In fear we feel isolated in a very limited world. With awe we experience a world that is vast and our connection to it. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
Dacher Keltner is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and the founding director of the university’s Greater Good Science Center. Last year he published his book Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How it Can Transform Your Life. In it he explores the personal emotional and social moral benefits of experiencing “something vast that transcends our understanding of the world.” Feelings of awe, he writes, shift attention away from the self and toward what is around us – to being, in the words of Jane Goodall, “amazed at things outside the self.”
Dr. Keltner’s research suggests that awe has great personal health benefits, including calming down our nervous system and triggering the release of oxytocin, a hormone that promotes positive feelings. He further found that awe activates the vagal nerves, clusters of neurons in the spinal cord that regulate various bodily functions, and slows our heart rate, relieves digestion and deepens breathing.
Awe also seems to affect that part of the cortex involved in negative self-talk, that critical voice in our head telling us that we are not smart, beautiful or rich enough. Judith Moskowitz (no relation), Chief of Intervention Science at Northwestern University of Feinberg School of Medicine, has studied how awe can help people cope with stress by redirecting a default focus on self. Sharon Salzberg, author and founder of the Insight Meditation Society, describes awe as “the absence of self-preoccupation.”
The Hebrew word yir’ah can be translated as either “fear” or “awe.” Fear is an emotional response to a perceived immediate threat. It roots us in the present and elicits a fight or flight response…or perhaps freezes us in a state of incapacitating immobility. It heightens our sense of vulnerability and isolation. By contrast, awe expands our awareness of ourselves as an integrated part of a great transcendent expanse. It induces a shift from self-focus to communal-focus.
Rather than decide how best to translate yir’ah when we encounter it in a written text, we might consider how to translate our fear response into an awe response. Bernard Steinberg, Director of Harvard Hillel from 1993 to 2010, wrote that “awe is what happens to fear when it stops being about me.”
The transformation of fear into awe is a major project in the Torah narrative. The Israelite people have been stuck in place for hundreds of years. The fear they carry is palpable…like the weight of harsh labor with mortar and bricks making their lives bitter. Moses as leader of liberation must model the transformation of fear into awe.
The Zohar digs into the surface of the text and uncovers Moses’ encounter with fear and his overcoming of it. It notes the text’s odd phrasing; “God said to Moses, Come to Pharaoh.” Why “come” instead of “go”? The Zohar sees Moses as being called to an interior experience rather than to an exterior one. He is forced to confront his own fear of the totality of evil that Pharaoh represents. At that moment of immobilizing fear, he experiences the divine response that he will not be alone in his confrontation with the crushing power that is Pharaoh.
Roberto Matta was born in Chile in 1911 to a Chilean father and a Spanish mother, who encouraged Matta’s interests in art, literature and languages. In his early 30s he moved to Paris where he served as an apprentice to modernist architect Le Corbusier. During this time he also established close relationships with members of the Latin American literary avant-garde, including Frederico Garcia Lorca, Pablo Neruda, and Gabriela Mistral. Through them he met Salvador Dali, who encouraged him in his artwork. Increasingly, Matta became immersed in the Surrealist world and their exploration of the subconscious.
Matta, along with many Surrealists and other artists, fled Europe in 1939. He arrived in New York, where he served as a link between the Surrealists and artists who would form the foundation of the Abstract Expressionist movement. Increasingly, Matta’s work combined a devotion to an exploration of the human’s internal world with a fervent social awareness and activism. He painted what he called “inscapes,” maps of the mind, as well as biomorphic vistas of a world on edge.
Pictured here is his Years of Fear. He painted it in 1941. Though lacking any traditional spatial orientations, it remains a landscape. In the upper right corner is a dark swirl of cataclysmic events. Below it is a field of more ordered lines and soothing palette of blues, grays and yellows. The canvass presents us with a tense engagement between conflict and resolution. Between terrors and fears encountered on both the physical plane and in the personal interior realm and the possibility of their resolution.
Ever involved in the world of politics and social activism, Matta always also pivoted toward the psychological and the spiritual dimension. For him a canvass constituted a “battlefield, not the physical one, but the one inside of us: fear against courage, criticism, and hate, suspicion and trust.” Resistance both to those internal dark forces and to the external forces of despotism was to be achieved through the exercise of human creativity. “Resistance is in each of us,” he wrote. “We resist by exercising our creativity. That is true poetry – when we seek new comparison, other ways of looking and conceiving of things.”
Moses leads the way for his people in their liberation, from slavery both as an external and as an internal force. He sees “other ways of looking and conceiving of things”…including himself. He beholds a burning bush that is not consumed. He experiences a God that is not defined or limited by space or dimension or time. And he discovers that he is not alone as he confronts his fears.
Thus transformed he is ready to lead his people out of the narrowness that Egypt represents and into the expanse that is the covenant of community, responsibility and mutual accountability.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PT) Thursday, January 18 as we explore to enter the expanse.
