A version of this sermon was delivered on Kol Nidre at Temple B'nai Torah - A Reform Congregation, Wantagh, NY on Kol Nidre 5784.
The time I spent at glass school this
summer spanned two Shabbats. On both of
them, I made a point to go and pray. There
I was, on Friday night, following a road into the woods, past all the cabins,
looking for a place with a great overlook of the sound below. One thing I neglected to take into account,
unfortunately, is that I was on the West Coast, so unlike our Shabbat on the
beach, I was going to have to pray with my back to the beautiful view. The water is on the wrong side of the land
out there... Luckily, the view of the tall
trees is equally majestic.
So, I found a place. And, having scoped it out in advance, I knew
I had a view of the water below and the skies above. I knew I was surrounded by trees older than
anyone I would ever know, towering into the heavens above. And I also remembered that the mystics in
Sefat would greet Shabbat on a cliff, overlooking the Mediterranean, watching
the sun set, facing west, so I prayed Kabbalat Shabbat facing the water, and
then turned to the east when I got to Barechu.
The spot I picked had light that filtered through it and shone in a
color I had never seen in light before.
An orange, amber glow, soft and ethereal. I stood in that light, deep in prayer, I
basked in God’s creation, and I made my way to the Psalm for Shabbat.
I adjusted my tallit and I continued.
Mizmor
shir l’yom haShabbat, tov l’hodot l’Adonai!
A song, a psalm for the Sabbath day,
it is good to praise Adonai.
I’m in the right place for it. I’ve got the right view.
It’s just me and God, so I’m singing
out fully into the woods, over the cliff, my prayers hovering over the waters
like the primordial spirit of God, making their way to the heavens, and all
around me. If someone had come upon me,
I’m not sure what they would have thought.
But they would have seen me swaying to the rhythms of the prayers from
my heart and soul, my fringes sweeping the underbrush. They would have heard me, passionate and off
pitch, praising God’s creation.
Mah
gadlu ma’asecha Adonai!
How wonderful are your creations,
Adonai!
And finally, I understood the
psalmist. I knew where King David found
the inspiration for these words. I felt
it. I saw myself as ever so small under
these giant, extraordinary trees, and even smaller compared to God and the
universe. I felt the light slipping away
as the Earth turned toward its day of rest.
Tzaddik
katamar yifrach, ke’erez balvanon yisgeh.
The righteous flourish like a palm,
they shall thrive like the cedars of Lebanon.
The last words of the psalm exited my
mouth, and I was still, tall trees towering above and around me. It was quiet.
I took a deep breath. Woah. I was in awe.
I allowed myself to dwell in that moment, to bask in that awe, to let it
wash over me like the amber light of the evening. And soon I felt my face form into a smile,
almost a laugh really, as I was overcome with a sense of the Divine, with a new
understanding of awe.
I gotta tell you. I felt
like the Baal Shem Tov or Nachman of Bratzlav, communing with God in the
woods. It was freeing. It was intimate. It was personal. It was expansive. It was awesome.
We call these the Days of Awe. What do we mean when we say this word? According to Dr. Dacher Keltner at Berkeley,
“Awe is the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends
your current understanding of the world.”[1] Awe is an experience. Awe is about opening up to something
more. On our calendar, these are the Days
of Awe because we are supposed to open ourselves up, especially on Yom Kippur,
to an experience of awe. We are supposed
to open ourselves to God, to possibility, to the community around us. We are supposed to walk away from this 25-hour
fast changed by that awe.
Awe makes us stop and say “woah.”
Literally. A vocal expression of
awe is among the most universally understood sounds. It doesn’t matter where a person is from in
the world, nine out of ten times, they will understand: “oooh,” “ahhh,” “wow,”
and “woah.” Anthropologists and
linguists believe that as early as 100,000 years ago, our ancestors, before
language had even been invented, were declaring their awe with a “woah.”[2] Awe is at the core of what it means to be a
human in this world.
