And None Shall Make Them Afraid

Rabbi Melanie Aron

Erev Rosh Hashanah 5765
September 15, 2004

As Linda mentioned earlier, there’s something very special about Erev Rosh Hashanah. Before services start, there’s a particular excitement- not so different from the buzz before opening night at the theater. It’s like a family reunion, seeing people you haven’t seen for a while. Last year’s Bar Mitzvah boys seem to have shot up a foot, and those in the know can distinguish between the 20 something’s friend who’s come for the holiday and the friend who has come for the holiday. We look in one direction and brush a tear from our eyes, remembering someone who is not in their regular seat tonight. We look the other way, and have to smile: my youngest is now in double digits, and without any small children at home, all the little ones look so delicious.

The service cooperates with the festive mood. While the Avinu Malkeinu introduces the holiday themes, on the whole the prayers for Rosh Hashanah eve are upbeat and celebratory. Tomorrow morning we will struggle theologically with the image of God determining “who shall live and who shall die”. On Yom Kippur we will recite over and again the litanies of our sins and misdeeds, but tonight, it is more like Nehemiah’s version of the High Holidays: ” Eat fatty foods and sweets,” he tells the people “don’t worry and celebrate.” ( really that’s what he says- you can look it up in Chapter 8 of Nehemiah).

And yet, we know we are here for something more than schmoozing, more than a chance to see and be seen. We are hoping to gain some understanding, some perspective. Believing in God, or not believing, still we want a touch of something holy, to have some of that transcendence brush off on us. We want to leave here tonight, feeling different, better, special. We want to know that we are part of a long chain of tradition, and that tradition will help us with the problems we face today. We want Judaism to say something about what’s really going on in our lives and our society.

So let’s start with something which is on everyone’s mind, the upcoming election ( you didn’t really think I wasn’t going to talk about it). The upcoming presidential election seems to me, to be stirring up more passion among members of our congregation, than any other election in my 14 years here. I don’t think its entirely because of the war; there are lots of domestic issues that have people riled up as well, but certainly part of it is the sense that we are living in a different world now, than we did three years and four days ago.

Commentators on both left and right have predicted that fear will be a major factor in this election. They say that the electorate is fearful and that influences what people are looking for in a candidate. To a large extent, the President is presenting the upcoming presidential election as being about security, with repeated reference to the events of September 11th and the ongoing terrorist threat. So let’s talk then about fear and see what Judaism has to say.

Who is afraid in the Bible? Though we are not told this directly, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob must have been afraid. God speaks to each one of them saying, Al tira, Do not fear.

God says this to Abraham just after he has been involved in a battle to free his nephew Lot who was taken captive. You might have thought Abraham was worried about reprisals from those he defeated, but from God’s remarks, we find that he is more afraid of dying childless and leaving no mark on posterity.

God speaks to Isaac also after some troubles with his neighbors, this time with the shepherds of Gerar who stop up his wells. God tells Isaac not to be afraid, and Isaac goes on to negotiate a treaty with Abimelech, a mutual non-aggression pact.

As a young man Jacob is afraid of his brother Esau who has threatened to kill him, and he runs away, but it is as an old man that God comes to him and says, fear not. Jacob is afraid to go down to Egypt to be reunited with his beloved son Joseph. God has to encourage him and say, don’t be afraid. Its true there’ll be hardship and pain in Egypt, but your descendents will get through it. As a modern Israeli would say, yehiye tov, In the end it will be ok.

Who is not afraid in the Bible? Daniel is defiantly not afraid. Alone or with his friends he exudes confidence. The Emperor worries about him, but Daniel himself is not concerned. Daniel’s enemies have manipulated the Emperor into putting Daniel to the test by throwing him into the fire, but Daniel is calm. Even more than David, the reputed author of the psalms, Daniel seems to live the words, “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not fear.” Scholars wonder if he isn’t a projection of later generations, a vision of how they wish they could behave in facing Antiochus’s persecution.

Mostly, though, the Torah is concerned about our being afraid of the wrong things.

I’m reminded of the year after 9-11, when many people were afraid of getting on planes. Enough people became afraid in fact, that highway driving increased noticeably as did your chances of dying in a car accident.

The Prophets, the great prophets of the Hebrew Bible, Amos and Micah and Isaiah, rant and rave about the people being afraid of the wrong things. The people are focused on the Assyrians and the Babylonians, their external enemies, while the prophets preach that they should be afraid of the injustice within their own society. They should be fearful of their own wrongdoing and the destruction it will ultimately bring about.

Psychologists explain that terrorism is so frightening because it forces us to confront a reality we try to evade throughout our lives, that is that we are mortal and could die at any moment. When we first realize this at seven, or ten or twelve years old, it can be quite a shock, but by the time we are adults most of us have learned to defend against that awareness. Terrorism, in the words of the Washington Post, ``penetrates that self-deception in a way that few things can.”

