Dreading The High Holy Days
A lot of people I know are walking around these days with a deep sense of dread: dread about another wave of COVID-19 as we move indoors, dread about the coming elections and the specter of widespread violence and political unrest, dread of economic fragility, dread about fires and hurricanes and droughts.
And now we are coming up to the Days of Awe, the days the liturgy tell us are awesome and full of dread - as if that were a good thing! How can dread be a spiritual quality that lifts us up, opens spiritual gates, helps us live a more attuned, more aligned life?
The word for this dread is yirah, an impossible-to-translate Hebrew word that lives in the intersection between awe and fear. Yirah invites us to take in how small and out of control we actually are. On the pleasant side of yirah is the starry night grandness or the vast desert, where we stop and gawk, feeling our own insignificance but also how amazing it is that we can sense into this hugeness every so often. On the less pleasant side of yirah, however, we recognize how fragile and vulnerable we are and how little we can do to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Yirah can be terror.
This is exactly where the High Holy Days are asking us to go. Rosh Hashanah – and particularly Yom Kippur – are an invitation to look at our world squarely and honestly. Where do we find the vastness, the wonder, the power that transcends the smallness of our abilities, our systems, our intentions? And while we also consider where we do have control, the holy days invite us to sit down in the truth of our own vulnerability.
I expect that this year this invitation might resonate in a new way. The pandemic has shown us swiftly and brutally how we are not in control. As we scramble to protect what we can, we still have experienced loss after loss, plans upended, stresses piling up. But what makes the High Holy Days different than the dread of the world around us is that our tradition grounds yirah firmly in the realm of love.
How so? We begin with the month of Elul, which the rabbis remind us can be an acronym for “Ani Ledodi Vedodi Li,” the beautiful declaration of mutual connection and adoration from the Song of Songs, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” We have the opportunity throughout Elul and into the month of Tishrei to work on reconciliation, reconnecting with those we love in new and healthier ways. In the season’s selichot prayers, we invoke God’s qualities of kindness and mercy over and over. Even in Unetaneh Tokef, the great poem of Divine judgement, we are reminded that God’s throne of justice is established in love.
To be clear, that love does not guarantee anyone a happy ending or a life of ease. We know that. But this exploration of yirah grounded in love can help us develop the deep peace of spiritual trust, a place some might say we can’t get to without allowing the experience of dread. My friend and study partner, Rabbi Dorothy Richman, introduced me to an essay called “On the Joke of the Megillah,” by R. Shimon Gershon Rosenberg, lovingly known by his disciples as Rav Shagar. He wrote, “The sense of security in God does not result from the tangible protection and goodness that He gives. On the contrary, it is the lack of security, that people run away from, that provides an individual with the opportunity to surrender and to feel secure in God in everything that he does.”
This is a practice, all of it, opening up to the yirah, sensing into the love. And it is a big ask. We are living in big times and the outcomes are unknown. But the potential for a deep sense of well-being, come what may, is real. And what a gift that would be for the year that is beginning!
May we all be blessed with health, goodness and sweetness in the new year. L’shanah tovah umetukah!