The Face That Does Not Hide

On Birkat Kohanim, the gaze and being seen

When Birkat Kohanim is recited in the Kal, as the Jews of Turkey call their house of prayer, in many communities the kohanim draw their tallitot over their heads, raise their hands over the congregation and spread their fingers in a set pattern. A widespread custom leaves five openings between the fingers of the two hands, a custom tied to the verse in Shir HaShirim where the beloved peers through the lattice. The congregation lowers its head, and no one looks at them. The Talmud speaks of eyes that grow dim from looking at the kohanim, but it says this about the Temple, where the blessing was given with the explicit Name of God. Today’s practice has its own reasoning. The Shulchan Aruch rules that the congregation should not gaze at the kohanim during the blessing, so that their attention is not distracted. It is a strange scene. At the very moment we pray that HaShem turn His face toward us, we lower our eyes. Where we most long to be looked at, we stop looking.

A person longs to meet a gaze that seems to look at them through the eyes of HaShem. I don’t write this as theory. I know it from the inside. Since childhood, the way people look at me has mattered deeply. Have I ever met such a gaze? No, I have not. This essay is partly an attempt to understand what that absence has been holding.

Hebrew offers a clue from the start. Panim, the word for face, is plural, as if a person had no single face and turned a different one toward everyone who looks. From the same root comes pnim, the inside. The language sees the face as the place where the inner life opens outward. To look into someone’s face is to look through a door that opens onto their interior, and perhaps that is why a gaze is so deeply longed for and so deeply feared.

The three lines of Birkat Kohanim open that door from three different places. The first asks for protection. Yevarechecha HaShem veyishmerecha, may HaShem bless you and keep you. The first work of a gaze is also to keep. Ruth Feldman’s research on mothers and infants showed that during moments of mutual attunement in face to face play, not only their expressions but also their heart rhythms fall into step, with a lag of less than a second. A gaze carries information about safety from one body to another. What Winnicott called holding may happen most fully between two pairs of eyes. Heinz Kohut gave the same need another name, the gleam in the mother’s eye. A child reads its own worth in an eye that looks at it with delight, and over time that reading becomes the way the child looks at itself. When that gleam is not seen enough, Kohut argued, the need does not disappear. It grows and moves elsewhere. The adult searches later eyes for what the first eyes could not give, and most often asks it of the people they love most. To expect a lover, a friend or a spouse to do the work a mother’s face once had to do places on their shoulders a weight no single person can carry. Beneath much of the hurt in relationships lies this silent expectation. Look at me in a way that lets me know I am worth something.

Such a gaze does more than keep. It also gives light, and the second line of the blessing speaks of that light. Yaer HaShem panav elecha vichuneka, may HaShem make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. In his essay on the sociology of the senses, Simmel describes the mutual glance as perhaps the purest reciprocity that exists between people. The eye cannot take without at the same time giving. When we look at someone, we also give ourselves away. That is why the gaze is one of the most tightly regulated areas of social life. Erving Goffman named one of its rules civil inattention. On a street full of strangers, or in an elevator, we look at one another for a brief moment, signal that we have noticed, and then withdraw our eyes. This small ritual is both courtesy and protection. It says I see you, but I am not watching you. In crowded cities we all live inside this ritual, and lowering our eyes to our phones may be its newest form. Civil inattention makes social life possible, but it has a price. Most of the glances that pass between people touch the surface and pull away. A shining face steps outside the ritual and is not afraid to give itself away.

I came to know this bond between light and the gaze with my hands before I met it in books. Most people know me as a sociologist and relationship counselor, or through my study of Kabbalah and gematria. Few know that my path also ran through a painting studio. I studied painting at a fine arts high school and later graduated in graphic design. Whenever I worked on a portrait in the studio, I always left the eyes for last. The rest of the face would be finished, and I would work on the eyes for a long time, and the moment I felt the painting looking back at me, I knew it was done. A painting was finished only when it began to look. Anyone who draws portraits knows that what brings an eye to life is often a tiny point of light left inside the iris. Without it, even the most carefully drawn eye stays flat. Kohut’s gleam and the painter’s catchlight seem to be describing the same thing. A face begins to look when it carries light within it. Yaer panav tells me something of this too. For a face to shine is for it to become truly able to see.

The Torah, too, has a face from which light overflows, the face of Moshe. When he comes down from Sinai the second time, the skin of his face sends out rays of light, and he himself does not know it. Aharon and the people look at him and are afraid to come near. Moshe calls them, speaks with them, and when he finishes speaking he covers his face with a veil. When he goes in before HaShem he removes it, and when he comes out to tell the people what he was commanded his face is uncovered, and then he puts the veil back on. The scene deserves a long pause. Even the most luminous face in the Torah must sometimes be covered, because those facing it cannot bear that light at every moment. Perhaps a face that does not hide is one that knows how to open its light to the measure the other can receive. To me, Moshe’s veil looks less like concealment than like care.

The light on Moshe’s face was a reflection. The Idra Rabba of the Zohar looks toward its source and builds a daring image. The eyes of Atika Kadisha, the most hidden and most ancient, have no lids. They never close, they are always open, and the Zohar connects them to the verse that the Guardian of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps. The eyes of the lower face, Zeir Anpin, open and close. At times they seem to sleep, and a person calls out, awake, why do You sleep? The Torah, too, says plainly that the gaze has a limit. Of Moshe it is written that HaShem spoke with him face to face, as a person speaks with a friend. Yet when Moshe asks to see HaShem’s glory, the answer comes. You cannot see My face, for no human being can see Me and live. You will see My back, but My face will not be seen. Being face to face and seeing the face are not the same, and even in the closest relationship part of a face remains hidden. Human eyes have lids too. None of us can look at another without pause. We tire, we blink, we turn our heads. When we search for eyes that look at us through the eyes of HaShem, we may really be searching for an eye without lids, and we expect a human being, an eye made to blink, never to close. However deep that expectation runs, it strips the person facing us of their humanity.

