A few months ago I was contacted by the folks at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York to give a talk this summer as part of their multi-faith lecture series.
The theme for all of these talks is awe and wonder, and they asked me to talk about awe and wonder in Judaism.
So I’ve been spending time this summer reading up and thinking, and I’ve found one book in particular to be really helpful.
It’s by UC Berkeley psychology professor Dacher Keltner and it’s called, Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life.
Keltner’s book summarizes a lot of recent research on what awe is and how it works. At the beginning of the book, he shares a definition of awe he developed with his colleague Jonathan Haidt.
They defined awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.”
That tracks. It’s pretty close to the way Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel defined awe. Speaking a little more, well, rabbinically, Heschel called awe “a sense for the reference everywhere to mystery beyond all things.”
Maybe you can think about times you’ve experienced awe. I think about visiting the Grand Canyon when I was a kid, or the first time I traveled to Jerusalem.
Being present at the moment when each of my children came into the world was as awe-inspiring as it gets. But so is watching them grow up, and especially seeing when they do good things for others.
The sound of a symphony orchestra leads me to feel awe. And so does singing Kol Nidrei surrounded by other Jews praying on Yom Kippur evening. I wonder what comes to mind for you.
Based on a cross-cultural study of thousands of people in 26 countries, Keltner identifies eight primary ways humans experience awe.
These include a lot of the ones I just mentioned: 1) Witnessing the courage, strength, and kindness of others; 2) being part of a group, like at a concert or during a ritual; 3) being in nature; 4) listening to music; 5) seeing beautifully designed things–like amazing buildings or artworks; 6) having genuinely spiritual or religious experiences; 7) being present at the birth or death of a human being; and 8) moments of epiphany, when we have a lightning bolt of illumination.
The really important thing, according to Keltner, is that we find moments of awe on the regular. Even brief moments a few times a week.
We are hard-wired to experience awe, he says, and one of the hardest things about modern life is that we don’t seem to be experiencing awe as much as we used to.
That, he argues, is one of the things contributing to other problems like loneliness, a feeling of not belonging, anxiety, alienation, etc.
Keltner’s book is a passionate argument that not only is awe important, but that it’s also constantly available to us.
Like our ancestor Jacob, who says, “What an awesome place this is — God was here and I didn’t even know it!” we are surrounded by opportunities to experience awe, we just have to develop our senses to realize it.
In a kind of weird way, experiencing awe these days seems to involve a conscious effort–attuning our awareness that it’s here, and then practicing it.
Judaism has so many built-in opportunities for experiencing awe. I mentioned Kol Nidrei on Yom Kippur — a classic.
There’s the Passover Seder. Or there’s our truly amazing rituals around death and mourning. Thinking about the strength and resilience of our Jewish ancestors can certainly be awe-inspiring.
So can looking at a rainbow — our tradition even offers us a blessing to say for that experience. Seriously, there are so many opportunities for awe in Jewish life.
As a rabbi, sometimes I find myself in a situation where I’m rolling a Torah scroll from one section to another. (These things happen).
I find that to be a pretty awe-inspiring experience: There are 304,805 letters in a Torah scroll, every one of which is copied by hand from another scroll, in a chain extending back thousands of years. Chills.
When you’re rolling a Torah scroll, you typically find that one section is more worn than all the rest. It’s a section of the Torah from this week’s Torah portion, Pinchas.
It’s worn because, in many communities, we read a section of this Torah portion on every one of the holidays: Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and even monthly for Rosh Hodesh, the new moon celebration.
While most sections of the Torah only get looked at once or twice a year, this section gets a ton of use. So the page is well-worn.
I think that symbolizes an important lesson about awe: one of the ways awe is most available to us is through our holidays. Because on the one hand, holidays are kind of ordinary, right?
We do them every year, same song, different year. But they’re also opportunities for transcendance.
They’re ways for us to take something so basic and ordinary time and experience it as something else, something that, as Dacher Keltner puts it, allows us to feel that we’re “in the presence of something vast that transcends our current understanding of the world.”
One Jewish holiday happens every week, of course, and that’s Shabbat. And for this week’s practice, that’s what I’d like to invite you to focus on.
Shabbat is an opportunity to experience awe. So make an intention for your Shabbat to include some moments of bringing more awe into your life.
You can find that awe in lots of places on Shabbat. Awe could come through ritual–taking time to light the Shabbat candles on Friday night with real awareness and intention.
Awe could come through nature, by giving yourself the time to walk someplace beautiful and behold the amazing ways even the smallest things in the natural world work.
Awe could come through really spending time with someone you care about, and allowing yourself to take in and appreciate the fullness of who they are.
Awe could come from giving yourself the time to simply connect with yourself — by slowing down and breathing, and appreciating the truly awesome nature of this gift of existence you and I have been given.
In the Book of Exodus, the Torah tells us, “For six days, the Creator made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day, the Creator rested and was refreshed” (Exodus 31:17).
Shabbat is this built-in opportunity we have every week to, like the Creator, slow down, to pause, to reconnect with ourselves and the world.
And all of that allows us to experience awe — something our bodies, minds, hearts, and spirits naturally want to do.
In the truest sense of the word, Shabbat is awesome, it’s the Jewish people’s most incredible mindfulness practice, and it’s available to all of us every week.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.