A mother sits down on a park bench and opens her book. After a long day of errands and chores, her kids are finally playing happily in the playground. A mere 5 minutes later, this mother hears a scream from across the playground and immediately recognizes the voice of her youngest daughter. She marches quickly toward the sound of the scream to find the young girl having climbed a tree and terrified to climb down. The child is crying and trembling with fear. The mother speaks to her: “Don’t worry Susie. Soon we’ll be home and you can have some time with your favorite book.” Several other adults gather to help and the mother continues speaking to the girl, apparently trying to calm her. Eventually, after lots of soothing talk, the girl is able to make her way down the tree. One of the other adults who came to help turns to the mother and says, “I’m so impressed by your calm voice.” He then turns to the little girl and says, “Susie, you’re a lucky little girl. You’re mom really knows how to take care of you.” The mother turns to the man and says, “actually, I’m Susie . . . I’m going home now to read my book.”
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I want to ask about fear, the fear of
children and the fear we all experience as we mature. In particular,
there are two Hebrew words for fear: yir’ah
and pachad. Yir’ah is awe, respect, wonder, spiritual
surrender. It comes from the same root as norah, as in Yamim Nora’im
– awesome or terrible, in the classical meaning of that word.
Yir’ah is good stuff: the sense of it helps us locate ourselves in
the cosmos, activate our humility and our gratitude. When we view
the world through yir’ah we acknowledge that we don’t control everything,
in fact, we don’t control much at all, that our very breath is a gift
that can also be taken away. This realization opens our hearts
– it is a version of fear that lifts us up.
Pachad is what we might call irrational
fear, panic. Pachad can be challenging: the sense of it clouds
our ability to see clearly and to make useful responses. When
we view the world through pachad, we may react with anxiety and feel
powerless. One contemporary teacher calls this “the fear we
experience when the yetzer ha-ra feels threatened1 – pachad
is the fear we experience when the yetzer ha-ra feels threatened.”
Let’s unpack that for a moment.
The rabbinic concept of yetzer ha-ra is complicated. Translated
concretely, it means, “the evil inclination.” But this is
an unfortunate translation because it only captures a small piece of
the picture. Rabbi Stone that I mentioned above calls the yetzer
ha ra the “inclination toward the self.”2 The yetzer
ha ra is what powers our motivation to survive as individuals and as
a species – we naturally want to feed, clothe and house ourselves
so that we may live, we naturally want to procreate so that we continue
as a species. The yetzer ha ra has an important place in our internal
geography – we couldn’t live without it. The problem is that,
in its own unique ingenuity, the yetzer ha ra finds ways of expanding
itself beyond its useful size, of relocating itself to more advantageous
places on our psychic map that can be more damaging to our whole self.
So, yes, left untended, it may become the source of evil behavior.
But for most of us, the dangerous inclination has more to do with loss
of perspective than of true evil. Pachad is the sense of personal
fear that comes with a threat to our self-inclination – a threat to
the instinct to protect our personal safety or to our ego. Pachad
is the place where the heart closes.
Our rabbinic ancestors left us vocabulary
for the mind-states that accompany these different levels of fear.
They call those states the small mind and expanded mind, literally mochin
d’katnut (from the Hebrew katan, small) and mochin d’gadlut
(from the Hebrew gadol, great.) When we’re a small mind
state, we are most vulnerable to the negative effects of pachad.
We’re likely to have what our generation of psychologists might call
neurotic thoughts. We’re more likely to feel erroneously hurt
or insulted. We don’t see the big picture. We don’t
feel the eternal connection with the Source of Creation. Likewise,
when we’re in an expanded mind state, we’re likely to access compassion
more easily. We’re likely to see that this moment is but a ripple,
a wink in the march of time. We’re likely to deeply know that
our story is just a thread in an infinite tapestry. It’s a version
of fear that is ironically joyful.
Lest this all come across as overly polarized,
let’s say for sure that pachad has its usefulness. If the house
is on fire, pachad will help you make the right choices and get out
safely. But, most of the time, we aren’t living in a burning
house. With the possible exception of our current environmental
crisis, most of the time, our challenges are more nuanced, more elusive.
The problem is that pachad and its yetzer ha ra vulnerability will also
keep us from expressing our love for those closest to us. Planted
in the fertile soil of the yetzer ha ra, pachad can become a kind of
emotional overachiever causing us to lose connection in the moments
we need it most. Yir’ah, on the other hand, is Divinely-inspired
fear. Activated in us, it helps us to open our hearts, to deeply
appreciate and tend to our connections.
On Yom Kippur we talk about repairing
connections between ourselves and God on one channel and between ourselves
and our neighbors (spouses, children, parents, etc.) on the other.
