Erev Rosh HaShanah: Sanctuary Service

Sermon by Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman
2019/5780

Just this past month, a number of us from Temple went to Eastern Europe. We traveled through the places that our ancestors once lived and where so many died in the Holocaust. We went to Terezin, we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau. We went to the Jewish quarters of Prague and Budapest, of Warsaw and Krakow, of Berlin. 

And when we were in Prague, I was reminded of the story of the golem. The golem of Prague – you might remember it. The Maharal, 16th-century rabbi of Prague, went to the banks of the river and took a clump of clay, and there, that clump of clay came to life. It was the golem. And all the fears of the Jewish people were placed on it. And then, it was put in the attic of the old New Synagogue, where our group stood and heard the story of the golem. The Maharal – 16th century: we stood in the very synagogue that he once taught in. I wondered at that time at the Maharal could ever imagine what would happen in that very city in that very Jewish quarter in the 1930s and 40s. I just wonder: could the Maharal ever imagine what happened from this past Rosh HaShanah last year to this one in our very country?

The Pittsburgh shooting, not long after the beginning of the new year last year. The shooting in California. The drive-by shooting in Miami that didn’t get a lot of press. But a drive-by shooter went past a synagogue; nobody was hurt. And then, there was the interruption of a few people: one in Las Vegas and the other in Washington state, whose activities on the internet were suspicious enough and extreme enough that the police took action. It was all against the Jews. 

I remember going out this time and looking at the ladder that went to the window of the attic, where the golem is supposed to live, and I wondered, for just a moment, how can we not let fear enter our hearts? 

Fear. Fear, for me, is something that we need to talk about. Fear is something that plagues us with all the increased anti-Semitism and hatred in the world, racism, Islamophobia, sexism. Just thinking about standing right here, right now: fear. Fear that I might have talked about fear in another sermon that you all are remembering, because I know I’ve done it before! Fear that maybe you’re waiting in this sanctuary for the sermon that you think I should give tonight, and that I will hear from you in my voicemail tomorrow! Fear. 

Everywhere I go, I am asked about Congresswoman Ilhan Omar. I’m asked about her election and the tweets and what I think. I’m asked about Israel and Netanyahu and the election. I’m asked about President Trump. I’m asked. And I was going to sidestep even mentioning all those people, thinking maybe it wasn’t wise. But then I realized I was afraid. And that I didn’t want to give in to. 

Now fear is interesting because every year I hear that some of you out there are afraid that I’m going to trip walking back and forth in my heels! Don’t worry, I won’t.

Fear, fear, fear: it can grab us. It can take over our lives. And the opposite of fear is curiosity. It is being wondrous, thinking about things. So I want to take this Rosh HaShanah to be curious about fear. I’m going to take this opportunity to look at fear, but don’t worry – I’ll get you to your dinners on time. Don’t look at your watches… 

The Hebrew language is pretty amazing because it helps us understand the different kinds of fear. Fear itself is not good or bad – no emotion is good or bad. The tale that is told is what we do with it. And that is a reality. So what are we going to do with that fear? That makes all the difference in the world.

In Hebrew, there are two words for fear. One is pachad, which means to react, so respond. And the other is yirah, which is connected to awe, or reverence. So what fear are we going to choose?

The gunman in Pittsburgh chose pachad. He chose to demonize a people, anybody, to make up for his own fears. We are told that, actually, we all have an aversion to fear. We want to put our heads in the sand and deny that there’s fear – deny that there’s anything wrong. We so often want to not deal with what is out there. And that is human, that is understandable. 

When this kaleidoscope of emotions and thinking come after us that create this anxiety in our hearts, we often want to find a simple answer for the complexity of the world and the complexity of who we are as human beings. And so what we do in those cases is find an easy answer, even if it isn’t based in reality. We will find someone to blame for the ills of the world. And that is what we often do, just naturally with our fear. But we are human beings who have the capability of doing something much more than just allowing ourselves to give in to fear. We have everything at our disposal, but it doesn’t come naturally – we’ve gotta work at it. And we have to help our children understand it.

FDR said the only thing to fear is fear itself. Do you know when he said those words? In 1933, in his first presidential inauguration. We knew not many years later, there was a lot to fear. Pachad… It is giving in to that fear to try and control it.

There’s a great saying that says you’re perfect the way you are, but you need a lot of work. That is working on our fear. It is making ourselves not side-step it, or blame and shame others, but it is leaning in to it. It is finding the positive in fear.

So I am here to promote fear. I think fear is good. Fear is powerful. Fear is protective. 

Rabbi Steven Kushner tells us that actually, fear is God-given. It tells us to be safe, to be careful of the cliff that’s in front of us. Fear tells us that when we touch a hot stove to not touch it again! Fear protects us, and that is a powerful reality. Fear is a powerful reality, and we can look at it as it bombards us with the reality of the day. 

Dr. Jennifer Kunst actually tells us in her work Wisdom from the Couch – she’s a Kleinian psychoanalyst – she tells us that we have to change the game. She says that so often, we as individuals, we are in a game of dodgeball. 

