Behind the Mask: The Lives We Don’t Lead

For centuries, it has been labeled “the holiday of masks”; in the era of Covid-19, Purim is a festival whose time has come. But despite the ubiquitousness of mask-wearing in the age of corona, we all know that we can hide very well without ever covering our faces. Just the sheer mundanity of our practiced identities, our “hello, how are you” and “doing well,” or “thank God” in some versions, can expertly shroud the reality we do not share with others, and perhaps least of all with ourselves.These unled lives are the background hum of our psyches, refusing to fully surface and yet also declining to fully recede, the “might have beens” of a thousand internal dialogues. They are the secret narratives of our not quite actualized potential, the fantasy future we believed in and yet mysteriously eluded us, and which, for some reason, we could neither relinquish nor own. In the words of the American anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, “one of the most significant facts about us may finally be that we all begin with the natural equipment to live a thousand kinds of life but end, in the end, having lived only one. ”This plurality, the starting out with multiple possibilities of self-fashioning, begins to narrow at some unforeseen point. You look up, and this is your life, and nothing but.In Megillat Esther, the title character would appear to have mastered the art of wearing a maskless mask, as she camouflages her identity on Mordechai’s instruction: the disarming skill of walking through the world incognito. People see in her what they want to see. Her Jewishness is covered up, her femininity is shamelessly displayed, but it is all done without unveiling even the slightest trace of an inner life. Esther never advocates for what she would really like to be, never agonizes about the agency stripped from her at a young age. Like many other ancient women, she will be granted no real choices about her schooling, her partner, her destiny.And yet, Esther’s life arc defies Geertz’s description; starting from a very narrow and apparently limited scope of what might be possible, she effortlessly morphs into the successive roles of innocent seducer, queen, supplicant, victor. Hiding in plain sight, she manages to both triumph and remain utterly unknown. Such is the fate of a Biblical character, subject to authorial control. The reader is left wondering what lies behind Esther’s mask, and whether that is important to know at all.But maybe this obsession with having a myriad of prospects is a particularly modern luxury – the ability to actually chart one’s purpose as gender roles equalize and educational opportunities expand. This is what the sociologist Peter Berger calls “the heretical imperative,” the unavoidable necessity of choosing in modern life. Many of our ancestors were born, grew up, got married, had children, plied their trade, were mired in poverty, worshipped their God, sought spouses for their children, grew ill, died and were buried all in the same place as their parents and grandparents had done before them. Real options for autonomy were often just an illusion within a closed community whereas today, even selecting the right toothpaste can occupy one’s time.Cursed by choice, we now imagine we could, at least for a flickering moment, be almost anything; yet we end up not sure of what to be at all. Faced with a thousand possibilities, we cannot even settle on one, until through dint of financial necessity, or the slow settling into an inevitable situation, we choose—or do we?--this school, this job, this spouse, this neighbourhood, these friends, this city. This life.Esther who virtually never asks for a thing, ends up saving a people; we who are endlessly unsatisfied, cannot even seem to manage ourselves. Many of us have become so adept at what T. S Eliot famously termed the preparation of “a face to meet the faces that you meet,” that we have forgotten about what lies beneath the façade. What Kurt Vonnegut Jr. once ominously suggested, that “we are what we pretend to be, so we better be very careful about what we pretend to be,” implicitly challenges all of our public presentations.In the midst of all the Purim revelry one mask wearer has also attracted a good deal of attention because of the lack of any reference at all to HIM in the story. God. To some it seems we are left with a deity who is fearful of being seen or perhaps cautious about intruding and thus appearing overtly influential. Conventional religious apologetics would argue that if the divine being appears to be offstage, it is only to orchestrate matters and ensure the day of salvation. In Megillat Esther, that day is summoned by the killing of 75,000 Persians towards the story’s close, a bloody but perhaps necessary price to pay for the text’s proverbial happy ending.Interpreting this absence as but the external disguise of a powerful but invisible hand may have offered a certain comfort in a pre-Holocaust universe. But in the 20th century, there was no escape, and certainly no merriment, no king who would hear our pleas when faced with the Haman of the Reichstag. Can we comfortably celebrate Purim ever again, knowing that atrocities are sometimes not thwarted, but spread like a pandemic of evil, leaving nothing but devastation and the rupturing of a whole world?From the plaintive cry of Psalm 44—"Awaken God. Why do you sleep? Rouse yourself”—to Leonard Cohen’s stern rebuke, “A million candles burning for the help that never came/You want it darker,” the spectre of a hide and seek God lost its charm somewhere above the smoke of the crematoria. Is it any wonder that if God chooses to remain in the wings, then the rest of us would hesitate to lend a helping hand? If, as Oscar Wilde quipped, “give a person a mask and he'll tell you the truth,” then is the divine most real when completely obscured? Does God even want to be found?Freud looked to archeology to provide the master metaphor for the work of psychoanalysis. Seeing in the activity of digging up what had been buried by time an apt analogy for the therapist’s work in “excavating” meaning from the rubble of the past, he maintained that only when things are subject to the light of day can we begin to process them and guide the patient to health. Sometimes, then, exposure is neither lewd nor invasive, but life affirming and necessary for human relationships to flourish. Masks can be fun, and even allow people to play at telling the truth beneath the security of the pretense but, ultimately, we must be able to acknowledge our naked selves.After corona, at a point when it is safe to do so, we can all slowly remove the physical impediments that blocked us from seeing one another. Will we be as courageous in abandoning our emotional masks, the ones that keep us distanced from those we love, and imprisoned within? Will we move from reticence to rawness, self-interest to sacrifice?It is a textual curiosity whether the unlikeliest of queens harboured secret longing about the different Esthers she could have been. For us though, perhaps the lives we do not lead are best thought of not as some illusory quest for money and glamour, and more the self we have been afraid to face and to share, and one that we still have time to reveal to ourselves and to the world.