Let My People Know

"He who hides His face is the same one as He who shows His face"

 

There is a saying that a complete Tzadik, or Saint, is the one who is favored by the good. 

Because a saint is someone who is convinced that everything happens (to him) for the best. 

It is not that he is the sort of person who cannot suffer, let us say, objectively; it is just that he cannot suffer subjectively. 

He is happy with his lot because he does not see the hiddenness of God. 

To him, there is Chesed (Mercy) and there is Gevurah (Judgment), like the right arm and the left arm of Divinity, and when God touches him, what does it matter whether He does so with His right hand or His left.

This is a high level of spiritual awareness, of course, but it is common enough in prayers such as, "I will sing for there is Mercy and Judgment; I will rejoice in God both in Salvation and in trouble." 

This is a power of seeing clearly, of being able to see that He who hides His face is the same one as He who shows His face. 

So that this apparent duality of Chesed and Gevurah is really a unity and becomes a fundamental principle of existence in human life. 

One learns that the concealment is also the revelation of God—in other terms, in other colors.

–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
 
From The Sustaining Utterance, p. 60, by Rabbi And Steinsaltz