How to Fear…Jewishly

Kol Nidre Sermon 2022/5783

By Rabbi Mark Glickman

It had taken several months for me to call Mike, but I liked him, and I missed him, and, frankly, I was kind of exasperated with him, so I finally decided to pick up the phone. We exchanged the usual pleasantries, and finally I got to the point. “Mike, we miss you around here,” I said. “What’s it going to take to get you to come back to services?”

“Rabbi, I’d love to come back,” Mike replied, “but I’m just not ready yet.”

“What do you mean, you’re ‘not ready’?”

I could hear him roll his eyes over the phone. Clearly, I wasn’t the first person with whom he’d had this discussion. “You know what I mean, rabbi. I’m still scared of this virus.”

I tried to be quiet, and I tried to be sensitive to his fears, but I think Mike could hear me roll my eyes, too. I caught myself, and instead tried to be kind and logical. “Look,” I said, “schools are open, workplaces are open, virus numbers are way down, you can wear a mask when you come. What more do you need?!”

“The virus numbers were up this week, rabbi!” In reality, they had ticked up lately, but they were way down from the peak. It was just enough to turn the truth into something messy. “And even if they weren’t up,” Mike continued, “I still don’t think I’d be ready to come back. Rabbi, I’m just so scared of getting sick.”

I could hear the fear in his voice. It was real. Before the pandemic, Mike had been so connected here – he came every week. But now, being in the physical presence of other human beings had become not something to look forward to, but something to dread. It was important that I be sensitive to that.

At the same time, I hoped he could hear me, too. For most of us, the virus had become far less dangerous than it once was. The world was reopening, and people were reconnecting. Sure, there was still a risk of getting sick, but there would always be risk, and our job now is not to avoid risk altogether, but to learn how to live with it. That’s because we need each other – we need to sit with each other, to see each other, to shake one another’s hands and maybe even to hug one another – it was important for us to be able to regather.

And that was precisely the problem. Temple had reopened, but many of the the seats remained empty during services (or at least many more than had been empty before the pandemic). Our community needs one another; we need our Mikes to come back, as well as our Judies and our Davids and our Sarahs and everyone else.

But Mike’s fear was real. And I cared about the guy. How could I be present with him, and also get him back to Temple?

Mike wasn’t alone in being afraid. And he’s far from the first person ever to feel that way. Fear, as you know, is an age-old human emotion. It dates back millennia, to the first person ever to watch their buddy get eaten by a lion. Sometimes, fear can be healthy, like when it inspires us to run away from large, man-eating cats. Fear can make us prudent. It can inspire us to get vaccines, and avoid dark alleys, and stop smoking. But fear, as we also know, can paralyze us. Some people are so scared of the unknown that they stay in soul-killing jobs rather than exploring newer and better paths. Others are afraid of germs, a phobia that, when severe, can be downright debilitating.

Personally, I’m terrified of snakes. And once, when we lived in Washington State, I was weeding around a shed we had in the backyard, when, suddenly, out slithered a garter snake that must have been…[hold arms wide] six inches long. And in response…well let’s just say that that was the last time I ever pulled a weed out from around that shed.

In Hebrew there are two words for fear – pachad and yir’ah – and I think that understanding them might help Mike and me come to a meeting of the minds.

The first of those two words – pachad – could also be translated as terror. It’s what you feel when you round the bend and find a growling bear waiting for you on the other side. It’s what soldiers feel when they’re surrounded by a vicious enemy and realize that the battle is lost. It’s what all those people in monster movies felt when running away at hyper-speed to avoid getting squashed by Godzilla.

Yir’ah, on the other hand, is different. Yir’ah also means fear, but’s it’s often translated as awe. And usually, it’s a good thing. A Jew, for example, is supposed to live life with a sense of yir’at shamayim – a fear of God, an awe of God, a feeling of veneration for God. Unlike, pachad, yir’ah isn’t terror. Instead, it’s wonder. It’s respect. It’s reverence. This is the kind of fear that reminds us that awful and awesome ultimately mean the same thing. When we feel yir’ah, we live with awe. Yir’ah doesn’t make us flee from lions; it makes us appreciate their beauty and majesty, instead. It doesn’t make us afraid of heights, it puts us in awe of them. It doesn’t make us fear things that go bump in the night, it makes us grateful for the mysteries enfolded in each night’s darkness. Yir’ah is the kind of fear that makes us feel small and large all at the same time.

Pachad and yir’ah – each is a type of fear, each is a genuinely human feeling, and each leads to radically different responses. Pachad paralyzes us, yir’ah inspires us. People feeling pachad for others become suspicious of them, and often demonize them; people feeling yir’ah for others appreciate them and feel compassion for them, even though those other people are so different and so puzzling…and sometimes because of it. Pachad makes us run; yir’ah makes us stop and think, with our hearts racing and our jaws agape in wonder. In the short term, pachad is essential, because can save our lives. In the long term, yir’ah is equally important, because can save our souls.

A neurologist might tell us that pachad comes from our amygdala – our inner brain, our lizard brain, whereas yir’ah comes from our cerebral cortex. I might suggest that yir’ah also comes from our heart – the source of our spirit – and that our ability to feel it is one of our most profoundly human traits.

For much of the pandemic, it was pachad that saved us. When it hit, we had to lock down, and we had to do it quick. And if we didn’t run away from the monster, it would have destroyed us. Of course, there were moments of yir’ah early on, too, as we reached out to others, and tried to show kindness from amidst the fear. Still, in the early days of a pandemic, it’s pachad that ultimately saved the day.

That day has come, and that day is gone. The pandemic still attacks, and it is still a threat, but it is no longer the threat that it once was. As a result, we have a little breathing room. We can determine how to be careful, and how to live with our fear. We can act out of a desire to preserve life, but also out of a desire to enrich it. We can move from pachad to yir’ah.

The great sage, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, perhaps said it best when he argued that fear is the anticipation of pain, whereas awe is hopeful and entails the anticipation of good. You’ve experienced both of these even during the pandemic. We all have. The virus terrified us, and to avoid letting it destroy us, we responded with caution and intelligence. Not to have done so would have made things horrible. And you’ve also seen goodness during these past few years. People reaching out in care and love; scientists doing amazing work to protect us; the transformation that can come from sitting quietly at home more than we can in normal times. These are good things, and when we respond with awe to difficulties, this is what we can experience.

To be clear, I’m not saying that we should throw all of our Covid concerns to the wind. What I am saying is that the time has come to respond to its threat not as if it was a lion waiting to pounce on us, but simply as an illness we can get if we’re not careful. It’s essential that we continue to take sensible precautions, but now we can take other factors into account, as well – our need to sit with others, the importance of community, the reality that life always entails risk, and a life fully lived doesn’t reject risk, but manages it, instead.

Mike, if you’re listening to my words tonight, I assume you’re doing so online. Wherever you are, I want you to know that we understand that you’re afraid, but we miss you. And we are incomplete without you. And we hope you come back soon, because without you sitting here, our community remains incomplete. My hope for you is that, with wisdom, courage, and every necessary precaution, you can transition from the necessary responses of pachad fear, to the reverent mode of awesome fear – yir’ah

These are complicated days, and they demand that we make difficult decisions. As we do, may we be motivated by the sanctity of human life, our need for human connection, and courage to do what we must despite the risks that those activities entail. And may the fear we all experience lead us to the safety we need to lay pachad aside and live with awe – yir’ah – for all that is good and holy in our magnificent world.

Shanah Tovah.