Everyone knows that there is a custom to wear a mask or dress up in costume on Purim. Does anyone have any idea why though? If you look to the Shulchan Aruch, you'll find no indication of what the source for the practice is, nor whether it is worthwhile; the discussion there merely focuses on the question of whether one can cross-dress for the purpose!
So what is the idea behind Purim costumes? I've always seen it as intertwined with the whole theme of hester panim - the way in which God hides His face from us, yet all the while manipulates events to bring about His plan. The story of Purim exemplifies the way in which we can look back over a sequence of events and connect the dots and recognise the Author of History (hester = history?!)
But then I asked myself still: why wear a costume, or mask? Surely Purim is about unmasking God, so to speak, removing His cloak of mystery (hester = mystery?!!) to reveal for a brief moment the undisguised Face of God.
Indeed if anything, the service and mitzvos of Purim are designed to unmask us, as we try to emulate God. We drink alcohol, quite literally till our outer shell cracks and we can be seen for who we really are. We give away money and food without reserve and without inquiry to whomever opens his hand in need, again dropping the barriers that we generally keep up to maintain our separateness from others. So wearing a mask seems to run contrary to all the other modes of observance and to the whole theme of the day...
Let me suggest an idea. First a question: where do we find the idea of a mask in the Torah?
The Hebrew word for mask is masekha, a derivative of the word masakh. In describing the elements of the mishkan, the Torah refers to the Parokhes HaMasakh (Shemos 34:12), the screen that divides between the Holy of Holies and the rest of the structure.
What does this Masakh do? What exactly is its function? I suggest that it ought to be understood not as a partition that merely hides what is on the other side, but as an interface that reveals as it hides. Much like the masakh (screen) on which you are probably reading this, the Parokhes Hamasakh hides the unfathomable Divine Presence in order to reveal to humanity all that is knowable about God.
As Ramchal writes at the beginning of Derech Hashem, God Himself defies conceptualisation and we can only relate to Him to the extent that He reveals His Will and Ways to us, through Tradition and Nature. These revelations then, act as the interface between man and God, dictating the ways in which we may approach and conceive of Him. Ramchal takes this further in another work, Da'as Tevunos, adding that we are not permitted to venture beyond this point of interface.
The physical Tabernacle replicates all of this symbolically in its architecture. The Kodesh HaKodoshim, containing the Ark and the Keruvim, from between which God's Voice emanates, is forbidden to be beheld by human eyes (except for on Yom Hakippurim, and only then through a cloud of smoke). It is screened off by the Parokhes HaMasakh, whose design bears the image of those Keruvim (Shemos 26:31), as if to reveal the very Essence that it hides.
Purim, as I've written elsewhere, gives us a brief window into a more perfect world, a world in which God's Hand is revealed as the Guiding Force of history. The day's mitzvos bring us to a momentary experience of the passion of intimacy between Man and God. As I've explained there, we purposely do this with the artificial stimulation of alcohol, to remind us of the grave danger that inheres in trying to inhabit that blissful state while bound in reality to the mundane world around us. That is in so far as exceeding the temporal limits of the experience.
What I'm suggesting here is that the mask, the masakh that we don on Purim is a necessary part of the qualitative experience of revelation. When we reveal God as the Storyteller on Purim, to use another contemporary analogy, we raise the curtain to reveal the screen. By viewing the screen itself we watch plot unfold and story told, but we cannot even glimpse the technology beyond. The picture hides in order to reveal.
Referring once again to the Torah's narrative, we find that even at the greatest point of Divine Revelation, God interacts specifically through this interface of a masakh. When Moses experiences possibly the most intimate communion with God possible for a created being, he views God's back, so to speak, while He shields His Face until It passes by (ve-sakhosi capi ad ovri).
Again, the skhakh, masakh, mask, that hides in order to reveal.
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