Rabbi Ari Lev fornari: The Days of Fear and Awe [1]
Rosh Hashanah Day 1 5786
Sept 23, 2025
Watch
Allow me to borrow a page from Passover, and begin this new year with a question:
“Do the words pterodactyl, terrifying, terrible and terrific have anything in common?”
Last week, while playing catch in the park, my kid asked me this question.
It was a complete non-sequitor.
Being the week before Rosh Hashanah, I had actually been ruminating on a related semantic inquiry of my own:
“Funny you should ask. I’ve been wondering, do the words awesome and awful have anything in common?”
A moment later, my kid responded, “Well maybe not pterodactyl.”
But terrific and terrifying were still on his mind, (pause) and mine.
--
In the introduction to his book Fear, Cory Robin, a Jewish professor of political science begins,
“It is seldom noted, but fear is the first emotion experienced by a character in the Bible. Not desire, not shame, but fear. Adam eats from the tree, discovers he is naked, and hides from God, confessing, “I was afraid, because I was naked.” (1).
Fear is primal and it is baked into our beginnings.
Not just our existential beginnings, but this particular beginning.
I arrive to this new year 5786 tender, raw and like Adam HaRishon, the very first human, afraid.
The past year included some awesome moments, full of wonder and laughter and connection. And this year has been punctuated by some awful moments, moments of profound uncertainty, worry and fear.
More than once this year I have been afraid in a way that touched me at my core, tapping into an existential fear for my own safety, the safety of my neighbors, my comrades, even the safety of my own children. As a trans person and the parent of two nonbinary kids, it has been personally distressing.
Virulent government policies are polarizing our relationships, threatening our communities and inspiring targeted political violence. My fears were further confirmed on Sunday when M. Gessen published an oped in which he wrote, “the feeling that I am on borrowed time in my own home is a familiar one.” The parallels he draws to Hitler’s Germany and Putin’s Russia are disturbing. Each escalated arrest, abduction, attack and assasination, brings threats of further repression and I have grown more afraid for our collective safety and well being.
And I know I am not alone in it. It has become a nearly routine part of spiritual care for KT members to share with me their need for a back up plan, an exit strategy, attempts to secure citizenship elsewhere, to rematriate to the country their parents, grandparents or even great grandparents once fled. For many of us, it is difficult to know where historical trauma ends and contemporary concerns begin.
We are living through the rise of authoritarianism world-wide and many of us are experiencing what Cory Robin describes as “political fear.” Unfortunately I don’t think our fears are unwarranted. [2]
So this year in particular, when I say welcome to the Yamim Noraim, The Days of Awe, what I really mean is welcome to The Days of Fear and Awe. The word norah contains this dual meaning, awe and fear, which is what I want to explore today.
--
As Rosh Hashanah was approaching, I became aware of my own need for comfort, and my desire to offer each of you comfort; for the melodies and the prayers to soothe our souls. I began to understand this as the goal of our gathering this year.
But how does that square with the terrifying imagery in the machzor? Or with the central message of the high holidays as articulated by my teacher Rabbi Alan Lew of blessed memory, “This is real and you are completely unprepared”?. That’s not very comforting.
In the prayer Unetane Tokef, one of the central prayers of the Musaf liturgy on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are depicted as trembling before God as we acknowledge the awesome power and fear-instilling nature of these days that determine our fate for the year to come.
Together I want to ask: What is the role of fear in our liturgy and in our lives?
When is it helpful? When is it harmful?
And, why do we begin the year afraid?
--
Classically speaking, Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom HaDin, Judgment Day. The book of life is open before us. We are meant to imagine our lives as hanging in the balance, the Holy One considering our worth, like a shepherd inspects her flock, which to keep and which to send to the slaughter. We are here to prove ourselves worthy. This is truly terrifying.
But that is not at all how I imagine this day.
–
In his final book, Be Still, Get Going, Rabbi Alan Lew, notes, “The English word “fear” (like the words “pain” and “suffering”) is quite imprecise and really denotes a complex variety of feelings. There are two Hebrew words for fear – pachad and norah – and although these words are often used interchangeably, they roughly correspond to two very different spiritual states” (116).
Pachad comes from the root peh chet dalet,
meaning terror or dread.
It most often describes fear of something external.
Whereas the word Nora comes from the root י–ר–א and it means both to revere and to fear. It’s a complicated spiritual concept that I plan to explore a bit later. But it’s helpful to know that I will be using norah and yirah somewhat interchangeably, which makes more sense in Hebrew than in English.
Spiritually and semantically, pachad is most closely identified with our mythic ancestor Isaac. Genesis 31 refers to “pachad yitzhak”, an epithet referring to the fear and trauma of his youth, drawing us back to the story of the Binding of Isaac, which we will read tomorrow morning. The rabbinic imagination picks up on this attribution and it persists. [3]
We even sang of it at Selichot in the piyyut Aneinu:
עֲנֵנוּ וּפַחַד יִצְחָק עֲנֵנוּ.
