Days of Awe

“The Days of Awe are coming.” Rather than a tagline for a Netflix series modeled on Game of Thrones, the phrase is the literal translation of Yamim Nora’im, or Jewish High Holidays. These awesome days begin with Rosh Hashanah on September 22 and reach a crescendo with Yom Kippur on October 1.

As a freshly minted man by the grace of a bar mitzvah, I cowered from the awe inspired by the fierce god who, Moses reminds the Israelites in Deuteronomy, spoke to them, unseen, through fire. “The gate between heaven and earth cracks open,” I was reminded, and “the Book of Life and the Book of Death are opened once again, and your name is written in one of them.”

Words chiseled on tablets in the mists of the distant past seem to carry greater weight than do words appearing on screens today. And yet, even though I am no longer an observant Jew, I am still filled with a kind of dread when the Days of Awe approach. They remind me, I imagine, of the fragility, ephemerality, and sheer contingency of our lives. Hardly surprising, then, that both “fear” and “awe” are encompassed by one word in Hebrew, yirah.

But this holiday also reminds me of a more salutary notion of awe. It is not only the stuff of reptilian fright or existential angst, but also the sort of extraordinary emotion that we embrace. Indeed, at rare and ravishing moments, we are elected when we least expect it to experience this kind of awe, a moment when we lose a sense of self and find a sensation that cannot be measured precisely because it is both immeasurable yet somehow immanent.

A glance back to the late 18th century helps explain the layered meanings of the word. In their reaction to the idolization of reason by the philosophes Voltaire and Diderot, the Romantics secularized—or, perhaps more accurately, naturalized—the meaning of awe. Not only was it something that ignited great fear, it was also something at once of this world and otherworldly, opening vistas that inspired admiration and reverence.

Perhaps no one was more important in the birth of this new understanding of awe than Edmund Burke. We tend to think of him as the great Anglo-Irish advocate of conservatism. But in his own time, Burke was also a leading light of Romanticism.

In his influential essay on the beautiful and the sublime, he declared that when we are confronted by the latter—namely, the vast and at times violent sights in nature, like wind-wracked seas or storm-crowned mountains—we are filled, even lifted, by the combined sensations of horror and thrill, dread and delight. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,” he wrote, “when those causes operate most powerfully is Astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”

Thus, the once-feared Alps, crossed by the occasional traveler whose sole aim was to leave them behind as quickly as possible, became magnets for European tourists famished for sublimity. This taming—packaging, really—of the sublime inevitably led to ever greater efforts to experience the sensation. It certainly explains, in part, why Mount Everest is now besieged by amateur climbers who are trashing it in their thirst for a taste of sublime purity, and the one-percenters who, in search of the otherworldly, spend obscene amounts of money to spend a few minutes gazing at Earth from outer space.

Yet perhaps we do not need alpine guides, but instead moral guides to experience this emotion. As a historian of France under the Nazi occupation, I cannot help but return, time and again, to the case of André Trocmé. He was a Protestant pastor and an ardent pacifist in the village of Chambon-sur-Lignon, a dot on the map of the rocky and austere Massif Central region in south-central France. Eighty-five years ago, that dot soon became a haven of safety for men, women, and children who were in fear for their lives.

In 1940, Trocmé and his equally remarkable wife, Magda, launched their effort to rescue as many Jewish refugees as possible who were fleeing Vichy police and SS officials. From his pulpit, Trocmé used his pulpit to spur les Chambonais to action. “Tremendous pressure will be put on us to submit passively to a totalitarian ideology,” he warned his parishioners. Yet, Trocmé continued, the “duty of Christians is to use the weapons of the Spirit to oppose the violence that they will try to put on our consciences. … We shall resist whenever our adversaries demand of us obedience contrary to the orders of the gospel. We shall do so without fear, but also without pride and without hate.”

Over the next four years, while Vichy collaborated with the Nazi implementation of the Final Solution, Trocmé and his congregation were, in every sense of the phrase, as good as their word. They made, in fact, their word flesh. As a growing stream of Jewish refugees, as well as French Jews whom Vichy had denaturalized, fled to Chambon, the townspeople opened wide their doors. They created safe houses, forged identity cards, sheltered, fed, and educated thousands of desperate Jewish men, women, and children.

The moral imperative of caring for children was the driving force in the young life of Trocmé’s nephew, Daniel Trocmé. He had come to Chambon to be a teacher, but he eventually found himself in the role of their protector. When the police captured his group of students, the young Trocmé refused to abandon the children. Instead, he kept them close, calming them as best he could. And he died with them at the extermination camp of Maidenek. Daniel Trocmé freely chose to follow the same ethical teaching expressed by his uncle. (In fact, Trocmé and his fellow pastors were also arrested and sent to a concentration camp, but they were mysteriously released a few months later.)

In his landmark account of Chambon, Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, the late American philosopher Philip Hallie was obsessed by a single question: Why did goodness happen not only in Chambon, but also the surrounding towns and villages? Historians, psychologists, and philosophers have since widened and deepened the search for an answer to this question. It turns out that the nature of goodness is perhaps even more difficult to isolate than is the nature of evil. But if one had to boil it down, it might come down to the words spoken by André Trocmé to a French officer who had demanded the whereabout of the Jews the pastor had hidden. “We do not know what a Jew is,” Trocmé replied. “We know only men.”

If we reflect, unhurriedly and patiently, not just on this imperative, but also on the context in which Trocmé and hundreds of other rescuers acted on it, we might experience a sensation of awe as great as when we gaze across the southern ridge of the Grand Canyon. In both cases, we encounter an ancient virtue, reverence, praised by the late classicist Paul Woodruff. It is the capacity, he writes, “to feel respect in the right way toward the right people, to feel awe towards an object that transcends particular human interests.”

I, for one, feel that same awe and same reverence when I stumble across such acts of goodness in our own dark times. There have been many such instances—too many to count—of Americans, from prominent politicians to my own neighbors, who are now risking imprisonment. They are acting on the moral command that, though expressed by Trocmé, spans all faiths and civilizations. These instances “transcend particular human interests”—the many reasons we give ourselves to go about our lives rather than concern ourselves with the lives of strangers—and spark our sense of reverence.

It turns out the days of awe have always been with us.