Looking Fear in the Eye

The other day when I was biking, I made a left turn that was a little too tight. There was a man on another bike making a right turn at the same time, and we came within maybe six feet of hitting each other. It wasn’t super-dangerous, but it was a little too close for comfort.

As many of you know I am a person very comfortable with cursing, but this man truly had a way with words that surpassed me. He started yelling at me, many choice words, about my tight turn.

Which of course brought out the Philadelphian in me and I got ready to rumble.

But then I used the calming mechanism that always works for me. I thought:

1. This guy might be a congregant, and

2. He’s just scared, so he’s not thinking straight.

So I apologized and biked on.

When you get scared, your nervous system floods with stress hormones. Fear is not, in the first instance, something that happens in the mind. It’s something that happens in the body.

Sometimes that’s exactly what you want. In real danger, the activation in your body helps you move fast and without overthinking. And sometimes it’s useless. When you’re about to speak in front of a large group of people, the racing heart does not help you sound measured and calm.

Fear instinct→ helpful to outrun a moose.

Usually→ no moose.

But those are the easy cases.

The hard case is the third one, when you genuinely cannot tell whether your fear is handing you crucial information for the moment, or whether what you’re feeling is actually connected to something that happened a long time ago and has no bearing on the room you’re standing in — like the person who grew up in a house where a raised voice meant something bad was about to happen, and who at fifty-two still goes rigid when they hear two people across a room start arguing.

How are we supposed to know when fear is to be heeded and when it’s to be overcome?

Our parsha this week leads us to a very tender answer.

Shoftim talks a lot about war, and specifically what is supposed to happen as the Israelites assemble for battle. First the priest comes forward and gives the speech you would expect:

Hear, O Israel. Let not your courage falter. Do not be in fear, or in panic, or in dread of them.

Standard-issue “be brave.” And then, interestingly, the officials step up and start sending people home.

• Is there anyone who built a new house and hasn’t dedicated it? Go home.

• Planted a vineyard and hasn’t harvested it? Go home.

• Betrothed but not yet married? Go home.

Lovely exemptions. Somebody with a just-starting life should not risk it in battle.

And then a fourth: Is there anyone afraid and disheartened? Go home.

That’s it. That’s the whole qualification. It never asks the man to justify his fear or examine it. It’s just: you can go.

In the Mishnah, Rabbi Yosi HaGelili looks at those first three exemptions and says something remarkable:

l’fikach talta lo haTorah et kol elu: therefore the Torah hung all of these on him, so that he could go back on account of them.

Translation? The house and the vineyard and the bride are a disguise. They exist so that the man who is leaving because he is frightened can walk out of that camp and have every single person assume he’s got grapes to tend.

The Torah built the scared man a cover story.

Which tells you what our tradition thinks fear is. Something so natural and real that anyone can feel it, and that they should be allowed to feel it, even as we understand that they can be embarrassed by it.

The rabbis continue: what exactly is the fear that the man carries? On this, the rabbis of the Mishnah can’t agree.

• Rabbi Akiva says: it’s exactly what it seems. It’s a man who cannot look at a drawn sword. The fear is a response to war.

• Rabbi Yosi HaGelili says: this is a man afraid because he is certain that something from his past is going to lead him to be punished in the current moment.

Two fears.

• One responds to a direct, apparent threat.

• The other is a call-back to a historical moment that makes everything in the current moment appear scarier than it actually is.

The psychologist Brené Brown defines worry as “a chain of negative thoughts about bad things that might happen in the future.” Fear about what hasn’t occurred. And the people who get free of it do it by asking two questions:

1. Does the actual data warrant me freaking out?

2. And even if so, will freaking out help?

That is, to a certain extent, the rabbis’ questions as well. When we are afraid:

1. Is there an actual sword in front of me?

2. Or am I dredging up something from the past, or did I catch this from somebody who got here before me — something that is making me more afraid than I really need to be in the current moment?

And then we act on the facts, not only on the feeling — knowing all the while that the feeling is real either way.

And fear is contagious. We know the Torah knew it, because of one word.

Right after that fourth Go home, the Torah gives its reason: v’lo yimas et l’vav echav kilvavo. So that he will not melt the heart of his brothers the way his own has melted.

Yimas. Melt. Like wax, like snow. Into nothing. Psychologists call it emotional contagion. We mimic the faces, voices, and postures around us, and then converge emotionally. The copying comes even before the feeling.

In other words, you do not catch someone’s fear by agreeing with it. You catch it by being in the room with it.

Which adds a third question to the two we already have: did I catch this from somebody else, or is this fear true to my own lived experience?

Because that is exactly what happened on my bike. I did not for one second think that we were going to collide. But my body went into the fear/anger response anyway, because the other guy’s did. I was lucky we were on bikes, and didn’t stop, because I needed the growing distance to ensure that his heart didn’t melt mine.

We live right now in a very tenuous moment for the American Jewish community. And it is not going to get easier anytime soon. I cannot offer you answers to this issue, but only questions to help guide us through the months and even years to come:

First, plainly: sometimes there is a sword. Some of what frightens us this year is not inherited, not imagined, not caught from anyone. When that is what’s happening, our tradition has no interest in talking you out of it, and neither do I.

But not all of it is the sword. We are a people with a very long memory — a gift that is also a reliable machine for producing dread. And right now, in our group chats and our feeds and our conversations at kiddush, we are melting each other. Somebody walks in steady and walks out frightened, and nothing happened in between. That isn’t information. That’s contagion.

So — three questions for this year.

Is there actually a sword in front of me?

Or am I dredging up a past that isn’t in this room?

Or did I catch this from somebody else — and if I did, who am I about to hand it to?

Or maybe a fourth. When I can’t tell which of the three I’m in — and we should all have the humility to know that’s most often the case — who do I trust to help me figure it out?

If you’re looking for a kavannah for these four weeks between tonight and the High Holidays, let it be this: locate the sword. Locate the feeling. Locate the courage. And locate the person who can tell you the difference on the days you can’t.

Shabbat shalom.