Aneinu ufachad Yitzchak aneinu.
--
To understand pachad, we must recall pachad yitzhak.
Quoting from Genesis 22,
וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יִצְחָ֜ק אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֤ם אָבִיו֙
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אָבִ֔י
וַיֹּ֖אמֶר הִנֶּ֣נִּֽי בְנִ֑י
וַיֹּ֗אמֶר הִנֵּ֤ה הָאֵשׁ֙ וְהָ֣עֵצִ֔ים וְאַיֵּ֥ה הַשֶּׂ֖ה לְעֹלָֽה׃
Yitzhak said to Avraham his father:
Father!
He said:
Here I am, my son.
He said:
Here are the fire and the wood,
but where is the lamb for the offering-up?
What then is the fear of Isaac?
It is the fear of a child who perceives he is about to be slaughtered at the hand of his own father.
A child who notices there is the making of a sacrifice but no animal to offer.
One midrash attempts to interrupt this story, describing angels hovering above the altar, crying. Their tears fall into Isaac’s eyes to keep him from seeing the knife in his father’s hand.
Pachad is visceral. Terror and dread in your bones. But Pachad also cultivates caution and humility. Fear can keep us from foolishness and danger. For this reason It is terrifying to parent a fearless child.
Certainly Isaac had reason to fear. But if not attended to, the feeling of it persists long after and without awareness we bequeath the trauma of pachad to our descendents.
In his iconic poem ירשה / Inheritance, Haim Gouri writes:
Isaac, as recounted, was not offered up in sacrifice.
He lived a long time,
experienced the good, until the light of his eyes grew dim.
אֲבָל אֶת הַשָּׁעָה הַהִיא הוֹרִישׁ לְצֶאֱצָאָיו.
הֵם נוֹלָדִים
וּמַאֲכֶלֶת בְּלִבָּם.
Nonetheless, that hour he gave to his progeny, an inheritance.
They are born
and a knife is in their heart.
--
We too, as a Jewish community, are wrestling with inherited fear, a knife deep in our history and our hearts. Its origins vary across continents yet the impact is consistent. The repeated claim that Jewish survival justifies, if not depends on, the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people is proof that inherited fear, if not attended to, has the power to destroy rather than protect life.
On the topic of fear, some two thousand years ago, the Talmud [4] asks this question:
What is the reason that the Sages prohibited going out with a spiked sandal on Shabbat?
To which they respond with a story:
Rami bar Yehezkel recounts: Once they were sitting in a synagogue, and they heard the sound of a spiked sandal from behind the synagogue. They thought that their enemies had come upon them. They pushed one another, and killed one another in greater numbers than their enemies had killed among them.
This story gives new meaning to the adage “kill or be killed.”
Feeling vulnerable and afraid, those gathered in the synagogue killed their own before their perceived enemies could get to them. Oy.
The threat of our adversaries may be real or perceived, and we may never know which.
But the threat our fear poses to our own souls is undoubtedly real and even more dangerous.
It occurs to me how vulnerable we are, sitting here together as a Jewish community in a synagogue of sorts. How vulnerable we are as a Jewish community world wide, gathered in synagogues across the globe. How tempted we might be to turn on each other, mis-identifying one another as the cause of our fears. How natural the instinct to try to protect ourselves, and how prone that defense mechanism is to cause harm.
--
Rebbe Nachman is famous for having said that the whole entire world is a very narrow bridge. And the important thing is not to be afraid, lo l’fached clal. There’s that word pachad again.
The saying is iconic.
But it is not entirely accurate.
It is true that he conceived of the world in tenuous terms. But what Rebbe Nachman actually said was, “Kol HaOlam Kulo, The whole entire world, gesher tzar me’od, is a very narrow bridge…And the most important thing is not to make ourselves afraid - lo l’hitpached clal - to not cultivate pachad in our hearts. The popular lyrics skirt his true wisdom here.
This is what I believe the tale of the spiked sandal also cautions against. The people gathered in the synagogue hearing a spiked sandal allowed terror to overtake them. In the face of fear they did not have the courage to protect life.
And that is precisely what we need today: The courage to protect life.
—-
But how do we cultivate the courage to protect life when we are afraid?
I think the answer lies in the second Hebrew word we have for fear, norah - and more specifically in the idea of Yirat HaShammayim - Divine reverence – which grows from norah.
--
If we learn about pachad from Yitzhak, from whom can we learn about nora or yirah?
