Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner

Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od; vaha’ikar lo lefached klal. 

This song has been bothering me for the last thirty years.

It started when I was a kid, maybe eight years old. During Sukkot that year, we were sitting in our family sukkah, finishing up the holiday meal, when my father announced that we were going to try to make our sukkah levitate. He said this was an ancient mystical belief: that if you sang the right song enough times, with enough fervor, the sukkah would start to rise up off the ground with you in it, and you would fly. 

And then my father began singing the song he thought would get us in the air: ‘Kol haolam kulo.’ Once, twice, three times, ten times, fifty. I think he was shooting for two hundred rounds that night. I don’t think we actually got there, but at some point during those endless repetitions, the song became the mystical equivalent of ‘Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.’ I did not feel transported, only annoyed. And our sukkah, sadly, never flew. 

In my twenties, I started thinking about the lyrics of the song, attributed to Rebbe Nachman of Braslav: ‘Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od; vaha’ikar lo lefached klal.’ ‘The whole world is a very narrow bridge, and the most important thing is to have no fear at all.’ 

What? If the whole world is a very narrow bridge, the only reasonable response is to live in fear! If you see the world as a ridge between two chasms, how can you be anything other than afraid? And yet Rebbe Nachman seemed to be saying: The whole world is fearful, fear-filled, and? We should have no fear. This felt like a maddening puzzle, suggesting a type of inner transcendence as unlikely as a levitating sukkah.

A decade later, I was in rabbinical school. And I learned that the lyrics might actually have been mis-recorded. Rebbe Nachman may not have actually said, ‘lo lefached klal’ – to have no fear at all. In his book ‘Likkutei Moharan,’ he’d actually written ‘lo yitpached klal’ – that we should not make ourselves afraid. 

These two possible messages from Rebbe Nachman seem to align with the two types of fear we all struggle with.

The first type is basic fear, which in Hebrew is pachad. Pachad is fear on its most primal level, fear that spurs us to meet our basic needs for food, shelter, life. Pachad is key to our survival.

The second type of fear is hitpachdut, or worry. Hitpachdut is the fear of change, fear of anticipated losses, fear that the world we anchored ourselves to is becoming unmoored. Hitpachdut is the fear that curls up our stomachs like an ouroboros, feeding on itself.

Both types of fear, pachad and hitpachdut, crop up again and again in the Torah. But they’re expressed most personally and poignantly in the Book of Psalms, which some of you studied with me during the month of Elul. 

If you’ve come to services on Shabbat, you’re probably familiar with psalms that celebrate nature, or psalms that praise God. But a sizeable proportion of the Book of Psalms is actually dedicated to expressing fear. So, we have 3,000-year-old poems in which the poet writes about being terribly sick, bent double with pain and afraid of dying. And we have poems in which the psalmist worries about enemies attacking without warning. And we have descriptions of a world that once seemed ordered now turned upside down, and the prayer, “If only I had wings like a dove, I would fly off and find rest in the wilderness…refuge from the streaming wind and the storm” (Psalm 55:7-9).

We can see from the Book of Psalms that our ancestors didn’t shy away from naming their fears. They described the world as it really was. They refused to pretend. And they insisted that their fears were a proper topic of conversation with the Holy One. 

The whole world is a very narrow bridge: Nearly seven months ago, we were thrust out onto a bridge we never imagined ourselves crossing. 

The pachad-fears, the most basic fears of this time, are real: we’re afraid of getting sick with a virus that could kill us or leave us with a compromised immune system. We’re afraid our loved ones will get sick, will die. We’re afraid we’ll lose our jobs and not be able to access health care or feed our families. These fears are real and legitimate. And it would be suicidal, homicidal to try to model ourselves on the first meaning of ‘Kol ha’olam kulo,’ to say ‘I have no fear at all,’ and refuse to adapt. Our fears keep us wearing masks, washing our hands, refraining from gathering in large groups. Our fears protect us and others. They keep us alive.

