Post by Rabbi Neil on Sept 27, 2023 15:40:59 GMT
In his book Rupture and Reconstruction, Rabbi Dr Haym Soloveitchik, son of the famous theologian Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, make a fascinating observation. He shares a High Holy Day experience in 1959 in a yeshivah in B’nei Barak and talks of how the prayer there was more intense, uplifting and powerful than anything he had ever experienced. And yet, he says, “there was something missing. Upon reflection,” he writes, “I realized that there was introspection, self-ascent, even moments of transcendence, but there was no fear in the thronged [community]...” He explains that after this realization he looked for genuine expressions of fear in community and over the thirty-five years that followed, realized that he never witnessed fear in any High Holy Day community to any significant degree. He says, “The ten-day period between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are now Holy Days, but they are not Yamim Noraim—Days of Awe or, more accurately Days of Dread – as they have been traditionally called.” He reflects back to his childhood which was “the only time the synagogue was ever full was during the High Holidays. Even then,” he remembers, “the service was hardly edifying. Most didn’t know what they were saying, and bored, wandered in and out. Yet, at the closing service of Yom Kippur, the Ne'ilah, the synagogue filled and a hush set in upon the crowd. The tension was palpable and tears were shed.” He explains that “what had been instilled in these people in their earliest childhood, and which they never quite shook off, was that every person was judged on Yom Kippur, and, as the sun was setting, the final decision was being rendered (in the words of the famous prayer) “who for life, who for death, / who for tranquility, who for unrest.”” He realizes that what has been absent in the decades of High Holy Day services since that childhood was a “primal fear of Divine judgment, simple and direct.”
This year’s High Holy Day sermons are exploring the themes of fear and awe, and why I believe that experiencing some amount of fear is not only helpful and traditional at this time, but essential. I am aware that in the last three sermons, I have used a lot of God language, and I believe that is important, because this is, at its core, a theological matter. Soloveitchik says, “I think it is safe to say that the perception of God as a daily, natural force is no longer present to a significant degree in any sector of modern Jewry, even the most religious.” As late as in the Shtetl, only a few generations back, Jews still experienced God as a daily, natural force in their lives. Think of Tevye and how he talks to God, even if many of those moments in Fiddler on the Roof are meant to be comedy. People didn’t just talk to God in the Jewish past but they bargained with God because they were afraid of God. That’s why they cried on Yom Kippur, because they were genuinely afraid for their lives in the coming year and because while they hoped that they had atoned sufficiently, they didn’t actually know if they had. Most of us do not experience God in the same way, though, and we reinterpret metaphors of God that were meant to inspire fear into something less fearful. The most obvious example of this is the metaphor of God as king, as we repeatedly hear during Avinu Malkeinu and other prayers. The metaphor of God as king originally meant that God is in total control, that we are God’s subjects, and that God has the power of life and death over us. Nowadays, though, when we think of a king, we think of someone like King Charles who last year got frustrated with a leaking pen and complained that it happens to him “every stinking time.” Asking the king to write us in the Book of Life seems far less threatening when the king cries “Oh God, I hate this!” as soon as some ink gets on his hand! As I was writing this sermon, I asked Asher what he thought of when I said the word king. He said, “Someone who hoards wealth, who is removed from the people, who doesn’t actually care about them, and who aspires to gain more power.” (I guess some Rosh Hashanah apples don’t fall far from the tree!) The king as understood by the modern mind is therefore not a good metaphor for God particularly because God as king is no longer a metaphor that inspires fear.
And I believe that where the metaphor of God as king was originally put in the machzor to instill fear, nowadays I believe that it’s subconsciously kept in the machzor precisely for the opposite reason – because subconsciously today’s Jews don’t want God to instill fear. We don’t want our religion to make us afraid, we want it to always comfort and console us. We want God the shepherd, God the nurturing mother, God the all-merciful. We want our religion to be like self-help literature or therapy. The shift in Judaism away from fear is no more noticeable than in the tune Kol Ha’Olam Kulo. In our siddur and machzor, it is translated as “the whole world is but a narrow bridge; the most important thing is not to be afraid.” But that’s not what Nachman of Bratslav wrote at all. He wrote, “know that [every] person needs to cross a very, very narrow bridge, but the essential thing is not to make ourselves afraid.” The difference is huge. We went from acknowledging the precariousness of our lives and not making ourselves afraid to not allowing ourselves to be afraid at all. Fear was removed from our Judaism because we want it to affirm the prime underlying message of modern-day society – that we have control over our own lives.