--
In my effort to really understand Yirat HaShammayim, I looked to the very first chapter in Exodus which reads:
The king of ancient Egypt said to the midwives: When you attend the births of the Hebrew women, look (u’rei-ten) at the birth stool. If it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live. The midwives, feared God in awe (va-tir-ena hameyaldot et haElohim / וַתִּירֶאןָ הַמְיַלְּדֹת אֶת־הָאֱלֹהִים) and they did not do as the king of Egypt had told them. They let the boys live (Exodus 1: 16-17).
In the Torah, the midwives are our defiant heroes, quite literally on the frontlines preventing the genocide of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt/mitzrayim. What I never noticed before is that it explicitly says that it is because of their Yirat Hashem, reverence for the Divine, that they were able to defy Pharaoh. Which is to say, their fear and awe of heaven was stronger than their fear of Pharoah.
One contemporary feminist midrash, from a collection called Dirshuni, zooms in on this moment and asks precisely the question I am asking these days - How can I get that kind of faith?
--
Here I am directly quoting the midrash written by Orna Peltz:
“The midwives were asked: Where did you get your fearful awe of God?
To which they answered:
From the great and deep things that we saw at the birth stool,
from the mystery that embraces us morning and evening:
human being after human being coming into the world;
where does each one come from and what do they each bring with them?
The goodness that a [parent] sees in their child, the compassion and the love that awakens,
crying babies bursting forth from exhausted bodies,
and the soft seal of God’s finger imprinted on their faces.”
--
For the midwives, the experience of attending births was the source of their Yirah. The magic and intensity of these life and death moments, the courage to defy the decree of a King of flesh and blood was possible because of their deep reverence for the Source of Life.
To the many midwives, doulas, and birth workers in our community - know that I feel awe in your presence, for your courage to witness human being after human being coming into the world. You bring goodness and compassion into our world. [5]
But what about the rest of us? From where might we learn yirah?
The midrash continues, “They challenged the midwives:
But didn’t it happen at Sinai? As it says in Exodus:
“All the people saw (ro-im) the thunder and the lightning and the voice of the Shofar and the smoking mountain and the people saw it and trembled and stood far off … and Moshe said to the people do not fear (al ti-ru), for God has come to test you, to keep the fearful awe of God (yir-a-to) before you so that you will not transgress” (Exodus 20: 15-17).
From here we are meant to learn that the fearful awe of God comes from the place of thunder and lightning!”
From the shammayim, the heavens itself.
Reading this was more than resonant. Having experienced my share of thunder and lightning this summer, I was in fact full of fear and awe, but had not considered that it was a pathway to the Divine.
This past July my family was camping and got caught in an epic thunderstorm, just days after the tragic flood at Camp Mystic in Texas. In the middle of the night I woke to raging thunder and lightning. The rain was whipping. The sky looked like a strobe show, flashing, booming, pounding. Despite the still dry tent, I was beginning to worry. Were we safe? Might a tree fall on our tent? Could there be an electrical fire?
It was so loud it woke up our kids, who were also scared. After a particularly loud and close crack, we decided to get in the car. Once in the car we drove around trying not to panic, barely able to see the dark forest road in front of us. For a while we parked in an empty lot far from any trees, considered our options and finally got back in our tent. The storm went on for another hour - lightning popping off incessantly. I was terrified. The lightning struck so close, I could feel it in my chest. More than once I recited the shema.
I thought of the book of psalms, (77:19)
ק֤וֹל רַעַמְךָ֨ ׀ בַּגַּלְגַּ֗ל הֵאִ֣ירוּ בְרָקִ֣ים תֵּבֵ֑ל רָגְזָ֖ה וַתִּרְעַ֣שׁ הָאָֽרֶץ׃
Your thunder rumbled like wheels;
lightning lit up the world;
the earth quaked and trembled.
Laying in my tent, I thought of the families in Gaza trying to sleep in their tents, the most vulnerable of shelters. Knowing they too were experiencing a storm of explosions, but theirs undoubtedly deadly, each night not knowing if they will wake to their home in rubble, or wake at all. How can one sleep with so much fear?
Laying in my tent, I thought of the immigrant families here in Philly, and around the country, afraid to close their eyes, leave their homes, go to school or work; who fear at any moment ICE may steal them from their lives. How can one sleep with so much fear?
Laying in my tent, unable to sleep, I was plagued with fear. Political fear and Divine fear. I went through my litany of fears. It was all mixed together.
I eventually fell back asleep, shaken and scared, grateful for tiredness to overwhelm my nervous system. I couldn’t wait to see the light of a clear blue morning.
It was not until I found this midrash that I understood why the thunderstorm scared me so deeply.
The midrash continues with the midwives explaining why for them it was by attending births rather than the experience of Sinai that taught them Yirah:
They explain: “There is fearful awe (yir-a) that comes from external seeing (re-i-ya) and there is fearful awe that comes from internal vision; A person can be frozen in terror, witnessing a supernatural miracle, which awakens and strengthens her sense of fearful awe.