If our basic fears help us manage threats in the present, our worries right now—hitpachdut—are about what we might lose in the future. They’re what keep us up at night, not because of physical pain, but psychic pain: Will my child make it through this pandemic without lasting trauma? What if my elderly parent dies and I can’t be there to say goodbye? What will happen if the current president refuses to leave office? When will catastrophic climate change make its way to where I live? Hitpachdut is the fear that feeds on uncertainty. It keeps us worrying and wondering and it makes our hearts clench with love. It reveals what we hold most dear.

Our whole world now is a very narrow bridge. Since we’ve got all these fears, what should we do with them?

Well, we can name and claim our fears, like our ancestors, and find connection in that act of naming—connection to the Holy One, or to one another. We can be witnessed in our fears, and mend some of the frayed edges of our lives by letting people know what we’re going through. And we can get curious about our fears, as both a useful reality check and an opportunity to explore how we engage with the world. When pachad comes up, we can ask ourselves, is this thing I’m afraid of a genuine threat to my physical safety? When hitpachdut, when worries arise, we can ask ourselves, what does this feeling reveal about who or what I care about? 

There are lessons to be learned from our fears. But we would be doing ourselves and our world a profound disservice if we only stayed there.

Going back to Rebbe Nachman’s song, the song that’s been bothering me for thirty years now: The song ends with the word ‘klal,’ which has been translated as ‘at all’, but really means ‘totality’ or ‘whole.’ The song is saying, do not make fear the klal, the whole. Regardless of which type of fear we find ourselves dominated by, we cannot let it become the totality of our vision. And on this point, I think, Rebbe Nachman is right.

Pachad and hitpachdut—survival-fear and worry-fear—can both be all-consuming. Both of them, if we make them the main focus of our day-to-day lives, can be paralyzing. This is because fear narrows our vision and focuses it on boundaries. Fear confines us; and we are already so confined, in our homes, on Zoom, waiting for an uncertain future to unfold.

So where do we go from here? How do we not get stuck? You’ll hear people suggest trust as the remedy for fear, or hope, but I want to offer a different idea: that we actually need to lean into a third type of fear, yirah.

This idea is actually based on the deathbed blessing of R. Yochanan ben Zakkai, who I spoke about on Rosh HaShanah. As Yochanan lay dying, decades after he climbed out of a coffin to birth a new Judaism, his students gathered around him and asked him for a blessing. Yochanan said: ‘May it be God’s will that you fear Heaven as much as you fear flesh-and-blood’ (Berachot 28b). 

Yochanan lived through destruction. He understood how overwhelming fear can be, and how, when we’re in its grip, it’s difficult to look to what’s beyond it. So Yochanan blessed his students with a fear beyond ordinary fear: yirah, fear of Heaven—or what we would call nowadays ‘awe.’

Awe may seem like an antiquated idea; maybe we associate it with hushed sounds, heavenly choirs, lofty architecture, or a God we don’t quite sense or believe in. Maybe we think of awe as a feeling that our ancestors knew, but that we, with our modern-day worries and fast-paced lives, don’t get to experience. But awe isn’t about emotion. It’s not about being moved or spiritually elevated. It’s about vision: our sense of how we fit into the world.

If we are living only in our fear, we are missing seeing the wider world. Which could mean that we are forgetting to notice beauty, connection, and goodness. That, in and of itself, would be a mistake, even a desecration of God’s creation. But more importantly, if we are living only in pachad or hitpachdut, we are profoundly limiting ourselves. We are saying: ‘I give up. I can do nothing to shape this world.’ We are confining ourselves to the dustbin of history before we’ve returned to dust. 

Yochanan knew that his students needed to see beyond their ordinary fears. And so he blessed his students—as I am blessing us, this evening—with yirah. 

How do we get to yirah? It starts with looking seriously at the world and ourselves, and asking the question we’ll encounter during tomorrow’s Amidah prayer: ‘where is the place of God’s glory/ayeh mekom kevodo?’ We must ask this question not just during these Yamim Noraim, these Days of Awe, but also particularly at this moment in time, when we find ourselves on a narrow bridge of history. The prayer asks, ‘where is God’s glory?’ And then it answers, as we must, too: ‘The whole world is filled with God’s glory/Meloh chol ha’aretz kevodo.’

