Rabbi Baruch once found his young son crying. “And why are you crying?” he asked. The boy replied: “my friends and I were playing ‘hide and seek’. When I came my turn to hide, I hid but after a long time in hiding I realized that they stopped looking for me… they forgot all about me,” the child lamented.
Rabbi Baruch calmed his child and then said to the others, “And is this not precisely what God cries about? He hid from us – as a result of our sins – but the purpose of His hiding is so that we shall search and seek Him. As it is written, if we search we will find him (Deut. 4:29, Jer. 29:13). But, like the child, we stop looking for Him…”