I am completely obsessed with podcasts. I listen to at least four episodes a day, mostly published in Brazil, the United States and Israel. I have still not found an excellent South African one about local news and politics, and if you have a suggestion I would like to hear it over brocha. A few years ago one of those podcasts gave me a story that has stayed with me ever since.
It was an episode of The Daily, from the New York Times.[1] It told the story of Ella Maners, a girl in Nashville who had just turned nine. Ella has OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder, and when the interviewer asks what frightens her, the list comes out fast and without embarrassment: being sick, tornadoes, fires, Windex, monsters, going upstairs on her own. The two at the top are vomiting and tornadoes, and the tornado siren for her whole neighbourhood stands next to her house. Her mother, Katie, explains something about the illness that most of us get wrong. We picture the compulsions, the hand-washing and the checking of locks. Ella's compulsion was avoidance. She would do almost anything to stay away from a situation in which the thing she feared might happen.
The day Katie understood the size of it, she pulled up in the carpool queue at school and it was the teacher, rather than Ella, who walked towards the car. Ella was on the floor of her classroom, knees against her chest, arms around herself, saying that if she stood up she was going to be sick. Katie says there was nothing she could say. "You are going to be all right." "You are not going to be sick." None of it reached her, and she ended up lifting her daughter off the floor and carrying her to the car. What she learnt later is that the reassurance had not simply failed to work. It had been feeding the thing it was meant to settle. Then the school ran a routine tornado drill on a cold afternoon, and Ella was wearing two thick coats, and the siren went, and the children were made to duck their heads in the bathroom, and she was sick. Her two worst fears arrived together that day. Everything the adults had promised her turned out to be untrue, and she found that out in front of her class.
A week at Fear Facers, a day camp run by the University of Florida in Gainesville, started to change that. There Ella gave her OCD a name, Ocie, and a shape, a small blue bubble in her head, blue because blue is her favourite colour. And she was taught to invert the sentence she had been using all her life. When Ocie started up, "you are going to get sick, you are going to get sick," she had always answered, "I'm not going to get sick," and that answer was the fuel. What she was taught to answer instead was: "yes, I am. Yes, I am. Yes, I am." Ocie, in her telling, gives up and complains that it isn't fair. Then they exposed her to the things themselves, working upwards from the mild towards the worst. On the hardest morning they had the counsellors chew vomit-flavoured sweets and pretend to be sick into a toilet, and asked Ella to look. She would not look. She cried, Katie cried and then left the cubicle because her own crying was making it worse, and outside the door she asked the staff whether they had made a terrible mistake. They said no. They said there would be a moment in there when Ella found out she could do it. Eventually somebody photographed the toilet and asked her to look at the photograph, and she covered her eyes, and then made herself look, and then took two steps and looked into the toilet itself. Her counsellors cheered so loudly that Katie could hear it through the door, and they formed a tunnel outside the bathroom for her to walk out through. Asked afterwards whether the camp took the fears away, Ella says no. Asked what is different, she says they are not as scary now.
Ella has an illness, and most of what frightens the rest of us is not an illness. Some fears are exactly the right size for what they are about, and a tornado siren next to your house is not nothing. What carries over from her story is not the diagnosis. It is the discovery her mother made on the classroom floor, that the sentence we reach for first, that everything will be fine, does not shrink a fear that is fed by hiding, and that the difference between the nine-year-old and the rest of us is not that we are braver. It is that she has told people. Adults usually take the fear into the closet and shut the door on it, and what we find out afterwards is that we could not put the fear in there by itself. Locked in with it are the parts of our identity that might set it off, the things about us that make us visible and therefore exposed, and those parts stay in the dark for exactly as long as the fear does.
