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What Your Mask Reveals
Written in July 2020
What does your mask say about you? Now that mask-wearing in public has become ubiquitous to prevent the spread of coronavirus, a plethora of mask styles has begun to proliferate. Do you wear the standard-issue disposable face mask? A colorful hand-sewn one? A bandana? Did you create your mask out of socks or old T-shirts? Does your mask feature any trademarks, statements or slogans? A whole industry has sprung up to accessorize masks to match your wardrobe: masks of denim, wool, silk; masks that fit any budget or occasion.
Mask-as-fashion-statement is especially odd considering that the purpose of a mask, by definition, is to conceal. When we put on a mask, we are choosing the face we want to present to the world, while our real face remains concealed. Feeling in a gray mood? Put on a sunny mask with smiley faces or colorful polka dots. Nobody can see your smile or your frown when you’re wearing a mask. You don’t wear a mask to express yourself but to hide yourself.
When G-d created the world, He had to put on a mask. G-d’s presence is so powerful that nothing outside of Him could exist. By analogy, inside the sun there is no room for sunlight, nor candlelight, nor any form of light at all. Every form of energy is subsumed within the light of the sun itself. In order for G-d to allow room for creation, He had to conceal Himself.
The teachings of Kabbalah explain that first He withdrew part of his energy to create an empty space. Then, inside that empty space He radiated a thin beam of light known as the kav, a very, very concentrated form of His essential light. But even that beam was far too powerful to allow for the existence of a physical world. G-d had to create a series of secondary worlds which sequentially masked His divine radiance. The end product was earth, the lowest of all worlds, which was G-d’s goal and intention to begin with.
The question is, if G-d has to mask Himself to create the world, then where does He go to express Himself? Where does He get to take off the mask?
The ultimate desire of G-d, the Talmud teaches, is to have a “dwelling place in the lowest world.” G-d’s greatest wish is that in this lowly world, where G-d is concealed and masked to the greatest extent, He can take off the mask. He will no longer need to express Himself to us by means of the mask but with His very essence. And we won’t shrivel up and disappear as a result. Rather, we will have built ourselves up to such a degree that we can contain an unmasked G-d without losing our own existence. This will be the state of the world when Moshiach comes, when, as the prophet Isaiah (30:20) says, “your Teacher shall no longer be concealed from you, and your eyes shall see your Teacher.”
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