Hester Panim - Moshiach - My Life Story - Rejection - Lessons Learned

Sometimes when I share something personal it resonates with people, so I share the following in the hope that it will help someone out there.

I would like like to talk about rejection:-). For many years I had jobs teaching at various places but I never was paid enough to sustain my family, so I often looked elsewhere to supplement my income. For many years what I earned didn't even exceed my rent and my wife didn't work so things were always tight. I am really not a person who has much ambition in the financial arena but feeding and clothing my children is really high up on my list of important things to do. Despite my inability to find anything else of substance, somehow, some way, Hashem did me the most fantastic kindness and got me through all those years. We always had what to eat and all of the bills were paid and no debt was incurred. All the while I wasn't really able to secure other jobs so it allowed me to learn a lot which was an unbelievable bracha. How much shevach for the Borei Olam. Baruch Hu Uvaruch Shmo.

What was interesting and edifying was getting rejected so often. I didn't take it so personally because they weren't rejecting me for personal reasons. Nobody who ever rejected me ever really knew me - not my positive qualities nor my negative ones. I am just not a "name" and the "market" is saturated with many capable people who can do what I can do, so I wasn't hired. Or maybe they just thought I wasn't good.... It doesn't really matter because my self esteem is affected only minutely by the opinions of others for reasons that another post might do justice to.

So there are three ways to get rejected. One is in person. That hurts the most. [It hurts not to be wanted and appreciated even when you know that they don't really know you. It also hurts to have to struggle financially]. The second is by phone. That hurts the second most. The easiest way to take a "we aren't interested" is via email. Less personal, less painful. What is fascinating though is how many people didn't even respond to my inquiries about teaching at their yeshiva/seminary. They just ignored me and my email as if I didn't exist. And this brings me to a point my friend R' Aharon made in his book [נגוהות] upon which I expand. [On my other blog there is a post about it in Hebrew].

The Jewish Philosopher Emanuel Levinas spoke about the concept of hester panim - hiding ones face. When tragedy befalls people the Torah calls it hester panim of Hashem. When a person is suffering and you are an empathetic person it is PAINFUL to look him in the FACE. The panim is a reflection of the pnimiyus. To see someone in pain and then to view them from the inside is brutal. The 'easiest' way to deal with this is to avoid looking. Kviyachol, when tzaros befall the Jewish People, it is so painful for Hashem that He can't look face to face so He turns away. Li-havdil elef alfei havdalos [and more] when the Nazis were trying to decimate our people you can see from the pictures that it was complete hester panim on their part. When you can't 'see' your victim, anything is possible. The way they try to reform convicts is by showing them videos which enable them to experience the horror of being attacked from the perpective of the victim. This releases them from their state of hester panim to a state of gilui panim [revealed face].

When someone sends me an email and asks for a job it means that the person both wants to spread Torah and to feed his family. If I want to respond to the person and don't have a positive response it is uncomfortable. The more and deeper I look at their panim, the harder it is. When you look deeply enough into someone else and you see his [or her] Tzelem Elokim, on some level you are seeing yourself as well. We are all part of one big neshama called in kabbala "Knesses Yisrael" and your neshama is mine.

So the 'escape clause' is to ignore the person and pretend he doesn't exist. It is like what I do when I get an unpleasant email. I click "delete" and it never was.... [In general, every ignored email from a friend awaiting a response is a form of hester panim. I don't see you. I didn't get that email. In my reality you don't exist. But when I see you in shul I will put on an act and be friendly. Rachmana litzlan to this common phenomenon.]

The only problem is that if this is the way we relate to each other then Moshiach can't come, and Klal Yisrael will keep suffering as we have been hearing day after day of tragedy after tragedy. My understanding is that if we have hester panim and can't really see each then Hashem responds in kind and has hester panim towards us. If I have 50 million dollars in the bank and sleep well and can be deaf to the distress of people who don't have food or can't pay their children's dental bills then Hashem can also 'sleep well' and ignore our cries. "Hashem tzilcha"-  Dovid Hamelech said that Hashem is our shadow, He just reflects back to us what we are doing to each other [the Besht and Rav Chaim Volozhiner both say this same idea. Remarkable that a talmid of the Gra and the Besht say the same thing. Must be emes].

So sweetest friends!! Hashem will take care of me as He has all of these years and luckily I get to work on Bitachon as I face an uncertain future. But I hope that when my fortunes change from things being great [now] to being super-great [in the near future] and people come to ask me for money or for a job, I hope I can first give them the courtesy of looking at them. Trying to see what their needs are and feel as if their needs are my needs too. I hope that next time I am walking down Broadway and I see a beggar, I don't look away because I can't deal with his misery. It is easy to pretend that his plight has nothing to do with me, but the reality is that it has EVERYTHING to do with me. I use psychological mechanisms to emotionally divorce myself from him but the simple thought that this person could just as well be me, or that he was once a happy child walking down the street holding his mother's hand, or that he quite possibly has so many dreams that were never realized, or that he is a human being, ben achar ben from Adam Harishon just as I am, should awaken me out of my emotional-psychological-spiritual-apathy.

Here is the "Ehrman-Challenge": If I am wrong - please prove it to me. In the meantime I will go now to daven....:-). I am always eager to hear how you react to what I write because it is for you that I write....

Love and blessings!