Seeking Small Wonders

Today’s episode is a Shabbat Replay of our Saturday Morning Service on December 7th. Rabbi Steven delivered a sermon in which he made us all jealous of a recent trip to see the Northern Lights, and also edified us on the nature of awe from both a theological and neuroscience perspective. How can we cultivate this profound and uncanny sensation of the divine in our daily lives without vacationing in the northernmost city in the world?

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Produced by Mishkan Chicago. Music composed, produced, and performed by Kalman Strauss.

Transcript

Transcript

My mother and I have a tradition of traveling every year for Thanksgiving, in part because both of our birthdays fall during that week. We’ve often used our annual trip to escape from the cold, but this year my mom really wanted to see the Northern Lights. And so earlier this week, we found ourselves in Alta, Norway, which is the northernmost city in the world. Hunting for the Northern Lights (and our guides used the word “hunting” deliberately) requires a mixture of luck, patience, and tolerance for discomfort. The weather has to be cooperative. You need to let your eyes adjust to the darkness, which takes a good thirty minutes of standing in the dark. And you need to be outside, away from light — and warmth. But then you see the faint glow of the Northern Lights, dancing across the night sky. It’s a magnificent experience, made more awe inspiring by the fact that what you’re witnessing is the residue of solar storms, colliding with the magnetic field that protects our planet, tumbling down over the poles to jostle the molecules of the upper atmosphere: a celestial rain of greens and reds.

My phone was surprisingly good at capturing the Northern Lights, but it’s nearly impossible to translate the awe I felt in that moment through a photo.

In her book Help, Thanks, Wow, theologian Anne Lamott talks about the three essential prayers that every person, regardless of religious (or areligious) identification, does by instinct. The first is the cry for help when we feel stuck, when we’re facing an impossible situation, when we just need that extra push to get us through. The second is the gratitude we feel when something amazing happens, or when we had expected the worst but somehow — despite the odds — we’re okay. And the third, the third is awe. The “wow” we experience standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon, or holding a child for the first time, or hearing Cynthia Ervo hit every note in “Defying Gravity,” or looking up to see the Northern Lights.

Through both collective and individual experience, we know about the benefits of asking for help when needed. No one can go through life alone. And a lot of ink has been spilled (and our tradition is pretty insistent on) the need for gratitude, as a life-giving and life-sustaining practice. But I want to talk about the necessity of awe, which, of these three modalities, may seem the most like an indulgence, like icing on the cake. Because as we look at the world around us, as we doom-scroll through social media and read the daily headlines, the overwhelming feeling that I encounter is cynicism, if not despair. Increasingly, the world feels like an ugly, desperate, and broken place.

When we open the Torah this week, we read about Jacob: the third of our patriarchs, the one who wrestles with God (and prevails), who is given (and gives us) the name Israel, who will father — with our matriarchs Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah — the twelve tribes of our people. But the opening verses of our parashah is decades before any of that will occur. When reading these stories, it’s important to suspend our knowledge of what happens in the end, to truly get into the headspace, and heartspace, of these characters. The Jacob we encounter is in dire straits. He has just deceived his father and stolen the birthright from his older brother. He is fleeing for his life, through an untamed and inhospitable wilderness. He is heading to a place he’s never been, to find refuge among people he has never met. I can only imagine how desperate he must have felt in that moment, how helpless and despairing.

And so as the sun begins to set and darkness obscures the unfamiliar landscape around him, exhausted and bereft and scared, Jacob comes to a place and collapses. He takes a rock for his pillow (clearly, he is very tired) and lays down to rest. And then he dreams.

Jacob dreams of a ladder, stretching between heaven and earth. And on this ladder, divine messengers ascending and descending. And suddenly, he finds himself in the presence of God, who says:

 “Ani Adonai elohei Avraham avicha v’Yiztchak — I am Adonai the God of your forefathers Abraham and Isaac. The land you are standing on will be given to you and your offspring. Your descendents will be like the dust of the earth, spreading in every direction, west and east, north and south. Other people will bless themselves by your name. Remember that I am with you. I will protect you wherever you go and bring you back to this land. Lo e’ezavkha — I will not leave you.”

And then Jacob wakes up. He looks around at the sand and stones and shrubs, what was formerly the landscape of his despair, and exclaims: “Achein yesh Adonai ba’makom ha’zeh v’ani lo yadati — surely God is in this place, and I did not know!” Jacob is filled with awe. How amazing, how wonderful is this setting. This must be a dwelling place of the divine, a gateway to heaven. And so he takes the stone that had served as his pillow, he stands it upright, anoints it with oil, and names the place Beit El — the House of God.

In a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, awe is defined as the “emotional response to perceptually vast stimuli that transcend current frames of reference.” Or said another way, awe is the feeling we get when we encounter something that is bigger, deeper, more profound than what we’ve previously experienced. This scale can by physical: a soaring mountain, a vast canyon, the distant horizon of a boundless sea. But it can also be emotional: the wellspring of joy that rises within you when you fall in love, or the mind-bending experience of learning something that challenges everything you thought was true, or (as in Jacob’s case) finding yourself face-to-face with the Creator of All Things.