In English, awe comes to
us from the old Norse word agi.[3] This word referred to fear, dread, horror,
and terror. In Hebrew, the origin of the
term awe is similar. We use the word awe to translate the word yirah, which is the same word in
the Bible as fear. Yira gives us the word Norah, like yamim
nora’im, literally the days of awe. We
hear the word in Un’taneh Tokef, which describes the holiness of this
day as awesome and full of dread.
One famous use of this verb we heard at Rosh HaShanah, on
Moriah. When the messenger of God stays
Abraham’s hand, the rationale given is that now God knows that Abraham is “yirei Elohim.”[4] So, which does it mean? Is Abraham afraid of God, or in awe of
God? Well, there’s certainly beauty in
thinking that it can mean both. And on
this day when we come face to face with God’s judgment and God’s mercy, it
makes sense that fear and awe comingle.
We often think of awe as stemming from an encounter with something
big, grand, and overwhelming. It sounds
frightening. The truth is that awe and
fear share similar reactions but are actually not really near each other on the
spectrum of human emotions. Even though
our language often puts fear and awe next to each other, our experiences
don’t. When plotted with other emotional
experiences in a controlled experiment, subjects placed awe closer to
admiration, joy, and aesthetic appreciation and far from fear, horror, and
anxiety.[5]
What’s the difference if at that moment on Moriah Abraham fears God
or is in awe of God? Fear can represent
coercion. Awe implies devotion. If Abraham brought his son to the mountain
out of fear, it means something entirely different than if he did so due to his
awe of God. Abraham’s relationship with
God is one of awe, of being present with something that transcends the
world. And, if that’s Abraham’s
relationship with God, that should be our relationship with God as well, for
Abraham sets the model for us. We are
inheritors of awe!
Awe makes us blurt out an “Amen.” Awe makes us take a beat, take a moment, take
it all in.
What is it that elicits awe? What experiences cause us to have no choice
but to instinctively declare: “Woah!”?
According to Dr. Keltner’s research, there are eight wonders of life
that lead to an experience of awe.
We might think that most people, when
prompted to describe a moment of experiencing awe, would relate something like
the story I began with, a story of beauty in nature, or prayer. But in actuality, the most prevalent source
of awe was what Dr. Keltner describes as moral beauty:[6] experiencing
other people’s courage, kindness, strength, or overcoming. More than anything else, participants
described witnessing another person channeling their better angels. We elicit awe from others when we live lives
of courage, kindness and strength.
A second wonder of life is what Emile
Durkheim called collective effervescence, where we feel like we’re
buzzing or crackling with some life force that merges people into a collective
self, a tribe, an oceanic “we.”[7] Think of the wave at a football game. You see it coming, you anticipate it, and
collectively all around you, so does everyone else. And when the undulating mass of humans makes
its way toward your section, you join in, lift your arms and body and sit back
down. You were a small part in something
much bigger.
Third on this list is nature. The fourth wonder is music. It’s no wonder Taylor Swift concerts have
yielded such a response. The fifth is
visual design. The sixth wonder has to
do with moments of deep spirituality.
The seventh with experiences of life and death, particularly birth
moments and death moments. The last
wonder is the experience of an epiphany.
All of these call us to moments when
we see ourselves as part of something more.
All of these allow us to move away from our ego. To sense more than ourselves. To discover how we fit into that something
more. But awe is not a bingo card to
fill out. It’s not about collecting all
eight to get to awe. It only takes one
moment in any category to feel awe. It
only takes one moment to take our breath away, to give us goosebumps, to wow
us.
All of Yom Kippur, if we allow it to
be, can lead us to these wonders of life.
When we all chant together and beat our chests in unison at our great
acrostic confessional, we feel that collective effervescence. When our friends and family work hard to
atone and to apologize and when we, also, make efforts to overcome our pride
and find contrition: these can be moments of moral beauty for us and others. We gather together in community for
prayer. We intone ancient melodies and
words. We implore God in moments of
spiritual dedication. The music of these
services is grand and powerful. We are
called to consider our lives and come face to face with our mortality. We invoke the memories of those we’ve
lost. We hopefully, by the end of the
day, will come to some realization of who we hope to be in this next year.