But for us, the Midwives continue, it doesn’t work like that.
Our fearful awe is “not in the heavens” (Devarim 30:12). Lo va’shammayim hi.
Our fearful awe of God arises precisely from within nature, from within the pain of what we witness on the birth stool.
In the midrash, the midwives conclude, “From there we learn to choose what is good, to protect life, to fight against death and to resist evil.”
Pharaoh instructed the midwives to surveil the birthstool. The midwives took Pharoah’s instruction seriously, they looked closely at the birthing stool and what they saw was the miracle and wonder of creation which connected them to the Source of Life. And after that, Pharaoh’s majesty and power looked a little shabbier, and a little easier to resist.
This is how yirah arises.
When we are deeply present, and deeply connected and aware of our modest place in the vastness of creation, there is an openness, a vulnerability and a willingness that leads to an awesome fearful sensation, and that is yirah. It is the knowing that we are part of the Ineffable.
It almost always brings me to tears.
I think the midwives were able to access yirah at the birthstool because they had moral clarity and deep purpose. And their yirah empowered them “to protect life, to fight against death and to resist evil.” Which is what we each need in these awful times.
Right now there is a lot to be afraid of.
I can’t pretend to know all of what you are each facing but I do know what we are all facing.
It would be nice if I could easily recount to you all the ways I regularly access yirah, the fullness of awe.
But the truth is that its actually hard to access, and particularly hard to experience alone and in our daily lives.
Certainly I have felt it this year.
Sitting with Shosh’s grandmother in her final moments.
Everytime I place a baby in the Torah.
Protesting the siege in Gaza with 1000 strong.
That summer thunderstorm.
When I learned that one Kol Tzedek member was anonymously donating an organ to save another’s life.
I know for sure I felt it at Selichot last Saturday night.
But since I am not a midwife, the moments are infrequent.
Which is precisely why we have the Yamim Noraim.
And why the liturgy deals so explicitly with questions of life and death, because it calls us to attention.
Once a year we get to cultivate yirah together, so we can return to it when we need it most, when we are most afraid.
These 10 days are an invitation to immerse in yirah, they are a much-needed booster shot, a well we are digging so it can sustain us all year long.
Because yirah is more accessible when we are together. And the rituals of the Yamim Noraim are designed to cultivate yirah. So lean into them. Let the hours of prayer make you delirious til you can’t tell the difference between awesome and awful, terrifying and terrific, judgment and compassion.
Lean into the melodies and the rituals so that you can recall the feeling throughout the year when you need it most.
A few years ago, RB Brown and the KT board actually bottled the magic of the Days of Awe by placing a bowl of water under the ark and then making it into an essence they gifted to me and Rabbi Mó - It was the the most thoughtful and incredible surprise: a little tincture full of Yirah. Every shabbat we would squeeze a drop in our mouths to get a little boost. It really did help.
Yirah, Norah, the Yamim Noraim come once a year to fill us with reverence, to reconnect us to our Source, to metabolize our fears, and to encourage our righteous defiance in the face of injustice. [6]
This is why I think we are here.
And why we begin the year afraid.
—-
Hayom Harat Olam - today the world is conceived anew.
We are the midwives of this new year.
We are attending our own rebirth.
That is the gift that Rosh Hashanah offers each of us, every year.
--
May the old year and her curses resolve
May the new year and her blessings begin.
Hazak hazak v’nithazek - courage, courage, grant us courage.
Footnotes
[1] With gratitude to my writing coach Jon Argaman, my hevruta Rabbi Mónica Gomery, Rabbi Avi Strausberg for sharing so many of these sources with me, Abby McCartney and Shosh Ruskin for editing earlier drafts, and Sam Shain for prompting me to consider talking about awe in the first place.
[2] According to Corey Robin, “Political fear is thought to be a species of terror.” His inquiry largely surrounds the war on terror that arose in response to the attacks on 9/11. But reading his book clarified for me how the war on terror and the rise of Islamophobia reorganized power in America and set us up for this moment. Robin concludes his introduction by foreshadowing the political reality we are experiencing: “For one day, the war on terrorism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind” (Fear, 25).
[3] There is even entire compilations of hasidic teachings called Pachad Yitzhak, the magnum opus of Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, a 20th century Orthodox American rabbi, born in Warsaw in 1906.
[4] Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 60a
[5] I dedicate this sermon to the birthworkers in Gaza, who continue to risk their lives to attend births in unbearable circumstances.
[6] Rabbi Shai Held writes#, “Courage, it seems to me, is not fearlessness but rather a refusal to be governed by our fears. The beginning of courage is to admit that we are afraid and at the same time to recall that fear is only one factor in our decision-making—and not the most decisive one.”