In Hebrew, this is expressed as bein adam l’makom, between a person
and God, and bein adam l’chavero, between a person and her peers.
But one way of understanding God is to understand that all of our earthly
relationships are just components of that larger relationship between
the Force of Creation and creation itself. This may lead us to
view the entire thing as one spectrum, rather than two different channels.
In other words, by tending to our earthly relationships, we are strengthening
our relationship with the source of all relationships. We
may come to understand that all of humanity is in one great relationship
and that our momentary interactions with those closest to us need our
attention if we are to maintain the integrity of the whole. Our
ability to keep alignment with the yetzer tov – the impulse to serve
the other3, whoever that may mean – is strengthened by
our yir’ah.
When we face challenges in our relationships
we can often find fear hidden under layers of other emotions.
Look underneath anger, you’ll often find fear. Look underneath
sadness (depression), you’ll often find fear (anxiety.) Fear
gone untended can be a foundation for blockages in our connections with
our loved ones. When we allow fear to block our hearts and our
relationships, not only do we hurt ourselves and our loved ones, we
weaken the larger fabric of relationship in the world. When we
open ourselves to fear in its most expansive, exalted form, we find
a foundation on which to strengthen the impulse to serve our relationships
and likewise, the whole universe of relationship. It is for this
that Yom Kippur was invented. Today, Yom Kippur, is an invitation
to be with fear intimately and communally.
In a few moments, we’ll turn together
to the Avodah service and the recitations of the priests on Yom Kippur
in Temple times. The moment when the priest would enter the Holy
of Holies, the sacred point in the inner court of the sanctuary, was
considered a moment of dread. The priest would spend days preparing
for that entry, going into solitude, removing himself from the community
and all possible distractions. For our ancestors, the Holy of
Holies was the place where our finite world merged with the world of
Divine Infinity – truly a narrow bridge joining two realms.
Believing that the Holy Spirit of Creation was actually tending to the
Temple and responding to the priest’s recitation, the people stood
in fear and dread awaiting the priest’s reemergence. Would he
successfully bridge that place of finitude with the expanse of eternity,
the same place that pachad can be transformed to yir’ah? The
text says, “they fell on their faces,” so great was their sense
of fear.
Today, in this place that is sanctified by our presence, we will re-enact this ritual by reciting parts of it, and while we may not have the same theology as our ancestors, we are invited to awaken fear in this moment as well. The external ritual outlined in our prayerbooks can be understood as an internal ritual for each one of us. Inside each of us is a microcosm of the Holy of Holies, our own inner court, the place where our life experience meets with our own eternity. Supported by the immense strength of our 2000+ year old tradition and the presence of our own community around us, we find the courage to look into our own Holy of Holies. So, let us take a cue from our ancestral priests and enter in. We take a few seconds for quiet and ask ourselves: in what way is pachad showing up in our lives? How do our small-mind fears keep us from fully connecting with all our significant others?
(Folk tale adapted from a version in
the The Dybbuk by Saul Anski and copied from the Jewish Catalog, offerred
here with gratitude to Rabbi Daniel Siegel.)
God's world is great and holy. Among
the holy lands in the world is the Holy Land of Israel. In the land
of Israel, the holiest city is Jerusalem. In Jerusalem, the holiest
place was the Temple, and in the Temple the holiest spot was the holy
of holies.
There
are seventy peoples in the world. Among these holy peoples is the people
of Israel. The holiest of the people of Israel is the tribe of Levi.
In the tribe of Levi the holiest are the priests. Among the priests,
the holiest was the high priest.
There
are 365 days in the year. Among these the holidays are holy. Higher
than these is the holiness of the Sabbath. Among Sabbaths the holiest
is the Day of Atonement, the Sabbath of Sabbaths.
There
are seventy languages in the world. Among the holy languages is the
holy language of Hebrew. Holier than all else in this language is the
holy Torah, and in the Torah the holiest part is the Ten Commandments.
In the Ten Commandments, the holiest of all words is the Name of God.
And
once during the year, at a certain hour, these four supreme sanctities
of the world were joined with one another. That was on the Day of Atonement,
when the high priest would enter the holy of holies and there utter
the Name of God. And because this hour was beyond measure holy and awesome,
it was the time of utmost peril not only for the high priest but for
the whole of Israel. For if, in this hour, there had, God forbid,
entered the mind of the high priest a false or sinful thought, the entire
world would have been destroyed.
Every
spot where a person raises his or her eyes to heaven is a holy of holies.
Every person, having been created by God in God's own image and likeness,
is a high priest. Every day of a person's life is a Day of Atonement,
and every word that a person speaks with sincerity is the Name of God.
May we all have the courage to enter
into our own Holy of Holies. If not today, then when?