Somebody’s angry or upset and they’re throwing the ball as hard as they can to get us out. There are many balls coming at us over and over harder and harder. And what’s our response? To throw back just as hard! To find a way for our team against their team. And we are going to play this game until the end. 

She reminds us that we have to change the rules of the game. That when somebody throws us a ball that is so hard and full of fear, that we have to actually be like a baseball catcher. We have to hold the intensity of that ball, of that feeling. Of that intensity. And we have to help people understand that we’re going to hold it, to take the sting out of it, and we’re going to take the power out of it. But we’re not going to hold on to it. It’s not ours. It’s not our fear.

We’re going to toss it back to the one who owns it. We’re going to help each other because we’re on the same team. To be on the same team is to be on the human team. And that’s where yirah comes in – the idea of awesome fear, of reverence in fear. In understanding at the beginning of our liturgy that fear is about humility and not being bigger than life, but finding our smallness. Understanding there’s something beyond us. 

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, who is the head Rabbi of Great Britain, brilliant man, wrote a book called The Dignity of Difference. What he tells us is that fear is crucial. Fear motivates us when we walk outside our home and see a swastika carved in a tree in a local park. Fear reminds us that we have to act. Fear reminds us that we have to respond to hatred; that we need to find the dignity of our own people, and that racism and anti-Semitism and sexism and Islamophobia will never truly be a solution and we know that. 

So in The Dignity of Difference, Jonathan Sacks tells us that actually, we have to be open to seeing the difference in the world. Because our God is one, we see the diversity of humanity. Because our one God created the diversity of this world, every ecosystem knows it. You don’t live as a reality of nature unless you have diversity. It’s where it’s vibrant. Technicolor life and beautiful. He reminds us that tribalism is really not the answer. Because it tells us that we don’t want to see difference. Nationalism is not the answer according to him because that also reminds us that it’s an “us and them” game. He tell us Plato, who gave us universalism – we cry the same tears – is not the answer anymore. Because the beauty of our differences is something that we honor.

Pastor Danny Givens reminds us, when he spoke to a group of people at Temple Israel in a courageous conversation, that he doesn’t want to be like everyone else, the universal humanity. Because the bottom line is the dominant culture decides what’s universal. He’s proud of being a black man. He said in that same sentence, you all are proud to be Jews. If I said we’re all like Christians, you would be offended. If I said I do not recognize that kippah, you would not like that. And after Pittsburgh, I decided to put on a kippah for the first time to show the love and diversity of our uniqueness as Jews and my pride in being Jewish in response to hatred towards our people. 

Rabbi Sacks goes on and says that what is truly important is for us to be curious. Remember that: the opposite of fear is curiosity. For us to be open to learn about other cultures. Ultimately, for us to not only understand but to be able to accommodate and acclimate to other traditions and cultures who see the world so differently than we do. 

When I first came to Temple Israel, we did this program on diversity. We each got a little piece of paper, and some people got “your culture doesn’t look in anybody’s eyes because you believe God lives in the eyes, and looking at another person’s eye is disrespectful.” Others got, “you come from a culture where human interaction is looking eye-to-eye.” Another group talked to people about their feelings openly while another group said little, for they believed that in silence there is honor. 

Then, they put us all in a room and said talk to each other, converse, mingle. So I was in a group who was talking to people eye-to-eye with someone who was looking at the floor. It was very difficult; I didn’t understand. In that exercise is a petri dish of what it means to be in a diverse world. It isn’t easy; no one said it was. But the yirah, the awe of something beyond us, the idea that we as Jews and human beings are humbled and small and therefore we don’t have the answer, but there are many truths . . . that is the true sense of which fear I want. 

I want a fear that helps me understand the awe of the world. I want a fear that helps me understand that we as human beings are complicated and that those complications are something to take in, to not try and find the answer but to sit in the confusion and have a mature sensibility about being in a community. I want a fear that is awesome and full of dread – that’s what these high holy days are all about. 

Sitting in the ghetto in Krakow, we learned about a non-Jewish pharmacist who was the only non-Jew allowed in the Krakow ghetto. He was an incredible man. He knew that if he wasn’t there that people would get sick, and they wouldn’t die a natural death, that the Nazis would have killed them. He knew; he and the women he employed kept hair coloring so that they colored the hair of elderly Jews so they looked younger. He and many others were planning an uprising in April of 1942, but the Krakow ghetto was liquidated in March, and it was never to be. He survived, he wrote a book, and he documented what happened. 

That is fear of awe. That is speaking truth to power; that is validating a people who are too often minimized and hated. But we—we will always have yirah – the fear of awe, of our pride of being Jewish, yirah allows us to be open and free, and in response to the Pittsburgh shooting we opened our doors within 24 hours and had 2,000 people. Neighbors, clergy of all backgrounds here in this sanctuary. I wasn’t going to let pachad, the minimizing fear, take over us. 

We joined our voices and made possible yirah. Awe and reverence. Shanah Tovah.