This whole day, Yom Kippur, HaYom, The Day, is an exercise in
providing us moments of awe. You may not
blurt out a “woah” after the Vidui. But if you take a moment to appreciate that
hundreds of us here together, millions of Jews around the world, are all coming
together to say these words on this day, the beating on your chest may take on
a different feeling, especially if you open yourself up to it! Our sins may be an alphabet of woe, but our
worship is meant to be an acrostic of wow!
Our ancestors, both ancient and more
recent, put together this day of awe and passed it down to us. And so there must be a point to it. The reason, though, is not awe. Awe is not the end goal. Rather it’s what awe does for us. Among other reactions, awe can make us less
self-centered, ready to see the world differently, and more giving.
In experiments conducted on awe and
its effects, Dr. Keltner discovered that people who had experiences of awe and
were then asked to take a selfie made themselves smaller in the photo than
folks who did not have an awe experience.[8] There was proportionally more background in
the selfies of folks in awe. Awe leads
to a “small self.” People who felt awe
practiced tzimtzum, contraction, a divinely inspired quality of making
space for others. If we make space for
others, we consider their opinion and we may be ready to reconcile.
Awe also undoes what psychologists
call our default self, the part of us which focuses on how we distinguish
ourselves from others, makes us competitive creatures, and helps us to achieve
our goals.[9] Modern society prioritizes this default
self. Awe is here to help us move toward
our more communal natures, to remind us that while the self is important, it’s
not the only thing; we’re part of something more, something greater. Awe leads us to a more interdependent,
collaborative understanding of the world.
More balance. “We sense that we
are part of a chapter in the history of a family, a community, a culture.”[10]
In another experiment, participants were asked to help make paper
cranes[11] for victims
of the 2011 tsunami in Japan. Those who
had an awe-filled experience just before the request stayed longer and made
more cranes than those who did not experience awe. Awe can make us more giving and willing to
offer our time.
It is awe that leads us to teshuvah,
tefillah, and tzedakah. It is awe that can
help us to temper judgment’s severe decree, if only we let it! Our traditions place before us a smorgasbord
of awe on this day: from the Kol Nidre
with its call to the heavenly court, to the reenactment of the service of the
High Priest, to the story of Jonah who survives in the belly of a fish for
three days, to the open aron tomorrow, as the sun is setting, and we rush to
get our prayers in before the gates close and we usher God into the heavens
with the last, long shofar blast. Yom
Kippur is a day of awe whose goal is that we make ourselves smaller, more
communal, and more giving.
Awe makes us see the world differently. Awe allows us to see what we don’t know, and
to realize that we don’t know everything.
An experience of awe can be fleeting.
It’s also true that awe begets awe.
The more awe we experience, the richer it gets.[12] Folks who went on an awe walk once a week
over eight weeks found that their experience of awe increased over time, not
decreased due to repetition as you might expect. Awe begets awe.
Yom Kippur calls us therefore not to a day of awe, or ten, but to a
lifetime of awe! The awe we can feel
over these 25 hours is meant to be taken with us so that we can live a life of
awe. A life where we value others. A life where we see ourselves as part of a
community. A life where we give of
ourselves. A life where we do not
believe we know everything. A life where
we see ourselves not at the center, but as part of something more, connected to
others and to God.
The sun set on my prayer in those Washington woods. The amber light faded. The darkness descended upon me. I took off and folded my tallit and trekked
back to my cabin, reflecting on the experience feeling like I was reflecting
God’s light.
In 23 hours, the sun will set on our Yom Kippur prayers. We’ll fold our tallits; we’ll put away the
red books until next year. But the awe
will stay with us if we let it change us.
Our tradition gives us this day of awe to teach us to live a
lifetime of awe.
G’mar Chatimah Tovah.
