Sacred Fear
Rosh HaShanah morning, 5780/2019
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Earlier this year my teacher died.
I met Rabbi Richard Levy forty years ago, when I was a first year rabbinic student, twenty-two years old, looking for a role model. Setting out on this “rabbi’s path,” I was searching for a trustworthy guide, someone with intelligence, and warmth and a moral compass, who had an authentic relationship with Torah and with God. I was looking for someone who was not faking it.
For me finding the right teacher was as important as finding the right person to marry. Just as I don’t know what I would have done if I had not found Marian, I cannot imagine my life if I had not met Richard Levy.
Richard shaped my thinking about Torah. His first premise was that our distant ancestors... thousands of years ago, were basically just like us. Granted, they could never have imagined our new technologies. Modern medicine. Microprocessors, genetic engineering. The internet. But in their everyday thoughts and feelings, their basic needs and desires, their loves and fears, their anger, their laughter, their anxieties and their jealousies....our ancient ancestors were just like us. Not because they were Jews, but because they were human beings. Just like us. Just like all human beings, sons and daughters of Adam and Eve. The Human Family.
Richard taught me to ask about the human experience in every verse of the Torah. All of it. When those human beings, who were not different from us, offered prayer and sacrifice, what was their experience? What is the human meaning of holiness? When Abraham or Moses heard the voice of God, what did they hear? And even those weird passages about purity and impurity, blood, and skin diseases and bodily emissions. They’re gross! But what do they reveal to us our human condition? Just ask any nurse or doctor, or preschool teacher or parent of a toddler. Our humanity is exquisitely bound up with our skin and flesh and bodily fluids. Richard taught me to be especially interested in the passages that bother us. Why do they bother us? If the Torah makes us wince or shudder....then it has touched us. Something mysterious but undeniable has happened, between us and the text and the people who three thousand years ago first spoke and wrote those words.
Richard taught me: the entire Torah is holy. An infinite source of wonder and horror and beauty and wisdom. Never to be simply accepted and blindly obeyed, but never ever to be dismissed as obsolete or irrelevant. From Rabbi Richard Levy, I learned that a modern Jew can hear the Torah as the voice of God.
He brought the same basic approach to understanding our Jewish holy days.
In seeking the deep human meaning of Rosh Hashanah, Richard focused on the word yirah, which is sometimes translated “awe,” but really means “fear.” Richard explained that yirah is the emotion we feel standing on the rim of the Grand Canyon. It is breathtakingly beautiful, and if you take one wrong step it will kill you. I think that is why I love hiking in the Sierras; it’s the experience of “yirah.” I would call it sacred fear. In my experience, many modern Jewish teachers talk about love. But only Richard Levy taught us about sacred fear.
In a few minutes, we will hear the cry of the shofar. It is a wordless cry, with infinite meanings. There have been over the centuries dozens and dozens of commentaries about what the voice of the shofar should make us think of: The trumpets that blow when a monarch is crowned. The shofar that blew at Mount Sinai. It reminds us of the shofar that blew in the ancient Temple. Sarah’s cries when she heard what Abraham had almost done to her son. The ram that Abraham sacrificed instead of his son. The battle horns that blew during the destruction of Jerusalem. The shofar that will announce the coming of the Messiah.
Nearly all of the teachings about the shofar see it as a reminder of important stories or historical moments, past or future, that are part of Rosh Hashanah. But one teaching about the meaning of the shofar is different. Saadiah Gaon in the 10th century offered a list of ten meanings of the shofar, and one of his list is nota reminder, not an idea, not a story....but a physical, visceral experience. Meaning #7 says Sa’adiah is: “when we hear the sound of the shofar, we are terrified and we tremble and we are broken before the Creator, because the very nature of the shofar is to instill fear.”
This is the kind of meaning that Richard Levy taught me to watch for. In the ancient Near East, all the way back to prehistoric times, the sound of the ram’s horn served as an air raid siren, an early warning system. Way back before the beginnings of Judaism. For tens of thousands of years the cry of the ram’s horn would be a warning of approaching danger. Rabbi Brenner, would you please demonstrate what the shofar might have sounded like in a Near Eastern village ten thousand years ago? Over thousands of years, our bodies...our hearts, our blood and our vital organs...were conditioned to fear that sound. Physical, visceral fear is the primal, deep human meaning of the shofar, transcending time and culture.
