“The Journey from Fear to Faith”

Yom Kippur 5764
October 6,2003
Rabbi Judith Schindler

A friend of mine recently recalled a trip he took with his little boy. It was just he and his son and they were staying at a hotel. After reading a story, the father turned out the light and it was dark. Without delay, the little boy reached out to grab his father’s hand. The father asked his son, “Are you holding my hand because you are afraid?”

“No,” said the little boy, “I’m holding your hand, because I don’t want you to be afraid.”

We all have fears. Like this little boy, most of us once feared darkness. But as we grew, we learned to fear other things as well. Ultimately each of us needs to make a journey from fear to faith. In order for us to live our lives fully we need have faith in ourselves, faith in others, and faith in God.

These High Holy Days should remind us of the precariousness of our lives. The unetaneh tokef prayer, as we just read, forewarns that on Rosh Hashanah our fate is written and on Yom Kippur it is sealed: Who among us in the coming year shall live and who shall die? And what will be the quality of our days? Who shall be tranquil and who shall be troubled?

Yet we do not need our lyrical liturgy to underscore for us the uncertainties of our future. We all are frighteningly aware that within a moment’s time our lives could change their course.

We all have fears. We all must learn to face them. We fear for our safety -- as we board a plane, take a drive, or enter a darkened house late at night.

We fear for our financial security. The majority of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Our unstable economy threatens so many of our professional lives. Losing a job means not only diminishing one’s self esteem, it means losing a source of stability. This fear is very real as it affects so many of us: our family members, our neighbors, our fellow congregants who have been downsized or whose companies have folded. We lay awake at night fearful of our future and economic wellbeing.

We fear for our health – we have fears of cancers taking over our bodies, of our hearts failing us, of a multitude of illnesses that could await us at our next doctor’s visit. Some of us have already confronted illness, and face fears about the course of our disease. Will we have the strength to fight it, or will pain overcome us?

This past summer, Lance Armstrong won his fifth Tour De France. He is a consummate competitor who knows how to fight to win a race, but his life was thrown into turmoil when he learned that he would also have to fight for his very survival. In response to his 1996 diagnosis of cancer, followed immediately by brain surgery and debilitating chemotherapy, he wrote: “I thought I knew what fear was, until I heard the words, “you have cancer.” Real fear came with an unmistakable sensation: it was as though all my blood started flowing in the wrong direction. My previous fears, fear of not being liked, fear of being laughed at, fear of losing my money, suddenly seemed like small cowardices. Everything now stacked up differently: the anxieties of life -- a flat tire, losing my career, a traffic jam - were reprioritized into need versus want, real problem as opposed to minor scare. A bumpy plane ride was just a bumpy plane ride, it was not cancer.”

Few of us are elite competitors like Lance Armstrong. We have not had the training to tolerate pain. We have not developed the discipline to keep going when are bodies are beyond exhaustion. We do not know if we have the drive to keep climbing the challenging hills of our lives when the summit ahead of us may not be in sight.

While we may not have Armstrong’s athletic aptitude, as Jews we hold in our hands something far more powerful for facing the inevitable fears of our lives. As Jews we have faith – in ourselves, in others and in God.

As we journey through life from fear to faith, we need to first have faith in ourselves. While none of us would choose adversity, it can strengthen us and force us to find resources we never knew we had.

In the Torah our people lived in fear. When it came time to settle the Promised Land, Moses sent up twelve spies to scout out the territory. Ten of the spies allowed their fear to overcome them. “We cannot go up against the people,” they cried, “for they are stronger than we.”

Yet two of the spies, Joshua and Caleb, had faith that that they could conquer their fears and claim that sacred space. Those ten scouts who were without faith were destined to die in the desert.

Years later, when a new generation was about to enter the land, Joshua exhorted his people “Chazak ve’ematz -- be strong and determined. Chazak ve’ematz -- be strong and determined.” And they succeeded in their conquest.

Those words have echoed through the ages to all of us today: “Chazak ve’ematz -- Be strong and determined.” We are the descendants of those same Israelites. Each of us has within ourselves the ability to prevail over the personal battles of our lives: the battles of being alone or of aging, of single parenting or of facing the illness or death of those we love.

Having faith in ourselves is about understanding that there is a larger meaning and purpose to our lives. Having faith in ourselves is about recognizing that we are each created b’tzelem elohim, in the image of God, and hence have within ourselves remarkable resources of resilience and strength. Having faith in ourselves is about knowing that we can get through and that we will grow from our trials. We can emerge from our hardships with more wisdom, with more strength, and with more compassion. It is our decision how we choose to face our fears.

Recently, I read the story of Martha Mason who was afflicted with polio when she was just a young girl. She has spent much of her life breathing in an iron lung. At the age of twelve, after a year of living with the disease, the doctor told her, “You will never walk again. You will never bathe or feed yourself. You are basically an excellent mind and exuberant spirit locked inside an inert body – a prison. Can you live with that?”

“No,” she said emphatically, “I can live above it.”

And she has. She has just written a book. She has made lifelong friends and serves as a counselor and teacher to countless individuals in her community and beyond.

Like this amazing woman, we, too, can live not with our adversity but above it. We can do so by taking the circumstances our lives and making the best of them. Like the sculptor who forms a flawed block of marble into a work of art, so too must we mold the condition of our lives, no matter what they are. Each of us, irrespective of our health or wealth, can have a life which is worthy of admiration.