Sept 23, 2025
Watch
Allow me to borrow a page from Passover, and begin this new year with a question:
“Do the words pterodactyl, terrifying, terrible and terrific have anything in common?”
Last week, while playing catch in the park, my kid asked me this question.
It was a complete non-sequitor.
Being the week before Rosh Hashanah, I had actually been ruminating on a related semantic inquiry of my own:
“Funny you should ask. I’ve been wondering, do the words awesome and awful have anything in common?”
A moment later, my kid responded, “Well maybe not pterodactyl.”
But terrific and terrifying were still on his mind, (pause) and mine.
--
In the introduction to his book Fear, Cory Robin, a Jewish professor of political science begins,
“It is seldom noted, but fear is the first emotion experienced by a character in the Bible. Not desire, not shame, but fear. Adam eats from the tree, discovers he is naked, and hides from God, confessing, “I was afraid, because I was naked.” (1).
Fear is primal and it is baked into our beginnings.
Not just our existential beginnings, but this particular beginning.
I arrive to this new year 5786 tender, raw and like Adam HaRishon, the very first human, afraid.
The past year included some awesome moments, full of wonder and laughter and connection. And this year has been punctuated by some awful moments, moments of profound uncertainty, worry and fear.
More than once this year I have been afraid in a way that touched me at my core, tapping into an existential fear for my own safety, the safety of my neighbors, my comrades, even the safety of my own children. As a trans person and the parent of two nonbinary kids, it has been personally distressing.
Virulent government policies are polarizing our relationships, threatening our communities and inspiring targeted political violence. My fears were further confirmed on Sunday when M. Gessen published an oped in which he wrote, “the feeling that I am on borrowed time in my own home is a familiar one.” The parallels he draws to Hitler’s Germany and Putin’s Russia are disturbing. Each escalated arrest, abduction, attack and assasination, brings threats of further repression and I have grown more afraid for our collective safety and well being.
And I know I am not alone in it. It has become a nearly routine part of spiritual care for KT members to share with me their need for a back up plan, an exit strategy, attempts to secure citizenship elsewhere, to rematriate to the country their parents, grandparents or even great grandparents once fled. For many of us, it is difficult to know where historical trauma ends and contemporary concerns begin.
We are living through the rise of authoritarianism world-wide and many of us are experiencing what Cory Robin describes as “political fear.” Unfortunately I don’t think our fears are unwarranted. [2]
So this year in particular, when I say welcome to the Yamim Noraim, The Days of Awe, what I really mean is welcome to The Days of Fear and Awe. The word norah contains this dual meaning, awe and fear, which is what I want to explore today.
--
As Rosh Hashanah was approaching, I became aware of my own need for comfort, and my desire to offer each of you comfort; for the melodies and the prayers to soothe our souls. I began to understand this as the goal of our gathering this year.
But how does that square with the terrifying imagery in the machzor? Or with the central message of the high holidays as articulated by my teacher Rabbi Alan Lew of blessed memory, “This is real and you are completely unprepared”?. That’s not very comforting.
In the prayer Unetane Tokef, one of the central prayers of the Musaf liturgy on both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we are depicted as trembling before God as we acknowledge the awesome power and fear-instilling nature of these days that determine our fate for the year to come.
Together I want to ask: What is the role of fear in our liturgy and in our lives?
When is it helpful? When is it harmful?
And, why do we begin the year afraid?
--
Classically speaking, Rosh Hashanah is known as Yom HaDin, Judgment Day. The book of life is open before us. We are meant to imagine our lives as hanging in the balance, the Holy One considering our worth, like a shepherd inspects her flock, which to keep and which to send to the slaughter. We are here to prove ourselves worthy. This is truly terrifying.
But that is not at all how I imagine this day.
–
In his final book, Be Still, Get Going, Rabbi Alan Lew, notes, “The English word “fear” (like the words “pain” and “suffering”) is quite imprecise and really denotes a complex variety of feelings. There are two Hebrew words for fear – pachad and norah – and although these words are often used interchangeably, they roughly correspond to two very different spiritual states” (116).
Pachad comes from the root peh chet dalet,
meaning terror or dread.
It most often describes fear of something external.
Whereas the word Nora comes from the root י–ר–א and it means both to revere and to fear. It’s a complicated spiritual concept that I plan to explore a bit later. But it’s helpful to know that I will be using norah and yirah somewhat interchangeably, which makes more sense in Hebrew than in English.
Spiritually and semantically, pachad is most closely identified with our mythic ancestor Isaac. Genesis 31 refers to “pachad yitzhak”, an epithet referring to the fear and trauma of his youth, drawing us back to the story of the Binding of Isaac, which we will read tomorrow morning. The rabbinic imagination picks up on this attribution and it persists. [3]
We even sang of it at Selichot in the piyyut Aneinu:
עֲנֵנוּ וּפַחַד יִצְחָק עֲנֵנוּ.
