The Days of Awe 2008
The ten days between Rosh Hashanah (beginning at sundown on Monday September 29th) and Yom Kippur (ending at sundown on Thursday, October 9th) are known as the Days of Awe, Yameem Nora-eem.
The root word of nora-eem is the Hebrew word yare. Yare means to be afraid, to fear, to revere, to have a positive feeling of reverence for God. We see the word used in Genesis 3:10 And he [Adam] said, "I heard the sound of Thee in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid myself.
The midwives feared God and saved the male Israelite babies. Exodus 1:17
Moses hid his face from God on Mount Sinai, for he was afraid to look at God. Exodus 3:6
Only fear the LORD and serve Him in truth with all your heart; for consider what great things He has done for you. I Samuel 12:24
Let all the earth fear the LORD; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. Psalm 33:8
We are right now in the middle of the Ten Days of Awe, ten days of fearing God. This is a time to focus on God, and His Awesomeness. It is a time to focus on the awesome things that God has done for us. The foremost being the shedding of the precious blood of Yeshua Jesus. In Him, all things are new. He is Awesome, Forgiving, Merciful, loving & good. He is working all things together for good, for those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
A parallel word to yare is guwr. It can mean to stand in awe, to be in awe, to be afraid, to dread, to fear. But it can also mean to sojourn, to dwell, to remain, to inhabit, abide.
Let all the earth fear the LORD; Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of Him. Psalm 33:8
"I am the vine, you are the branches; he who abides in Me, and I in him, he bears much fruit; for apart from Me you can do nothing. John 15:5
More than the rituals that embrace this holy day are the truths that God desires to drill into our spirits: am I truly submitting to God? Do I approach His holy gathering place as adamat kodesh - holy ground? Or do I approach Him as my shopping-list granter? Is He just my sounding board? Do I invite Him as an honored Guest when I conduct my own private pity party?
A traditional theme of the Days of Awe is that God maintains a Divine Book of Life, known as the Sefer Chaim, in which our individual fate for the next year is recorded: who shall live and who shall die, who shall have a good life and who shall not for the next year. This concept of Divine Inscription is the source of the common greeting during this complex, festive and spiritually awesome period: l’shanah tovah tika-tay-vu which means "May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year!"
Traditional Jewish belief says that these inscriptions in this Book of Life are made on Rosh Hashanah, but redemption is possible during the Days of Awe, depending on our actions offered to God in good faith. We may alter God’s potentially negative decrees. There are 3 types of actions that may change these adverse decrees:
teshuvah -- true, heartfelt repentance;
tefilah -- solemn prayer; and
tzedakah -- righteous acts/good deeds, especially, charity in its various forms
The Book of Life is sealed on Yom Kippur, just before sundown, after which Gods decrees for the upcoming year are fixed.
In Rabbi Alan Lew’s book, This is Real & You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation, he writes about how the Days of Awe are an opportunity for us to experience brokenheartedness in a deep way, that opens us up to compassion, to action and to faith. He writes, of the human condition, of our mortality and of our capacity for loss: This is very real and absolutely inescapable. And we are truly, utterly unprepared. We have nothing to offer God and each other but ourselves, and our brokenness… and thankfully, the hope of Jesus. That will be enough.
Humanity and nature are on a continuous collision course. In just the last few years, people in Pakistan had to dig their loved ones out of rubble; people in Nicaragua had to dig their loved ones out of mud; people in Indonesia are still recovering from the disappearance of over 100,000 men, women and children as entire villages disappeared into the sea; people in New Orleans and the Galveston area are still reclaiming their flooded lives in the aftermath of Katrina and Ike. All of those people are reaching through despair, living in a shattered present, stumbling toward a shattered future, longing for the restoration of an elusive hope.
During these Days of Awe, if we look beyond our own small world with its own set of circumstances and difficulties, we should find ourselves in utter shock and awe. But we typically find ourselves detached from terrible events if they do not touch our lives directly. Every day, more horrible news finds its way into our eyes, ears and lives – tsunamis, hurricanes, earthquakes, ongoing rumblings of a coming bird flu pandemic, economic meltdowns, evil regimes and wars that are claiming and displacing tens of thousands of lives. Right now, in the State of California, there is a vote coming before the people whether to allow the legality of gay marriage to stand as the law of the land. This one issue could forever change the spiritual landscape of our nation, but we brush it off and forget about it because we don’t personally feel its effects at this present moment. These are reminders that the world beneath our feet, the waters that flow around the earth and the powers that move us through this life, are much more precarious, much more transitory, much more prone to turn on us and the things we deem precious than we’d like to admit. In these Days of Awe, I think it’s important to acknowledge this head on, to remember how small we are in the large scheme of things, how fleeting our time is on this fierce and amazing planet and at the same time, the awesome responsibility that God has given us to “stand in the gap” for these situations. Yet most Christians avoid prayer and prayer gatherings like the plague, preferring to stay at home and watch “Desperate Housewives”, Grey’s Anatomy” or “Criminal Minds” and remain on the sidelines in the epic battle for the destiny of humanity until disaster strikes close to home. Then religious fervor rises and churches are full of people looking for answers and comfort. We saw it after 9/11, but once life returned to some sense or normalcy, church attendance actually went below 9/11 attendance figures and the sense of urgency in the pursuit of God returned to its original state of complacency.
The Days of Awe are a time for repentance, reconciliation and restoration. But they must begin with an awakening to the reality of how bad things are for many people, thus the blowing of the Shofar during Rosh Hashanah, also known as Yom Truah, or the Day of the Blast (blowing of the shofar).
There are numerous meanings and interpretations attached to this ritual. Rosh Hashanah is viewed theologically as the birthday of the world. The sounding of the shofar is Judaism’s way of celebrating God’s coronation as the Creator. The shofar also reminds us of the near sacrifice of Isaac on Mount Moriah, and the awesome revelation at Mount Sinai. But above all, the shrill, quivering, wailing blasts of the ram’s horn are to awaken us from our complacency, and remind us that we must move to that place of repentance, reconciliation and restoration.
The Days of Awe conclude with the final service of Yom Kippur, known as Ne’ilah. There is a tone of desperation in the prayers of this service. The service is sometimes referred to as “The Closing of the Gates”; think of it as the last opportunity to start fresh with a clean slate until next year.
If the gates truly were closing, how would we respond to these Days of Awe. If the middle of this week was the last opportunity to positions ourselves to experience the favor of the Lord for the next year, how would we pray, how would we speak and how would we act? Let’s wake up to the call of God. Let’s repent for our complacency to the world around us or our preoccupation with our own circumstances and focus on the things that are precious to God’s heart. If you don’t know what those things may be, a time of repentance and humility in His presence may reveal them to you. Or a quick look at the state of our world with its terrorism, its natural disasters, its economic upheavals and its general lack of morality and fear of the Lord would be a good place to begin crying out to the Lord for. Desperate people do desperate things while complacent people sleep. Let’s get desperate for God to release His holiness upon the immoral, His brokenness upon the apathetic and His blasting shofar upon those who are asleep. WAKE UP!