We can live above our adversity by having faith not only in ourselves and our ability to transform our misfortunes into blessings, but we must also do so by having faith in those around us.

I recently heard a humorous story about Sid Luckman who was a Jewish quarterback for the Chicago Bears. It was the first quarter of a big game and it was going very well. He completed his passes with little pressure from the defense. In the second quarter, things began to break down. Sid’s adrenaline was pumping as he was chased all over the field by enormous linebackers who would have liked nothing better than to separate his head from his shoulders. Suddenly a voice came out of the stands and said, “It’s o.k. Sidney, give them the ball. Your father and I will get you a new one.”

When we are afraid, when the world threatens to overwhelm us we need to listen to the voices – the voice inside ourselves, the voices of those who came before us, and the voices of those around us. Even in our darkest hour, we must reach out and have faith in those who are near to us, just as the little boy who reached out for his father’s hand in the dark room.

Just six weeks ago, New York was in the midst of an alarming blackout. In this city of millions, individual souls were not abandoned. Fire workers repelled down elevator shafts to remove those trapped inside. A pre-term baby whose ventilator lost power was kept alive for more than a half hour by three nurses doing CPR. One subway crew after evacuating the passengers returned to their darkened railcar to remain with a pregnant woman until medical assistance could arrive. People reached out to one another. People in their distress were not left alone.

As a community of Temple Beth El we, likewise, need to reach out to each other and do more to give others faith. Each of us needs to make a commitment to be part of our caring community. Make a meal and bring it to the Temple to be brought to a family in need. Make a condolence call. Make time each week to do something for someone who needs their faith strengthened. Write time for this in your calendar – make a call to someone who is sick, write a note to someone who is bereft, help someone who has lost a job make a contact to become reemployed. We need to have faith in others and we need to give others reason to have faith in us.

Finally, our religion teaches that we can turn to God as a shelter from life’s storms. For faith in God is the centerpiece of our tradition. Our prayers, our psalms, our silent meditation all serve the purpose of strengthening our lives.

While our people have known so many periods of hardship throughout our history, none was more frightening than the evils that were perpetrated against us during the Holocaust. Even then, our people found reason to hope. Countless writings scrawled on ghetto walls, scribbled in diaries, etched in the wooden barracks of the concentration camps, attest to the faith that gave those victims of horror the will to continue to live.

Inscribed on one wall of a cellar in Cologne where Jews hid from the Nazis was the following: I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining. I believe in love, even when feeling it not. I believe in God, even when God is silent.

In the face of losing everything they had: their livelihood, their homes, their communities, their families and friends, the Jews of just one generation before us continued to hold onto life and so many of them continued to have faith in God. In the Warsaw Ghetto, even the atheists, the non-observant, those who were unaffiliated flocked to the synagogues on this day of Yom Kippur. They spoke the prayers and sang the songs we utter today.

But it was not just the somber holidays on which they gathered – they celebrated the festivals as well. Elie Wiesel tells of an event that took place in an extermination camp on Simchat Torah – the day when we are enjoined to dance with the sacred scroll as we roll it from its end back to its beginning.

On this particular holiday, several hundred Jews gathered in one of the barracks. But there was no Sefer Torah in the camp with which to dance. As they were trying to solve their problem, an old man noticed a young boy standing against the wall. The old man turned to him and asked: "Do you remember what you learned in cheder, in religious school?"

"Yes," replied the boy, "I do"

"Do you remember the shema, our affirmation of faith?"

"Of course, I remember the sh'ma," answered the boy, “and I remember even more than that.”

"The sh'ma is enough" shouted the man. And with that he lifted the boy, and embraced him in his arms, and began dancing with him as if the boy were the Torah. And all joined in. They all danced and they sang and they cried. Never before had Jews celebrated Simchat Torah with such fervor. Even in such a time and place did our people sing and celebrate. They confronted their fear, the ultimate fear, with faith and with joy.

If, in the extermination camps, in the darkest nights of the history of our people danced, then surely so can we. Let us today celebrate the lives that we have. For joy is the ultimate antidote to fear. As Reb Nachman taught, “Always remember: joy is not merely incidental to your spiritual quest. It is vital.”

Life can be frightening. This day of Yom Kippur teaches that our fate is uncertain. And we have reason to fear. Yet the unetaneh tokef prayer that I mentioned earlier has a redemptive end. For it concludes by teaching that “Teshuvah u’tefilah u’tzedakah maavirin at roah hagzerah - repentance, prayer and charity can temper judgment’s severe decree.”

Teshuvah – turning back to ourselves, tefilah, turning to God, and tzedakah – turning to others will soften, and make livable the fate that we confront. As we discover our faith in ourselves, others, and God we can indeed overcome our fears.

In our High Holiday prayer book is the following beloved prayer: “Birth is a beginning and death a destination. And life is a journey, a going, a growing, from stage to stage. From innocence to awareness and ignorance to knowing; from weakness to strength or strength to weakness and often back again; from offense to forgiveness, from loneliness to love, from grief to understanding – from fear to faith…”

May all of us succeed in making the journey from fear to faith so that the coming year of our lives can be filled with blessing and with joy. Amen.