Hebrew has more than one word for fear. When we speak about our relationship with God, we ordinarily reach for yirah, which belongs to reverence, to the sort of fear that comes from being awed by something true. The word pachad is the one Hebrew speakers use every day for what Ella was living with. Rabbi Ilana Goldhaber-Gordon, an American rabbi who was a research scientist before she was ordained, draws the distinction carefully: the two overlap in ancient literature, but the awe that opens a soul tends to be called yirah, while pachad tends to name "the oppressive fear that shuts a person down."[2]
There is one place in the Torah where pachad is attached to God, and it appears in chapter 31 of Bereshit, when Yaakov takes his leave of his father-in-law Lavan. They quarrel, each accusing the other of having cheated him, and at a certain point Yaakov says:
לוּלֵי אֱלֹהֵי אָבִי אֱלֹהֵי אַבְרָהָם וּפַחַד יִצְחָק הָיָה לִי כִּי עַתָּה רֵיקָם שִׁלַּחְתָּנִי
had the God of my father, the God of Avraham and the Fear of Yitzchak, not been with me, you would have sent me away empty-handed. [3]
The word is pachad, the fear that locks a person in. Ibn Ezra takes it at face value, as the fear that Yitzchak himself felt, and points back to the mountain, to the passage we will read from this bimah tomorrow morning.[4] If Ibn Ezra is right, then something remarkable has happened in this family. Yitzchak was bound to an altar by his own father and came within a moment of being killed there, and that terror never left him. It did not get resolved, and nobody talked him out of it. What happened instead is that it became one of the names by which his son addressed God. The fear was not cured. It was carried, out loud, in the family's own vocabulary for the holy.
When my children were younger they used to bring me their fears, and I used to make them smaller. My daughter, who was eleven, having heard about global warming, told me one weekend that she was afraid Rio de Janeiro would be under water before she had the chance to have children of her own. My son had a period when he could think about very little except shootings and armed robberies, which in that city were not imaginary. Neither of them was paralysed, but the anxiety was there, and it showed up in ways they did not always name directly. My instinct in every case was the same instinct Ella’s mother had, which was to tell them the problem was not as big as they thought. I was doing that for them, because it was what I believed a father was supposed to do. I was also doing it for myself. Watching my children afraid sets off my own fear, which has to do with the condition of the world I am handing over to them, and shrinking their fear was the fastest way to get relief from mine.
If Ella is right that the healthy thing is to own our fears rather than hide them, then I should go first. Ella's fears were private and embarrassing. The ones I am about to name are public, and public fears are easier to say from a bimah, which is itself a kind of hiding. You will have your own list, and it may not look like mine.
I am afraid of the global rise in antisemitism, which has stopped being something we monitor from a distance. Every one of you produced a ticket with your name on it to get into this building tonight, and we checked those tickets more strictly than this congregation ever has. That is a security procedure, and it is the right one, and I am not asking anybody to relax it. I am asking us to notice that we absorbed it almost without discussion, and that it is now part of what coming to shul means here.
I am afraid of a chauvinism that has become respectable again, which treats any argument for including people who were historically pushed out as an insult to those already inside, and which has learnt to present contempt as common sense. Five days ago a party that the German state itself monitors as a threat to its constitution for its neo-nazi tendencies and connections took forty-four per cent of the vote in Saxony-Anhalt and came within three seats of governing alone a German state.[5]
I am afraid of what we are doing to the planet. The heat of this European summer killed at least thirty-five thousand people on provisional figures that cover barely half the continent,[6] while the ice goes at both poles and the rain over the Amazon shifts away from where it has always fallen.
And I am afraid of a world in which a handful of countries do as they please because nobody can stop them, and the rest of us are told this is simply how things have always worked.
One old response to fear of this kind is to make ourselves smaller. When I was fifteen I went to Israel for the first time on a Jewish Agency programme, and before we flew a man came to brief us on security. “If your plane is hijacked, do not think twice about getting rid of anything that identifies you as a Jew. Take off the chai, take off the magen David, throw them as far from you as you can. Right now it is better to stay alive than to die a hero.” He was not wrong about the aeroplane. What worries me is how easily that advice becomes a way of living, so that a whole community walks around having thrown its identity into the aisle and calling that safety. The other version of the same instinct builds upwards instead: higher walls and more locked doors, not because the threat requires them but because the fear does, until the building is safe and there is nobody new inside it.