With these limits of the gaze in mind, I turn to the third line, the deepest of the three. Yisa HaShem panav elecha veyasem lecha shalom, may HaShem lift His face toward you and grant you peace. The Talmud pauses over this line. The angels ask how it can be that the Torah says HaShem shows no favor, and yet He lifts His face toward Israel. The answer is surprisingly human. I commanded them in the Torah to give thanks when they are satisfied, and they give thanks even when they have eaten no more than an olive or an egg. How could I not lift My face toward those who are so exacting with themselves? Here the lifting of the face looks less like a reward than like a response. A gaze turned toward someone who can give thanks even when it is not enough, who knows how to be satisfied with little.

Where the Talmud describes the lifting of the face as a response, Emmanuel Levinas approaches the face from a very different direction. For him, the face of the other calls out to us before we ever grasp that person as an object, and the first thing the face says is you shall not kill. Naked, defenseless, and at the same time a command that comes from on high. For Levinas, to encounter someone’s face is to begin to be responsible for them. For Levinas the movement always runs from me toward the other. What gives me weight is less someone looking at me than my meeting a face and finding that I cannot escape responsibility for it. Once a face has turned toward me, I can no longer ignore it, and this responsibility expects nothing in return. That casts the longing to be seen in another light. Throughout this essay we have longed to be seen. Levinas reminds us that the deeper question is less who is looking at me than whose face I am looking at, and what that face asks of me. Inside the longing to be seen lies a duty to look. Perhaps that is why we long so much for a gaze that lifts its face toward us and at the same time shrink from it. To be seen calls us, in turn, to look, and to become responsible for the face we see.

Opposite the lifting of the face stands its hiding, and the Torah tells of that as well. Haster astir panai, I will surely hide My face. The verb is doubled, and a teaching transmitted in the name of the Baal Shem Tov reads the doubling as concealment within concealment. To be hidden is darkness, but not to know that one is hidden is a far deeper darkness. People too can hide themselves so thoroughly that they forget they are hiding. The more skilled we become on the social stage, the more we learn to carry a face suited to every setting, the less we ask who remains behind those faces. Moshe knew when to put on his veil and when to remove it. We often do not even remember that we are wearing one. To notice that one is hiding is the moment the face begins to open.

And I return to those lowered heads in the Kal. The Midrash connects the beloved in Shir HaShirim, who gazes through the windows and peers through the lattice, to Birkat Kohanim. HaShem, it says, gazes out from between the shoulders of the kohanim and peers from between their fingers. The openings left between the fingers come from this verse, and for centuries this shape of the hands has been carved on the gravestones of kohanic families as a sign. My training in graphic design taught me that form is very often defined by emptiness. Negative space is the space around a shape that makes the shape visible. The hands of the kohanim are like such a design, and the gaze passes less through the fingers themselves than through the space left between them. In the moment of blessing, then, the one who looks is not us but Him. What is asked of us is to bow our heads and consent to be seen.

Perhaps this is why I have never met the gaze I was looking for. I always searched for it in the eyes facing me, while that gaze may fall on me through the gaps between the fingers at the very moment I lower my eyes. This does not mean learning to expect nothing from people. It means learning not to ask of a human gaze what only the gaze of HaShem can give. Kohut’s gleam, Moshe’s veil, Levinas’s face and the lidless eye meet in the same place. A human being can only look at another in a human way. As long as we do not ask it for infinity, that may be enough.

Yisa HaShem panav elecha. May a face be lifted toward you. The last word of the blessing is shalom, wholeness. In the studio I considered a portrait finished the moment I felt it looking at me. Perhaps a person, too, is completed in the place where they feel looked at and consent to be seen.

Sources

1. Torah, Shemot 33.11 to 23, Shemot 34.29 to 35, Bamidbar 6.24 to 26 (Birkat Kohanim), Devarim 10.17 and Devarim 31.18.
2. Tehillim 121.4 and 44.24.
3. Shir HaShirim 2.9 and Shir HaShirim Rabbah 2.9 (HaShem looking out from between the shoulders and fingers of the kohanim).
4. Shulchan Aruch, Orach Chayim 128 and its commentaries (the spreading of the fingers, and the congregation not gazing at the kohanim so as not to be distracted).
5. Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 16a (in the Temple, where the blessing was given with the explicit Name, looking at the kohanim dims the eyes).
6. Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 20b (the angels’ question and HaShem lifting His face).
7. Zohar III, Naso, Idra Rabba (the lidless eyes of Atika Kadisha and the eyes of Zeir Anpin).
8. Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, Ben Porat Yosef (the teaching of concealment within concealment, transmitted in the name of the Baal Shem Tov).
9. Ruth Feldman et al., Mother and infant coordinate heart rhythms through episodes of interaction synchrony, Infant Behavior and Development 34, 2011.
10. Donald W. Winnicott, The Theory of the Parent Infant Relationship, International Journal of Psychoanalysis 41, 1960.
11. Heinz Kohut, The Analysis of the Self, 1971 (the gleam in the mother’s eye).
12. Georg Simmel, Soziologie, 1908, excursus on the sociology of the senses.
13. Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places, 1963 (civil inattention).
14. Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 1961, and Ethics and Infinity, 1982 (the face and responsibility).