Our Mussar class at Congregation Beth Elohim, led by Gary Shaffer, will conclude the study season next week with a discussion of the trait called, in Hebrew, yirah. That Hebrew term combines the meaning of both fear and awe: fear of Divine retribution, on the one hand, and awe of Divine majesty on the other. These emotions are sometimes merged, as when you look at a stupendous view from a precipice without rails or when you experience the overwhelming force of nature, as in an earthquake or hurricane or, if, you believe that God will evaluate your life at its end, when you stand in the blinding presence of the Eternal to be judged.
Our discussion of this trait next week will focus not on fear but on awe, a more congenial notion for the modern sensibility. Few in our class, I suspect, believe in an avenging God who will punish His creatures, in spite of many examples to the contrary in the Torah. Since I don’t believe in a presiding deity, I would find it hard to apply the notion of fear of divine judgment to my own life, unless I believed that one suffers in this life for one’s misdeeds. It may be true that some criminals who escape jail or public shaming are nonetheless plagued by guilt and remorse, but it’s so easy to rationalize one’s actions, especially if they are financially rewarding, that most of the wicked who flourish probably do so without regret. I’m too timid to be unusually wicked and even if I were not timid, my conscience would plague me for my misdeeds. So for me, at any rate, virtue must be its own reward.
But what about awe? Again, I can’t stand in awe of a Deity in which I don’t believe. On the other hand, I do stand in awe of the works that the Divine is said to have created. I felt awe at the cyclone which swirled past our windows last fall, awe when viewing the sunrise from the deck of our freighter as it crossed the Pacific, awe when looking into the multicolored vastness of the Grand Canyon. But cyclones don’t arrive every day, nor do we often visit the Grand Canyon or the redwood forests or other stupendous works of nature, and even if we're awake when the sun rises, the artificial canyons in which we live, at least in New York, make it hard to see it. The issue for me, then, is how to open myself to awe during the course of an ordinary day.
When I was able to walk every morning in Prospect Park, the beauty and grandeur of the trees would move me, as would the progression of the seasons that the trees reflected day by day - their budding in spring, their efflorescence in summer, the flaming demise of their leaves in the fall, and the delicate traceries of their branches against the winter sky. Awe in Prospect Park is easy to find. Listening to Mozart or Bach sometimes creates the same feeling. The melting beauty of the adagio movement of one of Mozart’s piano concertos, for instance, provides as good an argument as any for the existence of God. Again, it’s easy to feel awe in the presence of such masterpieces.
Sometimes awe takes me by surprise. Years ago, during an elementary course in drawing, we were asked to draw the ear of the person sitting next to us. The woman whose ear I drew was what one used to call plain, not homely but not glamorous either. Her appearance was perfectly ordinary. Her ear was an ordinary ear. Yet when I started drawing it, I realized that no ear is ordinary, all are beautiful in their construction and in the curves that compose their external aspect. For a moment, the woman glowed into beauty.
Such epiphanies have been rare for me. Yet I realize that even if we’re not standing in the presence of God, the majesty of the world around us is ever present, whether we’re viewing the stars, a man, or a leaf. As I try to find opportunities for awe, I’m reminded of Blake’s poem, which perhaps best expresses my goal: To see a world in a grain of sand, And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand, and Eternity in an hour.
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