Aneinu ufachad Yitzchak aneinu.
--
To understand pachad, we must recall pachad yitzhak.
Quoting from Genesis 22,
וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יִצְחָ֜ק אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֤ם אָבִיו֙
וַיֹּ֣אמֶר אָבִ֔י
וַיֹּ֖אמֶר הִנֶּ֣נִּֽי בְנִ֑י
וַיֹּ֗אמֶר הִנֵּ֤ה הָאֵשׁ֙ וְהָ֣עֵצִ֔ים וְאַיֵּ֥ה הַשֶּׂ֖ה לְעֹלָֽה׃
Yitzhak said to Avraham his father:
Father!
He said:
Here I am, my son.
He said:
Here are the fire and the wood,
but where is the lamb for the offering-up?
What then is the fear of Isaac?
It is the fear of a child who perceives he is about to be slaughtered at the hand of his own father.
A child who notices there is the making of a sacrifice but no animal to offer.
One midrash attempts to interrupt this story, describing angels hovering above the altar, crying. Their tears fall into Isaac’s eyes to keep him from seeing the knife in his father’s hand.
Pachad is visceral. Terror and dread in your bones. But Pachad also cultivates caution and humility. Fear can keep us from foolishness and danger. For this reason It is terrifying to parent a fearless child.
Certainly Isaac had reason to fear. But if not attended to, the feeling of it persists long after and without awareness we bequeath the trauma of pachad to our descendents.
In his iconic poem ירשה / Inheritance, Haim Gouri writes:
Isaac, as recounted, was not offered up in sacrifice.
He lived a long time,
experienced the good, until the light of his eyes grew dim.
אֲבָל אֶת הַשָּׁעָה הַהִיא הוֹרִישׁ לְצֶאֱצָאָיו.
הֵם נוֹלָדִים
וּמַאֲכֶלֶת בְּלִבָּם.
Nonetheless, that hour he gave to his progeny, an inheritance.
They are born
and a knife is in their heart.
--
We too, as a Jewish community, are wrestling with inherited fear, a knife deep in our history and our hearts. Its origins vary across continents yet the impact is consistent. The repeated claim that Jewish survival justifies, if not depends on, the ongoing Nakba of the Palestinian people is proof that inherited fear, if not attended to, has the power to destroy rather than protect life.
On the topic of fear, some two thousand years ago, the Talmud [4] asks this question:
What is the reason that the Sages prohibited going out with a spiked sandal on Shabbat?
To which they respond with a story:
Rami bar Yehezkel recounts: Once they were sitting in a synagogue, and they heard the sound of a spiked sandal from behind the synagogue. They thought that their enemies had come upon them. They pushed one another, and killed one another in greater numbers than their enemies had killed among them.
This story gives new meaning to the adage “kill or be killed.”
Feeling vulnerable and afraid, those gathered in the synagogue killed their own before their perceived enemies could get to them. Oy.
The threat of our adversaries may be real or perceived, and we may never know which.
But the threat our fear poses to our own souls is undoubtedly real and even more dangerous.
It occurs to me how vulnerable we are, sitting here together as a Jewish community in a synagogue of sorts. How vulnerable we are as a Jewish community world wide, gathered in synagogues across the globe. How tempted we might be to turn on each other, mis-identifying one another as the cause of our fears. How natural the instinct to try to protect ourselves, and how prone that defense mechanism is to cause harm.
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Rebbe Nachman is famous for having said that the whole entire world is a very narrow bridge. And the important thing is not to be afraid, lo l’fached clal. There’s that word pachad again.
The saying is iconic.
But it is not entirely accurate.
It is true that he conceived of the world in tenuous terms. But what Rebbe Nachman actually said was, “Kol HaOlam Kulo, The whole entire world, gesher tzar me’od, is a very narrow bridge…And the most important thing is not to make ourselves afraid - lo l’hitpached clal - to not cultivate pachad in our hearts. The popular lyrics skirt his true wisdom here.
This is what I believe the tale of the spiked sandal also cautions against. The people gathered in the synagogue hearing a spiked sandal allowed terror to overtake them. In the face of fear they did not have the courage to protect life.
And that is precisely what we need today: The courage to protect life.
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But how do we cultivate the courage to protect life when we are afraid?
I think the answer lies in the second Hebrew word we have for fear, norah - and more specifically in the idea of Yirat HaShammayim - Divine reverence – which grows from norah.
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If we learn about pachad from Yitzhak, from whom can we learn about nora or yirah?
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In my effort to really understand Yirat HaShammayim, I looked to the very first chapter in Exodus which reads:
The king of ancient Egypt said to the midwives: When you attend the births of the Hebrew women, look (u’rei-ten) at the birth stool. If it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live. The midwives, feared God in awe (va-tir-ena hameyaldot et haElohim / וַתִּירֶאןָ הַמְיַלְּדֹת אֶת־הָאֱלֹהִים) and they did not do as the king of Egypt had told them. They let the boys live (Exodus 1: 16-17).