We humans use religion to cope with the awareness of death. Christianity helps people to cope by insisting that death in this world is insignificant as compared with life eternal earned through one’s belief in Jesus as the risen son of God. Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, every great world religion must grapple with death, often trying to minimize its impact, by placing this life in some larger context. Jews believe in the immortality of the soul, giving a greater context to our lives, but because Judaism tends to put stress on life in this world, death remains a reality and not an illusion. Jewish funerals are sad; they are not celebrations. We may smile, even laugh, as memories are recounted, we are thankful for the person we have known and all we have gained from their life, but we don’t pretend that there isn’t loss. For the Jewish tradition, death increases the value of life. Nothing lasts forever, and that is part of what makes each moment so valuable. Since we have no choice but to live with the reality of death, then we are to cherish our loved ones more deeply, live more truly, not put off until tomorrow the mitzvah we can do today.

To some extent I really felt that in Israel, during my sabbatical in 2002. One response to constant terrorism was to give your kids an extra hug and a kiss. Someone told me about being on his cell phone having an argument with his wife, when he heard a series of sirens go by, usually the first sign of a terrorist bombing. He said to himself, what if the bombing had been here… this little quarrel… why should I be so stubborn… would I have wanted my last words to be a petty squabble?

Of course fear is not always so ennobling. Fear is, my psychologist friends remind me, about the reptilian brain. It is about our fight or flight mechanism, which physiologically deprives the brain of oxygen and keeps us from thinking straight. The Baal Shem Tov understood this. He taught, “Fear builds walls to bar the light,” that is why it was so essential not to be afraid.

Fear is what makes it hard for my father’s Egyptian colleague to get to medical meetings on time, since he arouses fear in his fellow travelers as well as airline personnel. Fear effects us in many negative ways. In a psychological experiment in the 1980’s a group of municipal judges were asked to set bail for prisoners in mock criminal cases. Half of the judges were first asked to fill out a questionnaire about their own mortality. Those judges wound up setting much higher bails. Fear reduced their compassion for others. Fear can throw elections, as we saw twice in Israel when bus bombings preceded election day, and just this past year in Spain.

Fear is especially debilitating when it is amorphous. In that regard, consider what we can learn from fiction, in this case from James Bond. I’m not much of a fan, but serious James Bond fans remind me that his enemy was always ” the shadowy international organization SPECTRE, Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, an entity of no fixed address, affiliated with no state, answerable to no constituency, diffuse, elusive, nihilistic, unavailable for negotiation, promiscuously cruel, fueled by hatred, with no comprehensible agenda other than mayhem, destruction and death.“ If we think we live in James Bond’s world, then perhaps we need to take James Bond type measures, and indeed some have argued that this is the case. But when tempted to do so we should think of those ancient Israelites and their prophets. Thinking they would save their skins, the ancient Israelites got into bed with the devil. “We know you advised us against making alliances with the Egyptians and the Amorites,” the people said,” but what could we do, it’s the situation.”

Just after 9-11 there were references to people worrying that their children or grandchildren would ask them someday, what did you do during the war against terrorism ? Being a good Jewish mother, my worries are a bit more extensive.

My youngest, the 10 year old, will be my age in the year 2042- what kind of world will she be living in? Will the United States still be the country we love today, a land of freedom and opportunity? Will the earth still be a place of beauty and bounty? Will Israel be a Jewish homeland of which our prophets could be proud? I’m no more eager to die than the next guy, but I am also concerned about civil liberties and separation of church and state. I am worried about the long term effects of the inequities in our society, where the working poor live lives of desperation, degradation and ill health, while others legally and through deceit reap a disproportionate bounty. As a child I saw Proctor and Gamble forced to clean up the Ohio river into which they had been dumping waste for decades. As a student rabbi, I witnessed the pride of my Pittsburgh congregants, when their city was restored to relatively clean air and water. It pains me to think of Shifrah and her generation bearing the consequences of our current collective poor choices.

Our prayer book has one addition on Rosh Hashanah, which has always struck me as strange and out of keeping with the mood of the service. In the Tefillah, after the first three blessings which are the same as on Shabbat, there is a section included only on the High Holidays. It begins Uvechen ten Pachdechah, And so grant Your Fear. Unlike other places in the Bible and prayer book, the word isn’t reverence, yirah, but really pachad, fear. The rabbis offer their explanation- fear of something great overcomes fear of something small. If we were really God fearing, it would put everything else into perspective.

Now let me clarify that I am not talking about fear of God’s punishment- as Sholom Aleichem said in Yiddish, “There’s a difference between fearing God and being afraid of him”. The Zohar similarly states: “Who fears punishment is not yet endowed with that fear of God which leads to life. He fears the lash not God.”

If our focus was on fear of God, could we better understand like Abraham, that it’s our immortality through our descendents wellbeing which should be our greatest worry? Could we like Isaac, go into negotiations even with those who have done us wrong, and come out with an agreement which gives us what we need and protects us, without shaming and dishonoring our enemy? If our fear was truly of the important things in life, could we hang on to the faith, that Jacob learned, that struggles are part of life, sometimes in fact, the struggle is the prize.

In the Bible there are various non-Israelites who are called God Fearing. The most famous of these people were the two midwives, Shifrah and Puah, who defied the king’s orders to kill the Israelite babies. They were not afraid of Pharoah, because they had a sense of higher values.

To be cursed in the Bible, is to be afraid even of a driven leaf, but when you are blessed, there is no one who can make you fearful. This year we pray bless us God, with the right fears, so that no one can make us afraid.