Throughout my Rabbinic career, I have led at least four hundred, maybe even five hundred, funerals - my previous community was very, very old! Leading that many funerals - from children who never even made single digits to adults who made triple digits - forced me to totally accept the reality that we are not in control of our own lives. We can sometimes control limited aspects of our lives, we can control how we respond to events that happen in our lives, but we are not actually in control of our lives. And that, at least until the modern age, has always been the message of Judaism. Now in the modern age, as we start to believe in our ability to control everything, our Judaism changes as fear disappears. We no longer have to be afraid of whether or not we’ll have food tomorrow because it’s probably sitting at home in our fridge or freezer. We no longer have to be afraid of whether wild animals might attack us because we drove most of them away when we built our homes and roads. We no longer have to be afraid of invading armies rampaging over the land because this country amassed the largest and most advanced military technology ever seen in the history of humanity. We no longer have to fear earthquakes or dams breaking and sweeping tens of thousands of people out to sea because we have constructed a technological society that almost always keeps us safe while billions of people worldwide live in fear.
Fear is very unmodern. Technological progress leads to a decline in fear. And if a person shares that they are afraid of something, very quickly someone else tries to create a technological fix to remove that fear. Our society is predicated on suppressing fear through the illusion of control. As a result of that underlying societal belief, we don’t want a God who makes us afraid, or if we do experience that God then we think there must be some kind of fix. Unetaneh Tokef, for example, is a terrifying piece of liturgy which recounts how precarious our lives are, and then diffuses that message by saying Uteshuvah Utefillah Utzedakah ma’avirin et ro’ah hag’zeirah – But atonement, prayer and charity can avert the evil decree. It’s a spiritual technological fix. God’s going to kill you? Then say the right words and do the right things and you’ll live another year. Problem sorted, no need to fear the coming year, off you go, shanah tovah! That’s not real. Our liturgy comes so close to addressing the core existential question of the moment – what do I do with the terrifying realization that I am not in control? – but then nullifies the question with a quick fix – spend a day in shul, atone, and be done. It’s a lie.
The High Holy Days should be scary. Another year has passed. We are all, every single one of us, one year closer to the grave. Nobody likes to say that out loud, though, in fact saying that out loud makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable. But this season is also a celebration that we made it through the last year with all of its trials and tribulations. The fear that we should experience does not have to be all-encompassing or paralyzing. The Zohar says that there are three types of fear. It says that the first two - the fear of God that punishment will be inflicted on us in this world and the fear of punishment in the world to come – do not belong to the root of fear and to its root meaning. The Zohar says that only the third type of fear – when we fear God because God is the great and mighty Ruler, and Foundation and Root of all things and before God we are nothing, only that, it says, is the valid fear. It’s fascinating that it says that because our liturgy really strongly implies fear of punishment for our sins. Fear is not something to be avoided or to be quashed with a simple fix but is something to be embraced and learned from. Psalm 111 says that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God and that all who practice it gain sound understanding. In Talmud, Rabba bar Rav Huna says that anyone who has Torah in them but who does not have fear of Heaven is like a treasurer to whom they gave keys to the inner doors of the treasury but they did not give keys to the outer door…. Rav Yehuva then adds that God only created this world so that people would fear before God, and he quotes the Book of Ecclesiastes which says that “God so made it that people should fear before God.”
In the wondrous mussar text known as Mesilat Yesharim or The Path of the Upright, Moshe Chaim Luzzatto writes that we have “reached the point where most people imagine piety consists of reciting many psalms, very long confessions, and difficult fasts” but he laments that “few are those who devote thought and study to the matter of perfection of [divine] service: on love, fear, clinging, and the other branches of piety.” He asks, “If we do not look into and analyze what is true fear of God and what are its branches, how can we ever acquire it? And how can we ever save ourselves from the worldly vanities which cause our heart to be forgetful of it?!” Fear of God is to him a purer expression of piety than all the psalms, confessions and fasts. That is why, as I mentioned on Shabbat Shuvah, Rabbi Louis Jacobs once wrote that "religion without fear of Heaven is no more than a sentimental attachment to ancient forms from which the spirit has departed."
Some sermons bring comfort to the community. This is not one of those sermons. This is meant to be an unsettling time. We’re meant to be afraid right now. We’re meant to be afraid of whether our actions in the past year have damaged our relationships. We’re meant to be afraid that we may not be the good people that we’ve convinced ourselves we are. We’re meant to be afraid that we have little time left on this earth to undo or at least balance out any negative things we have done. That’s what leads to teshuvah, to atonement. We’re not meant to be afraid that God is going to punish us because then any atonement performed is done merely in order to avoid punishment. That’s not fear of God, that’s fear of punishment.