In the Torah, the midwives are our defiant heroes, quite literally on the frontlines preventing the genocide of the Hebrews in ancient Egypt/mitzrayim. What I never noticed before is that it explicitly says that it is because of their Yirat Hashem, reverence for the Divine, that they were able to defy Pharaoh. Which is to say, their fear and awe of heaven was stronger than their fear of Pharoah.
One contemporary feminist midrash, from a collection called Dirshuni, zooms in on this moment and asks precisely the question I am asking these days - How can I get that kind of faith?
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Here I am directly quoting the midrash written by Orna Peltz:
“The midwives were asked: Where did you get your fearful awe of God?
To which they answered:
From the great and deep things that we saw at the birth stool,
from the mystery that embraces us morning and evening:
human being after human being coming into the world;
where does each one come from and what do they each bring with them?
The goodness that a [parent] sees in their child, the compassion and the love that awakens,
crying babies bursting forth from exhausted bodies,
and the soft seal of God’s finger imprinted on their faces.”
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For the midwives, the experience of attending births was the source of their Yirah. The magic and intensity of these life and death moments, the courage to defy the decree of a King of flesh and blood was possible because of their deep reverence for the Source of Life.
To the many midwives, doulas, and birth workers in our community - know that I feel awe in your presence, for your courage to witness human being after human being coming into the world. You bring goodness and compassion into our world. [5]
But what about the rest of us? From where might we learn yirah?
The midrash continues, “They challenged the midwives:
But didn’t it happen at Sinai? As it says in Exodus:
“All the people saw (ro-im) the thunder and the lightning and the voice of the Shofar and the smoking mountain and the people saw it and trembled and stood far off … and Moshe said to the people do not fear (al ti-ru), for God has come to test you, to keep the fearful awe of God (yir-a-to) before you so that you will not transgress” (Exodus 20: 15-17).
From here we are meant to learn that the fearful awe of God comes from the place of thunder and lightning!”
From the shammayim, the heavens itself.
Reading this was more than resonant. Having experienced my share of thunder and lightning this summer, I was in fact full of fear and awe, but had not considered that it was a pathway to the Divine.
This past July my family was camping and got caught in an epic thunderstorm, just days after the tragic flood at Camp Mystic in Texas. In the middle of the night I woke to raging thunder and lightning. The rain was whipping. The sky looked like a strobe show, flashing, booming, pounding. Despite the still dry tent, I was beginning to worry. Were we safe? Might a tree fall on our tent? Could there be an electrical fire?
It was so loud it woke up our kids, who were also scared. After a particularly loud and close crack, we decided to get in the car. Once in the car we drove around trying not to panic, barely able to see the dark forest road in front of us. For a while we parked in an empty lot far from any trees, considered our options and finally got back in our tent. The storm went on for another hour - lightning popping off incessantly. I was terrified. The lightning struck so close, I could feel it in my chest. More than once I recited the shema.
I thought of the book of psalms, (77:19)
ק֤וֹל רַעַמְךָ֨ ׀ בַּגַּלְגַּ֗ל הֵאִ֣ירוּ בְרָקִ֣ים תֵּבֵ֑ל רָגְזָ֖ה וַתִּרְעַ֣שׁ הָאָֽרֶץ׃
Your thunder rumbled like wheels;
lightning lit up the world;
the earth quaked and trembled.
Laying in my tent, I thought of the families in Gaza trying to sleep in their tents, the most vulnerable of shelters. Knowing they too were experiencing a storm of explosions, but theirs undoubtedly deadly, each night not knowing if they will wake to their home in rubble, or wake at all. How can one sleep with so much fear?
Laying in my tent, I thought of the immigrant families here in Philly, and around the country, afraid to close their eyes, leave their homes, go to school or work; who fear at any moment ICE may steal them from their lives. How can one sleep with so much fear?
Laying in my tent, unable to sleep, I was plagued with fear. Political fear and Divine fear. I went through my litany of fears. It was all mixed together.
I eventually fell back asleep, shaken and scared, grateful for tiredness to overwhelm my nervous system. I couldn’t wait to see the light of a clear blue morning.
It was not until I found this midrash that I understood why the thunderstorm scared me so deeply.
The midrash continues with the midwives explaining why for them it was by attending births rather than the experience of Sinai that taught them Yirah:
They explain: “There is fearful awe (yir-a) that comes from external seeing (re-i-ya) and there is fearful awe that comes from internal vision; A person can be frozen in terror, witnessing a supernatural miracle, which awakens and strengthens her sense of fearful awe.