You might know this song:
כָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאוֹד וְהָעִקָּר, וְהָעִקָּר לֹא לְפַחֵד, לֹא לְפַחֵד כְּלָל.[7]
the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the main thing is not to be afraid at all.
The song is a twentieth-century adaptation based on something Rav Nachman of Breslav write. The original text is slightly different, though, and the difference matters:
וְדַע, שֶׁהָאָדָם צָרִיךְ לַעֲבֹר עַל גֶּשֶׁר צַר מְאֹד מְאֹד, וְהַכְּלָל וְהָעִקָּר – שֶׁלֹּא יִתְפַּחֵד כְּלָל [8]
Know that a person has to cross a very, very narrow bridge, and the essential thing is not yitpached at all.
Yitpached is a reflexive verb built on the root of pachad. Do not frighten yourself. That is not an instruction to stop being afraid. Rav Nachman does not tell us the bridge is wide, and he does not promise we will reach the other side. He tells us not to do to ourselves what pachad is trying to do to us.
Yehuda Kurtzer, who runs the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and hosts another podcast I follow, made a distinction after the shootings in American synagogues. Being frightened is one thing, and it is honest. Turning being frightened into an ideology is something else, because it converts a feeling we cannot fully control into a belief that then decides how we read the world and what we are permitted to do about it. His conclusion is: "I refuse to be scared. There is too much to do."[9] That can sound like the sentence Ella was taught to give up, "I'm not going to get sick," but it is the opposite. Ella's old sentence denied the fear. Kurtzer admits it in the same breath, and refuses only to let it govern.
Here is what that refusal means for me. I do not want my fear of antisemitism to make me suspicious of everyone who is not Jewish. I do not want my fear for Israel to make me indifferent to the humanity of Palestinians. I do not want my fear of political extremism to convince me that everyone who disagrees with me is my enemy. I do not want my fear of a less tolerant world to make me a less tolerant person. I do not want my fear for the planet to persuade me that the outcome is already decided and there is nothing left to do. And I do not want my fear that the norms and the institutions are collapsing to persuade me that values are a luxury we can afford only when circumstances are easy. What frightens me most is the possibility of arriving at the far end of all this having quietly become somebody I would not have wanted to sit next to.
None of that requires pretending the dangers are imaginary, or that every threat can be talked down with goodwill and dialogue. Ella did not get better by discovering that she would never be ill again; she was ill, in front of everyone, and she is still afraid of it. Yitzchak did not come to terms with that mountain by pretending he had never been tied there. The question is not whether the fear is real. The question is what we do with it once we have admitted that it is, and whether a pachad that is carried out loud, the way Yitzchak's was, can stop shutting us down and begin instead to do the work of yirah, and open us.
The next ten days are ten days of supervised exposure, during which we are asked to lower our defences and stand in front of God and in front of ourselves as we actually are, with no masks available. For many of us that is the terrifying part, because we have spent so long performing the person we believe we are supposed to be that we have lost track of the person underneath. Will we face those questions without murmuring that everything will be fine, everything will be fine, everything will be fine, which was never true for Ella and is not going to be true for us? Will each one of us have the courage to name what frightens us without letting those fears decide who we become?
The Mishnah says there were no better days for Israel than the fifteenth of Av and Yom Kippur.[9] I do not think that means everything was fine on those days. I think it means people had stopped needing to pretend that everything was fine. In a few moments we will continue with the service, and a week on Sunday we will be back here for Kol Nidrei.
בְּרֹאשׁ הַשָּׁנָה יִכָּתְבוּן וּבְיוֹם צוֹם כִּפּוּר יַחְתְּמוּן
on Rosh Hashanah it is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed.
Who will take the risk of being seen as we really are, and who will hide for one more year? I don’t have a recipe of what we need to do; all I have is a nine-year-old's account of the morning she made herself look, which was that she was so scared, and that it was worth it.
Shabbat Shalom and Shanah Tovah.
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