These are frightening times. Despite technology’s attempt to reduce fear, it keeps returning more and more in today’s society. Fear of the climate crisis unfolding much faster than even the most pessimistic predictions suggested. Fear of gun violence. Fear of hard-earned rights being stripped from specific groups of people. Fear of the decline in democracy around the world. Fear of catching a virus that killed over a million Americans in the space of three years, and that is returning again. Fear of isolation, especially in old age. These are valid fears. It’s okay to be afraid of such things, it’s healthy, it’s appropriate. When we suppress our fears and then something terrible happens, we don’t know how to respond.
This Yom Kippur, then, we need to honestly open ourselves up to our fears. We need to be able to use the liturgy which talks clearly of fear. El Nora Alilah talks of beseeching God with trembling hearts as our very life pours before God. That’s fear. Un’taneh Tokef talks of God being judge and plaintiff, counselor and witness and talks of angels in a whirl of fear and trembling. It talks of judgment. It talks of who will die this year as a result of the divine judgment. That’s fear. It’s okay to be afraid. It’s healthy to be afraid. Fear that isn’t paralyzing leads us to action or at the very least to awareness and to inner peace, which is exactly what is meant to be the outcome of this season.
So, my High Holy Day sermons this year have been focusing on fear and awe. On Erev Rosh Hashanah, we saw how fear of the future can motivate us to act. On Rosh Hashanah morning, we looked at fear in the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, and suggested that the reason we read that passage is to ask ourselves how we might appropriately make evident our sense of fearful awe. On Shabbat Shuvah, we looked at whether it is better to serve God through fear or through love and why, in fact, both go hand-in-hand. Tonight, we have explored why we try to avoid fear in our society and why there should be an element of fear on Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is a day of abstaining from pleasures of this world, a day of removing ourselves from the world, a day where we have a taste of non-existence, of death. The metaphor of the Book of Life mirrors the tombstone that faces us at the end of our own lives, which asks of us one profound, terrifying question – how do you want to be remembered? “Days are scrolls,” says Bachya ibn Pakuda, “write on them what you want to be remembered.” Today is the ultimate reminder of the terrifying fact that our days are few, and that the number of opportunities to write how we will be remembered are limited.
On Rosh Hashanah, we considered how we might use our fear of the future of the world to motivate us to act morally. Tonight, on Kol Nidre, we consider how we might use our fear of how we will be remembered to motivate us to live fully. If Kol Nidre had a tagline, I think it would be “Be afraid, be very afraid, and then do something about it.” Don’t be afraid of punishment, don’t be afraid of not being written in a book – be afraid of how you might be remembered if this year were indeed your last on Earth. That is the empowering fear of this evening, a fear that doesn’t even need any of us to believe in God or in the Book of Life to be potent. That is the fear that drives us to change ourselves, just as our fear of the future drives us to change the world. So, this evening, may that fear not overwhelm us, may it challenge us, may it scare us, and may it as a result transform us during this season of fearful awe, and let us say, Amen.
This year’s High Holy Day sermons are exploring the themes of fear and awe, and why I believe that experiencing some amount of fear is not only helpful and traditional at this time, but essential. I am aware that in the last three sermons, I have used a lot of God language, and I believe that is important, because this is, at its core, a theological matter. Soloveitchik says, “I think it is safe to say that the perception of God as a daily, natural force is no longer present to a significant degree in any sector of modern Jewry, even the most religious.” As late as in the Shtetl, only a few generations back, Jews still experienced God as a daily, natural force in their lives. Think of Tevye and how he talks to God, even if many of those moments in Fiddler on the Roof are meant to be comedy. People didn’t just talk to God in the Jewish past but they bargained with God because they were afraid of God. That’s why they cried on Yom Kippur, because they were genuinely afraid for their lives in the coming year and because while they hoped that they had atoned sufficiently, they didn’t actually know if they had. Most of us do not experience God in the same way, though, and we reinterpret metaphors of God that were meant to inspire fear into something less fearful. The most obvious example of this is the metaphor of God as king, as we repeatedly hear during Avinu Malkeinu and other prayers. The metaphor of God as king originally meant that God is in total control, that we are God’s subjects, and that God has the power of life and death over us. Nowadays, though, when we think of a king, we think of someone like King Charles who last year got frustrated with a leaking pen and complained that it happens to him “every stinking time.” Asking the king to write us in the Book of Life seems far less threatening when the king cries “Oh God, I hate this!” as soon as some ink gets on his hand! As I was writing this sermon, I asked Asher what he thought of when I said the word king. He said, “Someone who hoards wealth, who is removed from the people, who doesn’t actually care about them, and who aspires to gain more power.” (I guess some Rosh Hashanah apples don’t fall far from the tree!) The king as understood by the modern mind is therefore not a good metaphor for God particularly because God as king is no longer a metaphor that inspires fear.
