I have been practicing Mussar (Jewish ethics or character development, cultivating an inner awareness or perspective for the purpose of gradual behavioral self-improvement) for a number of years now and I have yet to find a definition of Yirah that I think fully represents this Hebrew word or concept. The closest I have come to this concept (which really can’t be captured by words) is “awe, sacredness, wonder of G-d and G-d’s creations, and how we can act in G-d-like ways.”
Rabbi Elya Lopian defined Mussar as “making the heart understand what the mind knows.” Mussar is a set of tools to make physical the high ideals we intellectually know but may not actually live by – by taking small steps toward incorporating them into our daily life. It’s a process of waking up to our own personal spiritual curriculum. Maybe you need to work on patience, or compassion, or generosity. Each of these traits has practices we can undertake to slowly improve. We watch our progress and notice stumbling blocks or gradual improvement. Often this is done in a small group in order to share soul stories and provide support and discussion. This is how we grow toward our personal potential as human beings.
What is Yirah? It is the closest we can come to conceptualizing the divine wonder of our human experience, our purpose in life, and what the Divine is. It is an emotional and spiritual sense that “lifts the veil” in a way so that you know that what we see on our mundane, earthly plane is just the beginning of something much richer, much more complete, and much more holy than we can know.
It is reverence, like the wonder felt standing amongst 800-year-old redwood trees.
It is awe, like standing amidst the flutter and swirl of thousands of monarch butterflies migrating north.
It is amazement, like holding a newborn baby that has developed in the womb miraculously with everything it will need to function in life, without us having to do a thing.
It is vulnerability, like viewing an eclipse or a meteor streaking across the night sky and realizing how very small one person is in such a universe.
And yet…
Yirah doesn’t have to be experienced in these grand moments. It’s really about cultivating our own sense of open-eyed amazement at anything and everything. It’s experiencing each veined leaf of a tree or each eyelash on a child’s face as if you’ve never seen it before. It’s watching the clouds move with the wind or experiencing the wondrous movement of your body as you walk. It can be found anywhere if we slow down and cultivate our awareness of it.
This series is meant to explore moments of Yirah in my own life and to give you the opportunity to ponder how you look at your own life. I have just returned from a trip to Israel, where I experienced many of those moments. I’m excited to share them with you.
