Netzavim: nysteries

The parsha is complex.  It starts by saying: "You are all standing here today" and then proceeds to declare that the covenant covers both those present and absent.  I can feel myself standing there.   I was absent, not yet born, this is millenia before my birth. I am included in the coveneant.  tt is my turn to stand. 

Verse 29:28 is very disturbing. The Nysteros, the hidden, are for Hashem our Gd and the revealed things are for us and our children, forever, to perform all of the sayings of this Torah (teaching).  

What are these hidden things? The commentators contextualize this to mean the transgressions   that we are not aware of.    Failure to act on a known transgression is a big problem, In these few days before Rosh Hashana, it is certain that this phrase does not excuse the unexamined  person.  Failure to search one's memory is not an excuse.  But failure to understand actions after scrutiny might invoke some lessening of responsibility. 

Perhaps these hidden things are how the world works, the science of the thing.  The hidden energies beyond electricity , the unfindable exact position of the particle, the status of Schroedinger's cat, the location of the Divine  dice.  We post Goedel moderns, post  Google consumers, understand, in a new way, that all human knowledge is incomplete and a little inconsistent,  The mysteries are the completeness of knowledge, the truth. 

There is a very  dark interpretation of the verse.  On the border between the scientific and traditional  reading, there are the letters with dots over them.  In this verse, the words "us and our children" are dotted.  The dotted words are, as if ( half) erased, they are  faded words.  The existence of us and our children is tenuous in this verse.  In that context, the hidden: is Gd hiding the Countenance, Gd releasing benevolent mastery over the world for the instant that  it takes to make our continuation a question.   The psalm suggests fear as proper reaction to Gd hiding the face. Mystery implies danger.  Nysterv, all the more

Regardless, we have a job. Our job is the revealed.  The implication is that each person's mission can be found by self examination.  The mission is obscured by the nysteries... but let them go, they are not your business.  Every soul has its combination of the obvious and the obscure.   Choose life is how the parsha ends.  The choice is obvious