And I believe that where the metaphor of God as king was originally put in the machzor to instill fear, nowadays I believe that it’s subconsciously kept in the machzor precisely for the opposite reason – because subconsciously today’s Jews don’t want God to instill fear. We don’t want our religion to make us afraid, we want it to always comfort and console us. We want God the shepherd, God the nurturing mother, God the all-merciful. We want our religion to be like self-help literature or therapy. The shift in Judaism away from fear is no more noticeable than in the tune Kol Ha’Olam Kulo. In our siddur and machzor, it is translated as “the whole world is but a narrow bridge; the most important thing is not to be afraid.” But that’s not what Nachman of Bratslav wrote at all. He wrote, “know that [every] person needs to cross a very, very narrow bridge, but the essential thing is not to make ourselves afraid.” The difference is huge. We went from acknowledging the precariousness of our lives and not making ourselves afraid to not allowing ourselves to be afraid at all. Fear was removed from our Judaism because we want it to affirm the prime underlying message of modern-day society – that we have control over our own lives.
Throughout my Rabbinic career, I have led at least four hundred, maybe even five hundred, funerals - my previous community was very, very old! Leading that many funerals - from children who never even made single digits to adults who made triple digits - forced me to totally accept the reality that we are not in control of our own lives. We can sometimes control limited aspects of our lives, we can control how we respond to events that happen in our lives, but we are not actually in control of our lives. And that, at least until the modern age, has always been the message of Judaism. Now in the modern age, as we start to believe in our ability to control everything, our Judaism changes as fear disappears. We no longer have to be afraid of whether or not we’ll have food tomorrow because it’s probably sitting at home in our fridge or freezer. We no longer have to be afraid of whether wild animals might attack us because we drove most of them away when we built our homes and roads. We no longer have to be afraid of invading armies rampaging over the land because this country amassed the largest and most advanced military technology ever seen in the history of humanity. We no longer have to fear earthquakes or dams breaking and sweeping tens of thousands of people out to sea because we have constructed a technological society that almost always keeps us safe while billions of people worldwide live in fear.
Fear is very unmodern. Technological progress leads to a decline in fear. And if a person shares that they are afraid of something, very quickly someone else tries to create a technological fix to remove that fear. Our society is predicated on suppressing fear through the illusion of control. As a result of that underlying societal belief, we don’t want a God who makes us afraid, or if we do experience that God then we think there must be some kind of fix. Unetaneh Tokef, for example, is a terrifying piece of liturgy which recounts how precarious our lives are, and then diffuses that message by saying Uteshuvah Utefillah Utzedakah ma’avirin et ro’ah hag’zeirah – But atonement, prayer and charity can avert the evil decree. It’s a spiritual technological fix. God’s going to kill you? Then say the right words and do the right things and you’ll live another year. Problem sorted, no need to fear the coming year, off you go, shanah tovah! That’s not real. Our liturgy comes so close to addressing the core existential question of the moment – what do I do with the terrifying realization that I am not in control? – but then nullifies the question with a quick fix – spend a day in shul, atone, and be done. It’s a lie.
The High Holy Days should be scary. Another year has passed. We are all, every single one of us, one year closer to the grave. Nobody likes to say that out loud, though, in fact saying that out loud makes me feel profoundly uncomfortable. But this season is also a celebration that we made it through the last year with all of its trials and tribulations. The fear that we should experience does not have to be all-encompassing or paralyzing. The Zohar says that there are three types of fear. It says that the first two - the fear of God that punishment will be inflicted on us in this world and the fear of punishment in the world to come – do not belong to the root of fear and to its root meaning. The Zohar says that only the third type of fear – when we fear God because God is the great and mighty Ruler, and Foundation and Root of all things and before God we are nothing, only that, it says, is the valid fear. It’s fascinating that it says that because our liturgy really strongly implies fear of punishment for our sins. Fear is not something to be avoided or to be quashed with a simple fix but is something to be embraced and learned from. Psalm 111 says that the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God and that all who practice it gain sound understanding. In Talmud, Rabba bar Rav Huna says that anyone who has Torah in them but who does not have fear of Heaven is like a treasurer to whom they gave keys to the inner doors of the treasury but they did not give keys to the outer door…. Rav Yehuva then adds that God only created this world so that people would fear before God, and he quotes the Book of Ecclesiastes which says that “God so made it that people should fear before God.”