Yirah means asking: where is God’s glory? And remembering that it fills the world, and us. Yirah means remembering that we, individually and collectively, contain holy possibilities for creation, lovingkindness, righteous anger, and offering shelter to the smallest bird. Yirah means asking ourselves seriously: Where is there room for me to act beyond the narrowness of my fear?

We are created in the image of the One who Creates, and as long as we exist in the world, we have the capacity, and the commandment, to shape it for good. It is our duty and our birthright, no matter the fire this time, no matter what the future brings, to fill the world with God’s glory. We cannot limit ourselves to only fear, only worry; we must also reach for awe of the world, our place in it, and the tasks that lie before us.

I want to close by coming back to Rebbe Nachman’s song, the song that I think, at least for now, I understand a little better. 

Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od: The whole world is a very narrow bridge. I think I’ve been looking at the bridge all wrong. If the whole world is a very narrow bridge, and I see the world in terms of space, then of course I’ll feel constrained, of course I’ll stay away from the edges, of course I’ll be afraid of the chasm I imagine on either side. But if I look at this narrow-bridged world not from a perspective of space, but a view of time, then its narrowness commands me into yirah. 

Because if the bridge is narrow because our lives are finite, because we only have so many years in which to live, then Rebbe Nachman’s teaching comes to remind us that we are only here for a short time on this bridge between—depending on your theology—nothingness and nothingness, or everything and everything. And this reality should fill us with awe. And we are commanded—by the brevity of our lives, by the eternity that lives in us, by the eternity that calls to us from either side of this bridge—to live a life that is infused with awe and commanded by awe into action, simply because we are alive today. That, in itself, is an unlikely miracle. 

Now what will you do with that miracle? Start by singing with me: Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od; vaha’ikar lo lefached klal.

Questions for discussion:

“The first type is basic fear, which in Hebrew is pachad. Pachad is fear on its most primal level, fear that spurs us to meet our basic needs for food, shelter, life. Pachad is key to our survival. The second type of fear is hitpachdut, or worry. Hitpachdut is the fear of change, fear of anticipated losses, fear that the world we anchored ourselves is becoming unmoored. Hitpachdut is the fear that curls up our stomachs like an ouroboros, feeding on itself.”

Which type of fear do you find yourself sitting in most often?

“If we are living only in pachad or hitpachdut, we are profoundly limiting ourselves. We are saying: ‘I give up. I can do nothing to shape this world.’ We are confining ourselves to the dustbin of history before we’ve returned to dust.”

When have you found yourself feeling that you can do something to shape our world?

“If the bridge is narrow because our lives are finite, because we only have so many years in which to live, then Rebbe Nachman’s teaching comes to remind us that we are only here for a short time on this bridge between—depending on your theology—nothingness and nothingness, or everything and everything. And this reality should fill us with awe. And we are commanded—by the brevity of our lives, by the eternity that lives in us, by the eternity that calls to us from either side of this bridge—to live a life that is infused with awe and commanded by awe into action, simply because we are alive today. That, in itself, is an unlikely miracle.”

Now what will you do with that miracle? 

By: Rabbi Ora Nitkin-Kaner

I want to begin with a story about a birth that happened 2,000 years ago. This isn’t the birth of a person, but the birth of a city—maybe the most important Jewish city you’ve never heard of: a place called Yavneh. 

In the first century CE, the Jews in the Land of Israel were living under harsh Roman rule. In 66 CE, after years of oppression, they rose up in open revolt against the Romans. The rebellion lasted for years, so long that General Vespasian himself finally came to crush it. In the year 70 CE on the 9^th of Av, he commanded his troops to destroy Jerusalem.

The Temple, which had been the heart of Jewish life for centuries, was desecrated, then set on fire. Jewish men, women, and children were killed in the streets. The scale of destruction was shocking, unprecedented. And we have stories of rabbis, who, after the destruction, could only sit in the ruins of the Temple and weep. But there was one rabbi who did more than just mourn. There was one rabbi who, even as Jerusalem was burning, dreamt up a new kind of Judaism. His name was Yochanan ben Zakkai. 

