What Do Masks Mean?

A book review with an Adar / Purim theme

Next week, after Purim, I’ll be visiting the Brite Divinity School, in Fort Worth, TX, at the invitation of Professor Sharrona Pearl (click here for details). Her most recent book has been on my to-read list for a while now, and Adar seemed like the perfect time to get to it. Read on for my short review.

Mask (Bloomsbury, 2024), 114pp, paperback.

At the heart of Sharrona Pearl’s short book, Mask (Bloomsbury, 2024), is a point about ambivalence. Ostensibly, a mask conceals. But just as often, it reveals. Frequently a mask conceals and reveals at the same time. A question left for the reader to answer themselves is whether it ever becomes possible to draw that fine line between obfuscation and transparency?

(Of course, “mask,” might easily be used as a translation of tzimtzum. But I’ll have to leave that for another time…)

The book begins with an anecdote from the author’s childhood. Aged four she appeared with two classmates on a TV show called Just Kidding, which aimed to “capture the sweet and silly things that young children say, often naively.” Young Sharrona sagaciously explained the difference between a robber and a thief: the robber wears a mask around his eyes.

The deeper truth here is that the robber must hide because his crime is transparently unlawful and violent, while the thief’s crime is already more sneakily hidden. When the crime is hidden, the criminal doesn’t need to hide. Only when the crime is obvious does the criminal seek to avoid identification through the mask, a visual signifier which actually broadcasts the criminality of it’s wearer. 

Along with concepts such as freedom, constraint, protection, theater, and violence this book is scattered with masks and multivalences of all sorts. This isn’t specifically a Jewish book, but many Jewish themes come up.

In one chapter we find ourselves at a Jewish wedding. Having not seen each other for an entire week prior, the groom approaches the bride to veil her before they are each separately led to stand together beneath the marriage canopy. Here the mask functions as a public marker of intimacy, a separation that is the condition of sacred union. But Pearl also interprets the marriage veil as a facilitator of trust and protection:

sometimes the protection afforded by a mask is the moment when it is removed. Or the moment before it is put on. Some might say we need to be protected from the mask. It all depends on who and how we defend. It all depends on who and how we trust.

Another chapter is devoted to the Purim story. While masks don’t appear explicitly therein, Esther hides her Jewish identity only to reveal it at the crucial moment to save her people from extermination. Traditional interpretations have much to say about the hidden face of G-d, which, per the Talmud, is hinted at in the very name Esther.

Pearl, for her part, highlights the theme of inversion captured in the Megillah’s resonant phrase, v’nahafoch hu:

It’s a story of inversion, of flipping, of hiding and showing. Even the name, Megillat Esther is a cognate of legalot hester, to reveal the hidden.

This emphasis tilts her reading towards the kind of ambivalence, which, as she notes, Jewish tradition associates with the drunken inability to tell the difference between blessed is Mordechai and cursed his Haman. Pearl wants to shake us from the assumptions that our particular perspectives are laden with. Today, however, the view from nowhere has become the status quo, and clarity rather than ambivalence is its own kind of inversion.

Coming from my own Chabad inflected perspective, I would suggest that on Purim ambiguity is itself a mask: the theatrical frame for a clarity that cuts through the drunkenness, allowing the subject to see the face of G-d beneath the mask of reality.

This short book is a fun way to begin thinking about the very commonplace phenomenon of the “mask.” It’s also a nice size, and the soft cover is handily equipped with built-in bookmark flaps. I came away hoping it’s author might one day follow up with a more hefty tome, working these thoughts through to produce a more comprehensive cultural history of masks and their meanings.