But for us, the Midwives continue, it doesn’t work like that.
Our fearful awe is “not in the heavens” (Devarim 30:12). Lo va’shammayim hi.
Our fearful awe of God arises precisely from within nature, from within the pain of what we witness on the birth stool.
In the midrash, the midwives conclude, “From there we learn to choose what is good, to protect life, to fight against death and to resist evil.”
Pharaoh instructed the midwives to surveil the birthstool. The midwives took Pharoah’s instruction seriously, they looked closely at the birthing stool and what they saw was the miracle and wonder of creation which connected them to the Source of Life. And after that, Pharaoh’s majesty and power looked a little shabbier, and a little easier to resist.
This is how yirah arises.
When we are deeply present, and deeply connected and aware of our modest place in the vastness of creation, there is an openness, a vulnerability and a willingness that leads to an awesome fearful sensation, and that is yirah. It is the knowing that we are part of the Ineffable.
It almost always brings me to tears.
I think the midwives were able to access yirah at the birthstool because they had moral clarity and deep purpose. And their yirah empowered them “to protect life, to fight against death and to resist evil.” Which is what we each need in these awful times.
Right now there is a lot to be afraid of.
I can’t pretend to know all of what you are each facing but I do know what we are all facing.
It would be nice if I could easily recount to you all the ways I regularly access yirah, the fullness of awe.
But the truth is that its actually hard to access, and particularly hard to experience alone and in our daily lives.
Certainly I have felt it this year.
Sitting with Shosh’s grandmother in her final moments.
Everytime I place a baby in the Torah.
Protesting the siege in Gaza with 1000 strong.
That summer thunderstorm.
When I learned that one Kol Tzedek member was anonymously donating an organ to save another’s life.
I know for sure I felt it at Selichot last Saturday night.
But since I am not a midwife, the moments are infrequent.
Which is precisely why we have the Yamim Noraim.
And why the liturgy deals so explicitly with questions of life and death, because it calls us to attention.
Once a year we get to cultivate yirah together, so we can return to it when we need it most, when we are most afraid.
These 10 days are an invitation to immerse in yirah, they are a much-needed booster shot, a well we are digging so it can sustain us all year long.
Because yirah is more accessible when we are together. And the rituals of the Yamim Noraim are designed to cultivate yirah. So lean into them. Let the hours of prayer make you delirious til you can’t tell the difference between awesome and awful, terrifying and terrific, judgment and compassion.
Lean into the melodies and the rituals so that you can recall the feeling throughout the year when you need it most.
A few years ago, RB Brown and the KT board actually bottled the magic of the Days of Awe by placing a bowl of water under the ark and then making it into an essence they gifted to me and Rabbi Mó - It was the the most thoughtful and incredible surprise: a little tincture full of Yirah. Every shabbat we would squeeze a drop in our mouths to get a little boost. It really did help.
Yirah, Norah, the Yamim Noraim come once a year to fill us with reverence, to reconnect us to our Source, to metabolize our fears, and to encourage our righteous defiance in the face of injustice. [6]
This is why I think we are here.
And why we begin the year afraid.
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Hayom Harat Olam - today the world is conceived anew.
We are the midwives of this new year.
We are attending our own rebirth.
That is the gift that Rosh Hashanah offers each of us, every year.
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May the old year and her curses resolve
May the new year and her blessings begin.
Hazak hazak v’nithazek - courage, courage, grant us courage.
Footnotes
[1] With gratitude to my writing coach Jon Argaman, my hevruta Rabbi Mónica Gomery, Rabbi Avi Strausberg for sharing so many of these sources with me, Abby McCartney and Shosh Ruskin for editing earlier drafts, and Sam Shain for prompting me to consider talking about awe in the first place.
[2] According to Corey Robin, “Political fear is thought to be a species of terror.” His inquiry largely surrounds the war on terror that arose in response to the attacks on 9/11. But reading his book clarified for me how the war on terror and the rise of Islamophobia reorganized power in America and set us up for this moment. Robin concludes his introduction by foreshadowing the political reality we are experiencing: “For one day, the war on terrorism will come to an end. All wars do. And when it does, we will find ourselves still living in fear: not of terrorism or radical Islam, but of the domestic rulers that fear has left behind” (Fear, 25).
[3] There is even entire compilations of hasidic teachings called Pachad Yitzhak, the magnum opus of Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner, a 20th century Orthodox American rabbi, born in Warsaw in 1906.
[4] Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 60a
[5] I dedicate this sermon to the birthworkers in Gaza, who continue to risk their lives to attend births in unbearable circumstances.
[6] Rabbi Shai Held writes#, “Courage, it seems to me, is not fearlessness but rather a refusal to be governed by our fears. The beginning of courage is to admit that we are afraid and at the same time to recall that fear is only one factor in our decision-making—and not the most decisive one.”