Days of Awe

At the Rosh Hashanah service I attended this week, the rabbi lamented that in modern times, people have lost the ability to feel awe. Jews call the period from Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur the “days of awe,” when we stand in trembling and amazement before the infinite power of God and repent for our sins. The rabbi was suggesting that today, in the frenetic lives most of us lead, we rarely stop to contemplate things that exist far outside our own sphere of existence. And with the sense of control that modern technology can give us over our immediate environment, it is only in moments of disaster and catastrophe that we feel the sense of helplessness that the ancient Israelites felt before the power of God. He urged us to stop, clear our minds, and try to recapture a sense of awe.

The sermon suggested an odd paradox to me. Today, thanks to science, we have more reason than ever to feel awe at the universe, at creation, and it is worth reminding ourselves often of just how astonishing the discoveries have been. It is just a century since astronomers discovered galaxies. Now, they estimate that there are somewhere between 200 billion and 2 trillion galaxies in the universe, containing perhaps a total of 200 sextillion (200,000,000,000,000,000,000,000!) stars. The observable universe, they calculate, is so vast that light would take 93 billion years to travel across it. The earth is a single planet of a single star in a single galaxy, and it alone hosts millions of separate species. We think of ourselves as the most important of those species, but, on the other hand, the earth hosts 8 billion of us and perhaps 20 quadrillion ants. And each organism is a universe unto itself. Our bodies, we now know, contain as many as 36 trillion cells each, and we still understand relatively little about how they all work together. Each cell, meanwhile, contains scores of trillions of atoms. Just as the scale of the observable universe is unfathomably vast, so the scale of the atom is unfathomably tiny: I could, in theory, line up 300 billion hydrogen atoms on my thumbnail. And all of this, from the smallest subatomic particle to the largest galaxy, is in constant change, over unfathomable periods of time. The universe is, we think, 14.6 billion years old. Recognizable humans have existed for about the last one-eightieth of one percent of that period. Recognizable civilizations have existed for about the last one half of one percent of that period. The scientific observations I have been discussing here belong mostly to the last two percent of that period. And finally, as the philosophers remind us, we must take it on trust, in a sense, that all these figures, and everything they signify, exist “out there,” in reality, in the noumenal world, for we apprehend them inescapably through our sense organs, and through the operations of our nervous systems and brains. And we know so little about those things, and about the minds they host. “Inward lies the path of mystery,” wrote Novalis more than two hundred years ago (“Nach Innen geht der geheimnisvolle Weg”). The mysteries remain as great as ever. Indeed, all the incredible achievements of modern science, even while adding immeasurably to our knowledge, make us realize how very little, in the end, we still know and understand.

Yet even as science reveals creation to be an impossibly larger, more complex, more powerful thing than the ancient Israelites imagined, our awe before it has receded. Perhaps all the science and technology has fooled us into thinking that even if we don’t understand everything about the universe now (what is dark matter and dark energy?) we will have the capacity to do so someday—that there are no mysteries we cannot eventually pierce (perhaps with the help of AI?).

Mystery is a crucial component of awe. Even as the Israelites stood in awe of God, they confessed how little they knew about Him. During Rosh Hashanah services, Jews read the following passage from Isaiah (55:8-9): “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Sometimes, in scripture, God deigns to explain himself. But often, he doesn’t, and is it even worth trying to speculate about the motives and reasons of an intelligence so infinitely beyond our own? Faced with such a challenge, standing in awe, the scripture often tells us we have only one path to follow: blind obedience to God’s will.

Most modern people rebel at this idea, as we rebel at the notion that there are some things that are beyond our capacity to understand. We never want to offer blind obedience. We insist on having things explained to us, and on being able to give our rational consent to the rules we follow. As the rabbi said, we hate to give up our sense of control. And, in many ways, this is a good idea. We should question things, demand explanations and answers, strive to understand. Blind obedience is not a practice that modern societies should cultivate—especially blind obedience to people who claim to speak in God’s name. All too often, though, our refusal to offer blind obedience, our insistence on our own freedom of action, on our ability to know everything, makes us hesitant to admit our ignorance, our actual woeful lack of knowledge and expertise. The modern public sphere is a place where everyone feels free to offer their opinions on any subject they choose, to pretend to be fully knowledgeable when they are, at best, tourists in most subjects. And despite the vain Enlightenment hope that free and open discussion would engender rational critique, very often it produces little but cacophony and strife.

But between blind obedience on the one hand, and the fantasy of complete freedom and control on the other, there is a middle path, the path of acceptance: acceptance of what we cannot understand and control, acceptance of our own limits, humility. That is something we should all be practicing a great deal more. Taking a bit more time to stare up into the sky in awe, is a good start for helping to get there.