We call these days the Ten Days, we always have. But when I counted, I found only seven days between the end of Rosh Hashanah and the start of Yom Kippur. To reach ten, you have to fold in the two days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur itself. So the name itself is hiding something, keeping three days invisible before letting them back into the count.

Maybe that isn’t a coincidence, because these days themselves are about concealment. Three books are opened on Rosh Hashanah, we’re taught, one for the utterly wicked, one for the utterly righteous, and one for those in between, the beinonim. The righteous are inscribed for life at once, the wicked for death at once. But the beinonim stay suspended, from Rosh Hashanah until Yom Kippur. And no one can see their own book. I don’t know which category I’m in, neither do you, and it’s exactly that not-knowing that pushes everyone to treat themselves as beinonim and take these days seriously. So once again, something hidden, this time our own standing, carries the weight of these days.

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov saw something even deeper inside this concealment. There are two levels of God’s hiddenness, he writes. Sometimes God only hides Himself, which is hard but can still be searched out, because someone who knows he’s hidden keeps searching. But sometimes God hides the very fact that He is hidden. That’s where the real danger sits, because someone unaware of the concealment never begins to search at all.........

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