Yochanan ben Zakkai recognized that Temple-based Judaism—the Judaism that connected Jews to God through priests and sacrifices—couldn’t survive the destruction of Jerusalem. So, as the city burned, Yochanan did something audacious: he got ahold a coffin. Then he lay down in it, and two other rabbis carried this coffin to the city gates, where guards were stationed. The guards wanted to stab the coffin to confirm that the person inside was actually dead, and were only convinced at the last second not to desecrate the body. 

The coffin was carried into the Roman camp, and set down in front of General Vespasian. And then Yochanan stood up, and climbed out.  This minor resurrection shocked the general and got his attention. Yochanan then flattered Vespasian, stroking to the general’s ego and calling him ‘emperor.’ And then Yochanan made his request: ‘Just give me Yavneh and her sages.’ And his request was granted. Jerusalem was destroyed, but Yavneh—a small town north of the city—was spared. 

Before the revolt, Yavneh had been an insignificant backwater where a few rabbis studied and debated Torah. Their way of life—based around Torah learning—hadn’t really made a dent in Judaism up until that point: the Jerusalem Temple had been the focus. In Yavneh, Yochanan ben Zakkai and his fellow rabbis birthed a new kind of Judaism: the Judaism that we practice, today. 

Temple Judaism had been full of warring Jewish sects, each insisting that their interpretation of Torah was the only right one. In contrast, the rabbis of Yavneh encouraged vigorous debate. This laid the groundwork for what later became the Mishnah, and then the Talmud. Rather than trying to rebuild the Temple, the rabbis of Yavneh created synagogues, and these synagogues became places of Jewish worship, and Jewish study, and Jewish community-building. In Yavneh, Judaism stopped being a centralized, sacrificial cult, and evolved into a more democratic and diverse way of life.

This was the birth of rabbinic Judaism. It was a Judaism that would spread across the Middle East to North Africa, then Asia, Europe, and eventually North America. Our Judaism, us sitting here today, is because of Yavneh. We are its inheritors. 

So what? Why am I speaking with you about Yavneh today? Because we, like Yochanan, are living through a time of shatter in this country. 

We saw the cracks in the veneer years ago. We saw the fault lines in 2016 and 2017, the growing fractures in 2018, 2019. And this year, and these last 6 months in particular, we are seeing chasms. 

On December 31^st 2016, American Sikh lawyer and activist Valarie Kaur gave a powerful speech at an AME Church in Washington, DC. She spoke about her fear that her brown son, who was just a toddler at the time, would grow up to be seen “as foreign, as suspect, as a terrorist, just as black bodies are still seen as criminal, brown bodies are still seen as illegal, trans bodies are still seen as immoral, indigenous bodies are still seen as savage, the bodies of women and girls still seen as someone else’s property.” Ms. Kaur said in 2016 that the future of this country looked dark. “But,” she went on to say, “The mother in me asks what if? What if this darkness is not the darkness of the tomb, but the darkness of the womb?” 

In light of the devastation of these last 4 years, of these last 6 months, of the nearly 200,000 dead in this country alone because of a willfully incompetent administration that lets its people die in a plague, we cannot pretend this is not the darkness of the tomb as we grieve and as we rage over everyone and everything we’ve lost. 

We are living through a time of shatter. 

The Hebrew word for shatter is shavar. Shavar also means brokenness, destruction, calamity. It’s from the word shavar that we get the shofar call shevarim: Three cries, three articulations of grief punctuated by gasps. 

Shevarim is the sound of this moment: not just the new year, but this moment, September 19^th 2020 in the United States of America. 

Like the shofar, we are crying out: ‘Look! Things are not ok!’

Like the shofar, we are crying out: ‘How do we get through this?’

Like the shofar, we are crying out: ‘This hurts! This hurts! This hurts.’

