JustASC

I’ve written before about my friend Elli Wohlgelernter and his belief in what he calls “unis” — the seemingly coincidental events that point to a higher meaning or intelligent universe (or something — he can explain it better than I).

I like to throw him a bone every now and then, so here’s my unis of the week: Three, count ’em three, unrelated but coincidental references to a child’s anxiety about playing hide and seek and no one tries to find him.

The first: In The Lazarus Project, by my new favorite writer Aleksander Hemon, a character remembers playing hide and seek and worrying no one would look for him:

He remembers a childhood evening when he played hide-and-seek with his friends-they were hiding, he was seeking; then they all went home, without telling him; he kept looking for them well into the night, shouting into the darkness full of their shadows.

The next day I was reading Chumash Etz Chayyim, the Conservative movement’s Bible commentary, and saw a commentary on last week’s portion, Vayelech, when Moses warns that God will “will Hide his face from them for all the evil they have done.” The commentary quotes a hasidic tale (from Buber?), in which Rabbi Baruch’s grandson was once playing hide and seek and waited for his playmates to find him. When the child complains to his grandfather that no one tried to look for him, Rabbi Barukh cries and says: ‘God says the same thing: “I hide, but no one wants to seek me.”‘” 

Then there was the Oct. 5 Garfield comic strip (go here and click “previous” a few times): That nutty lazy Garfield agrees to play hide-and-seek with Nermal, and then doesn’t look for him (or her — I’m not a maven). You can guess the ending.

So what does this all mean? Who’s hiding from whom? What am I seeking? Why was I reading Garfield?

UPDATE: Reading this over, I couldn’t help but ask: What was it like to have Rabbi Baruch for a father or grandfather? If I read the story correctly, the kid came to his granddad for a little comfort. He gets a theology lesson?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 4:54 pm and is filed under JustASC. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.