In the wondrous mussar text known as Mesilat Yesharim or The Path of the Upright, Moshe Chaim Luzzatto writes that we have “reached the point where most people imagine piety consists of reciting many psalms, very long confessions, and difficult fasts” but he laments that “few are those who devote thought and study to the matter of perfection of [divine] service: on love, fear, clinging, and the other branches of piety.” He asks, “If we do not look into and analyze what is true fear of God and what are its branches, how can we ever acquire it? And how can we ever save ourselves from the worldly vanities which cause our heart to be forgetful of it?!” Fear of God is to him a purer expression of piety than all the psalms, confessions and fasts. That is why, as I mentioned on Shabbat Shuvah, Rabbi Louis Jacobs once wrote that "religion without fear of Heaven is no more than a sentimental attachment to ancient forms from which the spirit has departed."
Some sermons bring comfort to the community. This is not one of those sermons. This is meant to be an unsettling time. We’re meant to be afraid right now. We’re meant to be afraid of whether our actions in the past year have damaged our relationships. We’re meant to be afraid that we may not be the good people that we’ve convinced ourselves we are. We’re meant to be afraid that we have little time left on this earth to undo or at least balance out any negative things we have done. That’s what leads to teshuvah, to atonement. We’re not meant to be afraid that God is going to punish us because then any atonement performed is done merely in order to avoid punishment. That’s not fear of God, that’s fear of punishment.
These are frightening times. Despite technology’s attempt to reduce fear, it keeps returning more and more in today’s society. Fear of the climate crisis unfolding much faster than even the most pessimistic predictions suggested. Fear of gun violence. Fear of hard-earned rights being stripped from specific groups of people. Fear of the decline in democracy around the world. Fear of catching a virus that killed over a million Americans in the space of three years, and that is returning again. Fear of isolation, especially in old age. These are valid fears. It’s okay to be afraid of such things, it’s healthy, it’s appropriate. When we suppress our fears and then something terrible happens, we don’t know how to respond.
This Yom Kippur, then, we need to honestly open ourselves up to our fears. We need to be able to use the liturgy which talks clearly of fear. El Nora Alilah talks of beseeching God with trembling hearts as our very life pours before God. That’s fear. Un’taneh Tokef talks of God being judge and plaintiff, counselor and witness and talks of angels in a whirl of fear and trembling. It talks of judgment. It talks of who will die this year as a result of the divine judgment. That’s fear. It’s okay to be afraid. It’s healthy to be afraid. Fear that isn’t paralyzing leads us to action or at the very least to awareness and to inner peace, which is exactly what is meant to be the outcome of this season.
So, my High Holy Day sermons this year have been focusing on fear and awe. On Erev Rosh Hashanah, we saw how fear of the future can motivate us to act. On Rosh Hashanah morning, we looked at fear in the Akeidah, the Binding of Isaac, and suggested that the reason we read that passage is to ask ourselves how we might appropriately make evident our sense of fearful awe. On Shabbat Shuvah, we looked at whether it is better to serve God through fear or through love and why, in fact, both go hand-in-hand. Tonight, we have explored why we try to avoid fear in our society and why there should be an element of fear on Yom Kippur. Yom Kippur is a day of abstaining from pleasures of this world, a day of removing ourselves from the world, a day where we have a taste of non-existence, of death. The metaphor of the Book of Life mirrors the tombstone that faces us at the end of our own lives, which asks of us one profound, terrifying question – how do you want to be remembered? “Days are scrolls,” says Bachya ibn Pakuda, “write on them what you want to be remembered.” Today is the ultimate reminder of the terrifying fact that our days are few, and that the number of opportunities to write how we will be remembered are limited.
On Rosh Hashanah, we considered how we might use our fear of the future of the world to motivate us to act morally. Tonight, on Kol Nidre, we consider how we might use our fear of how we will be remembered to motivate us to live fully. If Kol Nidre had a tagline, I think it would be “Be afraid, be very afraid, and then do something about it.” Don’t be afraid of punishment, don’t be afraid of not being written in a book – be afraid of how you might be remembered if this year were indeed your last on Earth. That is the empowering fear of this evening, a fear that doesn’t even need any of us to believe in God or in the Book of Life to be potent. That is the fear that drives us to change ourselves, just as our fear of the future drives us to change the world. So, this evening, may that fear not overwhelm us, may it challenge us, may it scare us, and may it as a result transform us during this season of fearful awe, and let us say, Amen.