it is merely that God is not palpable.

It is awful — to perceive without delay the hidden nature of God can sear itself into your eyes, and into your soul.

However, presumably, as a 12th-century French commentator (Nachmanides) taught: God hides the Divine Presence — not out of anger but because God cannot bear to see people in distress. It is an act of love and compassion, not a punishment.

All of these texts share one thing in common: God chose to veil the Divine Presence — either as a punishment for sin or because God cannot tolerate the reality of our suffering.

Let me offer another, perhaps more radical, answer.

In his song “Lover Lover Lover,” written during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the late singer-songwriter-poet Leonard Cohen engages in a dialogue with God. He asks God, the Lover, to return to him.

“Then let me start over again,” I cried,
“please let me start over again,
I want a face that’s honest this time,
I want a spirit that is calm.”

To which God responds:

“I never turned away,” he said,
“I never walked away.
It was you who built the temple,
it was you who covered up my face.”

God would not follow it — the eclipse of God — neither as punishment nor as a painful response to human suffering.

It is surely defective and violent human action that forces God into retreat — that contributes to the eclipse of the Divine Presence.

As I surely have learned from my friend and colleague, Rabbi Dennis Ross:

In a 1952 book by the same title, the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber likens the eclipse of God to an eclipse of the sun. In a solar eclipse, the moon passes between the earth and sun and the sky grows dark and gray. During an Eclipse of God, as during the Holocaust, for example, people behave in ways that make it difficult, if not impossible, for God to be seen.

And, unlike a solar eclipse, that imagined disappearance of God is not temporary. It has been going on for centuries. The biblical narrative is the story of God’s slow disappearance, as biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman describes it.

God is extremely hidden in the Torah. As the biblical narrative develops, God becomes increasingly hidden and less revealed — until we reach the book of Esther, whose title itself alludes to hester panim, the hidden nature of God. Finally, as we reach the end of the Hebrew Bible, Nehemiah can only hope that God will remember him: “O my God, remember me favorably for this, and do not blot out the devotion I showed toward the House of God and its attendants” (Nehemiah 13:14).

However, I see the gradual disappearance of God in the Bible — and in human history — not as a punishment, but as an opportunity for human action.

However, here is the good news: a God who hides is also a God who can be found.

Here is the higher info: The events of the most sleek past can even accept as true with forced the Divine Presence into eclipse, but there are signs that the Presence would be returning.

Because of parents are making it happen.

How? Through a renewed sense of spirituality. That sense of renewal is not steadily recent; it is, in fact, rather worn. “Such is the circle of parents who turn to Him, Jacob, who seek Your presence” (Psalm 24:6).

How? For religious Zionists, the establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Land — and, even and in particular, the struggles over the meaning of that power — is a demonstration of the Divine Presence.

“They shall know that I the Lord am their GOD when, having exiled them among the nations, I bring them back into their land and leave none of them behind. I will never again hide My face from them, for I will pour out My spirit upon the House of Israel — declares the Lord GOD” (Ezek. 39: 28-29).

The eclipse itself is a testament to the cycles that return to the natural universe, the flow of time and the position of the planets and orbs — all imagined, all in the mind of God — as intimated in the opening phrases of Genesis.

You’ve got your eclipse glasses, haven’t you?

In the words of Bruce Springsteen:

Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sunBut mama, that’s where the fun is (“Blinded by the Light”).