It may go even further back than that. A biologist friend, the son of a rabbi, once suggested to me that our physical response to the shofar might be encoded in our DNA...reaching back beyond the dawn of humanity. Are we not descended directly from primate ancestors who for millions of years would scream a cry of warning in the forest to alert their tribe to approaching danger. (Should I do it? It is shocking!) Is the shofar an echo of that scream in the forest? I cannot imagine a more powerful way of hearing the voice of the shofar, and of understanding this day of the blowing of the shofar...which, by the way, is the way the Torah refers to this day. The Torah never calls it Rosh HaShanah, but “the day of the blowing of the horn.” This Day of the Blowing of the Horn is at its heart about our deep, primal, human and maybe even pre-human emotion of fear. Sacred fear.
The great prayer of this day begins Unetaneh tokef kedushat hayom, ki hu nora v’ayom, which means: “We acknowledge the powerful holiness of this day, for it is frightening and terrifying..... This was Richard’s insight into Rosh Hashanah: today we open ourselves to fear. We exalt fear. Why would we do that? Don’t we already have enough fear in our lives?
One important answer comes from a 19th century Romanian rabbi known as MaLBIM. MaLBIM had a view of the evolution of religions. Early religions, he says, believed in multiple gods. They believed in one god who caused good and in another god who caused evil, because they could not imagine that the good in the world and the evil could both come from a single source. Naturally, they loved the god who caused good and they feared the god who caused evil. Our Jewish religion, says MaLBIM, was the first to teach that there is only one God, who causes everything....both good and evil. And this is why the Torah instructs us to both love and fear God. A full, complete relationship with the true God, says MaLBIM, requires both love and fear.
This, I think, is why Richard Levy emphasized so urgently the importance of balancing our love of God with sacred fear. Richard demanded a religion that feels completely true. Completely honest. Not just the warm and fuzzy side of God, the loveable side of the Creator....but also the God that we experience as cruel, the source of suffering, and the unbearable dimensions of our lives. Today we confront everything we know about God.
Sacred fear permeates this day. The unetaneh tokef contains the most profound teaching of this season: we have no idea what this year will bring. It may be a year of life, of health and blessing. We hope so, we pray for that! Please, let it be!.... But the truth is we don’t know. It is equally possible that this New Year may bring tragedy and heartbreak. On any ordinary day at this point I would add a fervent “God forbid. Ken ahora. Poo poo poo. No evil eye.” But today is not an ordinary day. We just read B’rosh Hashanah yikateivu...On Rosh Hashanah it is written, who will live and who will die. We have reason to be afraid. If we are not afraid, we are in denial. On Rosh Hashanah, we come together as a community, to honestly face the reality....and to allow ourselves to feel the fear. The shofar, prehistoric air raid siren, pre-human primal scream of warning helps us to fully awaken and experience our fear.
Thankfully, that is not the end of the story. My sister, by the way, teaches rabbis. She herself is a rabbi, and she teaches them that they must always end a sermon with good news! So...here is the good news. The unetaneh tokef prayer, and Rosh Hashanah, do not end with fear. It takes us there....and then from that place of total truth, the prayer goes on to say: There are three things that can help. They will not prevent suffering, they cannot shield us from loss. But they can help us bear it: Three Jewish medicines:
o T’shuvah—a return to Judaism and community
o T’fillah—prayer to God
o Tzedakah—acting to help another human being in their suffering
These three constitute Rosh Hashanah’s therapeutic response to the frightening truth of our fragility. None of them is truly compelling unless and until we experience, in our bodies the sacred fear engendered by this awesome and terrifying day. Then these three Jewish acts do begin to feel necessary. Teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah. Through these sacred acts, we may find ourselves strengthened and encouraged to face the unknown future, and to live in a full and honest relationship with the true God.
One last word about my beloved teacher, Rabbi Richard Levy, who taught me.... and thousands of others....about an honest and passionate relationship with Torah. Like Moses, Richard had a stutter. By the time I met him, he had learned to control it most of the time. But every once in a while, without warning, he would stammer and struggle to speak a word. I never discussed it with him, but to me Richard’s speech impediment...like Moses’...seemed to arise out of a deep, mysterious, sacred fear, a fear rooted in his very real, deeply personal, loving, fearful and completely honest relationship with God.
I miss my teacher Richard every day, and I am honored to share his Torah with all of you on this Rosh Hashanah. May you and your loved ones be inscribed in the Book of Life for a good, sweet, healthy new year.