I imagine we have all had our moments of awe, the times when we couldn’t help but say “wow” at the world around us. If we’re lucky, over the course of our lives we will collect quite a few of these memories. Seeing the Northern Lights is certainly one of mine. We remember these moments not just because they are special or unique, but because they have a profound impact on how we understand ourselves and (by extension) our perception of existence itself.

There is a science to how awe shapes us. Yang Bai, a researcher at UC Berkeley, helped author a study that looked at the function awe plays in tempering our sense of self-importance, creating what they call a “small self” perspective. She explains:

“Awe helps you to stop focusing so much on yourself. And to look more to what’s around you — toward other people and the world at large.”

Jacob leaves his encounter with God comforted and encouraged, but also humbled. God doesn’t bless him with greatness, God blesses him with the promise that his descendants will be like dust. My friend Rabbi Zohar Atkins pointed me to a commentary by Sfornno, a 16th century rabbi and scholar, who writes: 

“After you have been humbled by like the dust of the earth, then you shall spread out in all directions.” 

The “spreading out” here is not simply physical, that Jacob’s descendents should find ourselves in every corner of the earth, but perceptual. He is able to adopt a wider lens, a God-like scale of time and space, a “small self” perspective.

I was also reminded of the wisdom of Rabbi Simcha Bunim of Peshischa who tells us that we should each have two pockets, and in one we should keep a note which says “For my sake the world was created,” while in the other we should keep a note saying “I am but dust and ashes.” Awe reminds us of our smallness, though not in a way that leads us to despair, but rather one that helps us understand the impossible miracle of our existence, and our place within the cosmic dance of the universe.

Going back to the study out of UC Berkeley, the researchers found that a small self perspective increases prosocial behavior. After an experience of awe, we are more likely to look to others for help. We are curious about their experience and perspective. We tend to act from a place of abundance, rather than view others through the suspicion of scarcity. We are nicer, more patient, and less-selfish.

Another study out of Stanford and the University of Minnesota found that people who experience awe feel like they have more time — a perception that has become increasingly rare in our busy, highly-accessible, productivity-driven world. Awe has the ability to alter the subjective experience of time, the researchers found. They write:

 “Experiences of awe bring people into the present moment. And being in the present moment underlies awe’s capacity to adjust time perception, influence decisions, and make life feel more satisfying than it would otherwise.”

Awe also breaks us out of our usual thought patterns. It exposes us to new possibilities, to the world as it could be, rather than only seeing the world that is in front of us, the world as it is. Awe induces hope, that there is more to life than what we have been given in this moment. Jacob wakes up from his dream with a new sense of purpose. He still doesn’t know what tomorrow might bring (and that’s still scary!), but he has the courage and the vision to face whatever may come his way.

Like Jacob, we find ourselves in the wilderness. I don’t need to list the many tragedies of this moment to remind us of the inhospitable landscape that we are traversing. Our inboxes and our social media threads remind us of this every day. Looking to the road ahead, we will need to ask each other for help. We will need to find space for gratitude, for blessings big and small. And we must cultivate awe, to help us keep perspective on what is in our power (for we are but dust and ashes) and the power that we have (for our sake, the world was created).

But how do we create opportunities for awe?

The big moments are great (and you should seek them out, as you’re able). But we also need to develop the habit of cultivating what the psychologist Dacher Keltner calls “small wonders.” He writes: 

“Don’t think you have to travel to an exotic locale or learn the finer points of classical music to fine awe. Do pause and look for moments of awe in the every day (and help young people notice them as well). When you go for a walk, notice the large and the small — the canopy of trees as well as the individual flowers and blades of grass. If you’re building a music playlist, add songs that make you feel connected to the larger world. Begin conversations with open-ended questions that point to mysteries rather than answers...Feeling awe is an antidote to our high-stakes, stressed-out, highly competitive times.”

In another interview with Inc. Magazine, Keltner lists eight opportunities for awe, what he calls the “eight wonders of life.” They are: moral beauty (what Mr. Rogers might call looking for the helpers); collective movement (whether a yoga class or a rave); nature; music; visual design; big ideas; encounters with life and death; and spirituality. Looking at this list, I couldn’t help but think of what we’re doing today, on Shabbat. Shabbat is a spiritual technology that creates space in our lives for experiencing “small wonders.” To be present with one another. To move together. To get outside. To sing. To contemplate beauty. To wrestle with our tradition. To celebrate new life and remember those who are no longer with us. And of course, to encounter the divine — however you might define it, whatever name you might give it. Now, I’m not saying you need to practice Shabbat in any particular way. But as we look down the long road ahead of us, consider how you might bring a bit of Shabbat into your weekly rhythms. It can be as simple as sharing food with friends, or lighting candles with a loved one, or coming to services to sing, or (if you’re feeling bold) setting down your phone for an hour or an evening or an entire day, to intentionally create opportunities for small wonders. For the experience of awe is not just something that lifts us our spirits; it will carry us through the months and years ahead.