(Delivered September 20, 2025)

I still remember where I was when I learned. It was a silvery spring day, the first really warm day. Sunshine, buds, short sleeves. My siblings and their spouses and Bill and I went for a nice long walk in the Nichols Arboretum, Ann Arbor, Michigan. One of my favorite places on this planet or any other.

I don’t know why, but we decided on a little game of hide-and-seek. I hadn’t played for years. There’s not much opportunity to, as a self-serious music student with ambitions as high as my vocal range. But we were getting pretty silly that day—must have been the spring air—and a game of hide-and-seek seemed like just the thing.

We decided who was “It” and scattered amongst the trees to hide while they counted. I found my spot and settled in. Then came the lesson. Having not played in a long while, and having been a very rule-obedient child, I was shocked and thrilled when I saw one of my brothers-in-law sneak out of his hiding place, run behind the “It” person and switch trees, while I crouched seemingly for an eternity behind one single oak tree.

It had never occurred to me before that minute that I wasn’t glued to my hiding place like a sitting duck. It had never occurred to me that switching hiding places was a strategy. It had never occurred to me that hidden things could change.

The whole episode came to mind this week as I was studying Parshat Nitzavim. As we’ve just heard, the parsha mainly revisits laws and teachings given in the service of the covenant that frames and permeates the book of Deuteronomy. Again, we receive the sharp warnings about what will happen, should we get caught up in idolatry, and again, we receive the gentle promises that returning to the fold is always possible, that if only we restore ourselves and our children to the right path, God will take us back in love.

And in the midst of this push and pull of sin and repentance, comes the mysterious pasuk that finds the hidden and the visible in a subtle dance. Deuteronomy chapter 29, verse 28 reads: 

הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיי אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד־עוֹלָם לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת־כָּל־דִּבְרֵי הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת
What is hidden is for Adonai our God, and what is revealed is for us and our children eternally,
to do all of this instruction

The commentators make the logical connection that the word נִּסְתָּרֹת—that which is hidden—refers to secret idolatry. The bigger lesson, though, is that there are things that are known only to God. 

One of my earliest teachers taught me this—although neither he nor I knew he was my teacher as it happened. In a moment of teenage discombobulation, I went to stay for a few days with our longtime family friends, Jerry and Roberta Goldman, to recover from a broken heart. One afternoon, sitting in the backyard, I poured out my uncertainties and sadness, and Jerry, a rabbi who is as sensitive as he is brilliant, gently said, “Life is like a tapestry we can only see the back of. We see the knots and the clusters of threads tangled together and, sometimes if we’re lucky, the barest hints of what the picture on the other side might be. Only God sees the whole thing, and somehow, from God’s side, it makes sense.”

When it was first offered, Jerry’s lesson was one of hope and perspective, a grownup’s thoughtful advice to an overwrought teenager. Only later have I begun to see it also as a teaching about humility. Each and every one of us, no matter how curious and knowledgeable we might be, is limited in what we can observe. Countless factors contribute to this, from temperament to environment to the thousand quirks of the moment. The plain truth is that we can only ever see a small part of the world around us, and everything we perceive is a product of our experiences, expectations, and biases. It’s easiest and most normal for us to see what we’ve always seen, what we plan to see.

This is all the more so in the current polarized media environment, as we’ve witnessed to a horrifying degree in recent weeks. The shocking murder of Conservative media personality Charlie Kirk is only the latest Rorschach Test that maps political and social orientations onto the very perception of reality. While folks to my left have been excoriating Kirk as one of the most vile people ever to walk the earth, folks to my right have been canonizing him. The government’s policies on immigration, free speech, and gender issues are similarly met with cheering in some quarters and loathing in others. Many believe we are edging toward fascism; many believe we’re finally cleaning things up. Families and communities are navigating real schisms based on the American political scene, based on the situation in Israel and Gaza, based on world views about gender, sexuality, and race, based on beliefs about the rights and freedoms and responsibilities we regard as sacrosanct. The point is that in a feverish environment like the current moment, in which we don’t talk to one another across difference, the things we might be able to agree about remain hidden. And what’s revealed is so skewed as to be cartoonish. 

Between the technology that dominates so much of our waking lives, and the algorithm that offers us refills on what we already have decided is truth, and simple social isolation, we, as a society, have lost the thread of what constitutes fact, much less nuance. Each of us comes to conclusions that make sense, based on the information we’ve been fed. But we are not ordering from the full menu, and we are not asking questions of one another across the table.

I often lament how disheartening it is to hear people say they just can’t talk to so-and-so because their politics are not aligned. The less we hear ideas and viewpoints that challenge us, the more convinced we become not only of our rightness but of the essential wrongness of anyone who thinks differently. The middle space where we talk things over and consider multiple angles hollows out, while the habit of dehumanization gets ever more ingrained in us. There’s an arrogance to the whole vicious cycle, a knee-jerk dismissal of anything from the so-called other side. And what I want to say to you is that yes, there may be things about the ideology on the other side that are disagreeable or even hateful, but much of what we’re tagging as hateful is being fed to us in a way designed to make us think that. The same is true for the person you most vividly differ with. 

For the most part, the places where we get information are curating content and viewpoints for maximum agitation, at once disparaging those who see things differently and flattering our assumptions. All this is a very effective way of keeping us scrolling so they can generate more ad revenue. Our very humanity is being bought and sold, while our capacity for holding multiple perspectives with curiosity erodes with every conversation we avoid.

But the hidden things, the nuances of who we are, away from political argument, are known to God alone. What’s revealed is very much at the human level, and we simply can’t see the whole thing. Yet that long-ago game of hide-and-seek holds a lesson too. Hidden things can change, and we always have the choice to look harder at what’s revealed and wonder, together and apart, What is it that God sees in all this? What else is it that God sees in all this? And how can I teach my children to return to a stable path, so God can take us back in love?

We can never know the fullness of this world, but we can respect the not knowing, hold our convictions with humility and others’ with curiosity, and, in the words of Leonard Cohen, bless the covenant of love between what is hidden and what is revealed.

Shabbat Shalom!