A Much-Needed Renewal of Awe

Rosh Hashanah 5785

Russ Resnik, UMJC Rabbinic Counsel

With Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, we enter the Ten Days of Awe that will continue through Yom Kippur.

But we live in a time when it’s hard to be awed . . . because awe is the response to the presence of a transcendent other, something or someone far greater than ourselves, greater than our understanding or our ability to perceive. Much of modern life has inoculated us from that awe, focusing instead on what can be explained and managed and quantified. But awe is something we need to be fully human.

This year on September 12, the entrepreneur Jared Isaacman became the first private citizen to walk in space.

“It’s gorgeous,” he said, in awe of what he could see, as he eased out of the spacecraft into the vacuum of space, hundreds of miles from Earth. “Back at home, we all have a lot of work to do. But from here, it sure looks like a perfect world,” Isaacman said as the capsule soared above the South Pacific. Cameras on board caught his silhouette, waist high at the hatch, with the blue Earth beneath. (Sky News, news.sky.com)

Isaacman reportedly spent hundreds of millions to gain this vision of awe. The call of the Shofar this week draws us all back to awe in more direct fashion, back to realizing we are in the presence of something—someone—far greater than ourselves.

In some of the special passages we read at Rosh Hashanah services, the Shofar announces the approach or presence of the King, as at Mount Sinai, although it’s not clear who is sounding the Shofar: “And when the blast of the Shofar sounded long and became louder and louder, Moses spoke, and God answered him by voice” (Exod 19:19). Perhaps it is the Lord himself who sounds the Shofar: “Then the Lord will be seen over them, and His arrow will go forth like lightning. The Lord God will blow the Shofar, and go with whirlwinds from the south” (Zech 9:14).

This is what we might call the Shofar from Above, calling us to attention, to alertness in the presence of the True King. Several times in Exodus when the Shofar is sounded the people tremble. We need to hear, to pay attention to, this awesome, flesh-trembling call amidst the secular-material age in which we’re living.

There’s also the voice of the Shofar from Below, when we sound the Shofar to remind God-who-is-present of our need for his gracious response.

On the day of your gladness also, and at your appointed feasts and at the beginnings of your months, you shall blow the [shofars] over your burnt offerings and over the sacrifices of your peace offerings. They shall be a reminder of you before your God: I am the LORD your God. (Num 10:10 ESV)

This Rosh Hashanah, let us be mindful of both, the Shofar from Above awakening us to the presence of God in our midst, and the Shofar from Below, as we call on God to remember his promises of compassion and deliverance, above all the promise of deliverance through the sacrifice of Messiah Yeshua.

Another essential text for Rosh Hashanah is the Akedah, the story of the binding of Isaac in Genesis 22, which sheds additional light on this matter of awe, in turn revealing deep insights into the matter of worship. Our fundamental human need for awe is also a need to worship, to know and recognize and serve One beyond ourselves.

God had told Abraham to take his uniquely loved son Isaac to the land of Moriyya “and offer him up there as an offering-up” (Fox trans), signifying an act of worship. When it’s time to make the final ascent to the place God had marked out, Abraham tells his two servants, “You stay here with the donkey, and I and the lad will go yonder; we will worship/bow down (nishtachaveh) and return to you” (22:5).

God created humankind—on Rosh Hashanah, according to the sages—as worshipers, those who would be in awe of him and serve him. Worship, like awe, is a fundamental human need, but left to ourselves we create our own ways to worship with human perspectives at the center. Maybe it’s always been this way, but our age has carried this to near-perfection, as evident in the recent spacewalk and its grasp for awe. Moreover, the dominant culture says it may be fine to speak of God and worship in abstract and subjective terms, but forget about speaking of a personal God who has revealed both himself and his expectations of humankind.

But God is the Creator of all. He created us as worshipers and is seeking those who will genuinely worship him, in spirit and in truth, as our Messiah teaches (John 4:24). The Shofar from Above is God calling us to worship in spirit and in truth, offering up not what we choose, but what God directs—even the best and most difficult to give up. We want to worship to a point. Our ancestors in the wilderness made the golden calf because Moses was gone too long. They wanted to worship in truth until it got too hard or too scary, until it seemed incompatible with their immediate human needs.

Abraham faces a similar test. When he and Isaac reach the appointed site, Abraham builds an altar, binds Isaac, and places him upon it to be offered up. Only then does the angel stop him and reveal a ram caught in a thicket by its horn, a ram that Abraham is to sacrifice in place of his son. When the angel stops Abraham from raising the knife to Isaac’s throat, he says, “For now I know that you are in awe of God” (22:12 Fox). Abraham’s act of worship isn’t only until it’s too demanding or too mysterious; it is in place despite, or better amid, what is too demanding and too mysterious. And it prepares the way for the Shofar from Below, for crying out to God for his merciful intervention.

The Days of Awe call us to a renewal of awe, which in turn yields a renewal of worship. Will we live in awe of God until it’s too challenging or too paradoxical—or amid the challenges and paradoxes life in this world always presents? Will we devote ourselves this New Year to worshiping in spirit and in truth, knowing that the Father seeks such to worship him?