It feels, right now, like we are in the darkness of the tomb. It feels, lately, like death is winning, like destruction is everywhere. It feels like we are moving from crisis to crisis, barely able to catch our breath. It hurts. And there is devastation. And things are not ok.

And so I need you to remember Yochanan ben Zakkai, who, in a time when everything around him was on fire, sidled up alongside death in order to give birth to a legacy that is ours, today. I want you to remember Yochanan, who climbed into a coffin in order to birth the Judaism we needed. Our religion, us gathering here today, was midwifed by one person, 2,000 years ago, who had an audacious vision for a life that included mourning what was lost, but also imagining how different the future could be.

Like Yochanan, we are living through a time of shatter. 

This shatter means that we may never regain the lives we had before. We have to grieve all that’s being lost. But grieving should also be accompanied by dreaming. Because living through a time of shatter now doesn’t mean that there is only loss ahead. It means that we also have a chance, more than ever before, to be dreaming and building towards the future that we know will be different, whether next month, next year, in five years, ten years, in the lives of our children or our grandchildren our or great-grandchildren.

Coming back to the Hebrew word for shatter, shavar. The Hebrew for crisis also comes from shavar. The word for crisis is mashber. But: mashber also means birthing stool. In our tradition, in our language, crisis, and birthing stool, are one in the same.

Every person who has ever labored to push out a baby knows that birth is messy. That birth is dangerous. That it is painful, so painful. And that it is powerful, and awe-inspiring. And we give birth again and again because ultimately, the hope of bringing new life into this world, of bringing about a new world, is worth it. 

Labor is a crisis that shatters bodies and hearts. It takes all our energy, all our effort. And it is the purest moment of creation that we as humans know.

It’s no coincidence that much of the Torah we read on Rosh HaShanah retells stories of difficult births and new worlds longed for. We have Sarah, who gives birth to Isaac at age 99. And Hagar, who births Ishmael, and then saves his life with a prayer. We have Hannah, who pleads to God for a child after years of infertility, and gives birth to Samuel, who becomes a prophet. And of course, the alternate Torah reading for today is Bereshit, literally the story of the creation of our world.

Rosh HaShanah, with its stories of shatter, of breach and of birth, reminds us of all that’s possible.

Almost four years ago, Valarie Kaur suggested that this era is the darkness of the womb, and not the tomb. I think, now, we can see that it’s both. This is breaking, and birth. This is shatter; and with it, the tearing of the veil to make way for a new vision. 

Rosh HaShanah is the birth day of the world, the anniversary of the moment the Holy One spoke life into existence, and named it ‘good’. Rosh HaShanah reminds us that we are God’s partners in creation. Rosh HaShanah, more than any other day, is the time to begin birthing new visions and new worlds.

I want you to remember all our ancestors, Sarah, Hagar, Hannah, Yochanan, and all those whose names we don’t know who labored after them. All our countless ancestors who dreamed and birthed and did not stop dreaming, did not stop creating, and named us as their inheritors of a tradition that reminds us, never more than today, that we are made in the image of the One who creates light out of darkness.

Trust this. Trust that this is a birth. We will need to breathe life into it. We will need to give it our patience, our fierceness, our imagination, the whole of who we are. 

It will be messy. And it will be worth it.

May we, and the world we are birthing, be inscribed together in the Book of Life. And let us say, amen.

Questions for discussion:

“Shevarim is the sound of this moment: not just the new year, but this moment, September 19^th 2020 in the United States of America. Like the shofar, we are crying out: ‘Look! Things are not ok!’ Like the shofar, we are crying out: ‘How do we get through this?’ Like the shofar, we are crying out: ‘This hurts! This hurts! This hurts.’”

What are you crying out right now?

Whose cries are being heard, and whose voices are going unheard?

“Almost four years ago, Valarie Kaur suggested that this era is the darkness of the womb, and not the tomb. I think, now, we can see that it’s both. This is breaking, and birth. This is shatter; and with it, the tearing of the veil to make way for a new vision.”

Do you agree feel that this is a time of shatter?

What new vision are you dreaming up?