Remember the last time you were really afraid? Heart racing. Hands shaking. Chest heavy. Mind already three steps down the worst possible path.
Some fears don’t stay in our heads. They live in our bodies. And fear has been running more of our lives, and more of this country, than we are willing to admit.
I once worked on a mental health helpline. Again and again, during my four-hour shifts, I heard this question: “Am I going to be okay?”
Individuals in a mental health crisis would ask me — searching for assurance, sometimes between long silences, sometimes through tears until they got the words out. Spouses and parents would ask it too, is my loved one going to be the same? “Am I going to be okay?”
I never really knew how to answer it. “You’re not alone,” I’d say, and I’d pass along resources — support groups, books, websites. But that wasn’t really what people were asking for. They were asking me to tell them how the story ends. They wanted certainty. And that was the one thing I could never give them.
Will I be okay? It is a question that extends far beyond a moment of crisis. We ask it when we’re physically sick. When a relationship is falling apart. When we make a mistake. When we’re standing at the edge of a decision with no idea what’s on the other side.
Am I good enough? What if I fail? What if I change, and discover the life on the other side of that change is not what I imagined?
Fear is not inherently a bad thing. It tells us to stop because there is real danger ahead. But fear can also hold us back. It says: not to have the hard conversation. Not to take the risk. Not to apologize first. Not to do anything new.
When I think of fear, the words of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a Hasidic rabbi and 18th century spiritual teacher, echo in my head. 1 Kol ha’olam kulo gesher tzar me’od, “The whole world is a very narrow bridge,” v’ha’ikar lo l’fached klal, “and the most important thing is not to be afraid.” These words have been turned into a song, echoed at camps, youth groups and sanctuaries just like this one. And for so long, I heard their simple lesson: life is scary, the bridge is narrow, don’t be afraid.
Rebbe Nachman does not say the bridge eventually widens. He does not say that if we’re careful, or faithful, or good enough, the ground beneath us will feel more solid. The bridge stays narrow. That is simply the reality of being human. We are always, in some sense, crossing a narrow bridge.
But Nachman’s teaching was never just about the bridge, it was about the fear of the person standing on it. Fear itself makes our world more narrow. When we are afraid, we see only what might go wrong. We confuse the safest choice with the right choice, and our world gets smaller. Psychologist Susan David describes this as getting stuck— when a difficult emotion doesn’t just pass through us, but takes charge, narrowing our choices only to the ones fear finds acceptable.2It isn’t always fight or flight. Sometimes fear simply convinces us to be stuck, to freeze, to make our lives a little smaller than they might otherwise be.
Rebbe Nachman doesn’t just say lo l’fached — don’t be afraid — as if that were even possible. He says lo l’fached klal — the essential thing is not to be completely overcome by fear. Not to let it take over the whole bridge, nor our whole self and our whole world.
We will never eliminate fear. The only question is whether we let it shrink our world, or whether we will step forward on the bridge anyway.
And if fear can shrink one life, what happens when fear starts shaping an entire community?
Twenty-five years ago, our country watched the sky fall. The morning of 9/11 has shaped how a whole nation sees danger and each other ever since. Collective fear doesn’t stay contained to a single moment. It becomes a lens.
This past summer, I ran a bystander intervention program for teens at camp, teaching them how to recognize harmful behavior and what they can do when they see it happening. We walked through scenarios like someone drops an antisemitic image in the group chat or a swastika shows up on a wall at school — and I asked: who would speak up? Most of the room stayed in the “do nothing” category.
I asked if the scenarios felt familiar. Almost every hand went up. And then they told me what happened next, in their own lives: nothing. A photo was taken. Something got painted over. No one spoke of it again. Parents had called, emailed, shown up to meetings — and still, nothing changed.
That’s the part that has stayed with me. It wasn’t only that these kids had already lived through antisemitism, at their age. It was that they had already learned a lesson: that speaking up doesn’t matter. That someone else will deal with it, or no one will, and either way it won’t be them. They weren’t cynical. They were logical.
I left that room with a pit in my stomach that didn’t go away. Is this generation going to be okay? Are we, Jewish Americans, going to be okay? That pit in my stomach was collective fear.
We have seen it on our own streets. This is not a memory. And Jewish memory has kept us alive. But there is a difference between remembering danger and letting danger become the center of our imagination — and there is a difference between a community that remembers what happened to us and a generation that has quietly come to understand: there is no point in doing anything about what is happening to us.
Fear works on a community the way it works on a person: it makes the world smaller. It stops asking “will I be okay?” and starts asking, “who can we trust? Who is one of us?
Who is against us?” We withdraw. We grow suspicious. And it reorganizes how we see ourselves.
If the only story we tell about Jewish life is the story of what can happen to us, antisemitism doesn’t just threaten our safety. It begins to shape our identity.
This is exactly the silence I saw in that room at camp. Not students who didn’t care. Students who had already decided their voice wouldn’t change anything.
I recently listened to a podcast with Dara Horn, author of People Love Dead Jews. She described speaking on college campuses, facing hostile students, and afterward, Jewish students would approach her, impressed, and explain that they could never do what she just did, they could never stand up the way she did. They didn’t know as much as she did,
they said. Horn says that wasn’t the problem. What they needed wasn’t more knowledge. It was courage. She calls it a Queen Esther moment: the instant you realize speaking up might cost you something — and when you finally do, you discover how many people were quietly waiting for someone to say it first. As she tells students again and again: that somebody could be you.3
This is what courage means for a Jewish community. Not pretending antisemitism isn’t real. Not abandoning safety. It means protecting ourselves without letting fear define us. We should not let hatred teach us to hate. We should not let fear become our identity. We should not build a Jewish future organized only around survival — because survival is not the end of the Jewish story. It is the beginning.
Our collective question isn’t simply, will we be okay? It is: what kind of Jews will we become because we are afraid? We can grow quieter, more closed, more suspicious and wait for someone else to speak for us, the way those teens at camp already have. Or we can grow more rooted in Jewish life, more willing to name antisemitism clearly and stand up for ourselves, while refusing to let fear set the boundaries of our compassion.
Collective fear asks us to be quiet. Courage asks us to speak.
And beneath both, beneath the personal and the collective, there is another layer: existential fear.
What if I can’t control what happens? What if the country I call home changes in ways I don’t recognize? What if someone I love becomes terminally ill? The root of these questions is not “will I be okay” or even “will we be okay.” It is: will anything ever be okay?
Here, fear can become something more than a warning. It can become despair. We want certainty, but we cannot know what’s coming. On Yom Kippur we will recite the prayer Unetaneh Tokef, and say out loud what we spend most of our lives avoiding: we do not know what this year will bring. Some will live and some will die. And it is not in our control.
We want to believe that if we’re careful enough, we can keep the worst things from happening. Unetaneh Tokef refuses to grant us that illusion. And if we cannot control the outcome, the fear underneath starts to whisper: so why bother trying?
But the prayer does not leave us there without a path forward. After naming what we cannot control, it offers us actions: teshuvah- repentance, tefillah- prayer, tzedakah righteous and just work.
That is the distinction, between desiring control and taking action and responsibility. Control says: I need to know how this year turns out before I decide how to live it. Responsibility says: I don’t get to know how this year turns out, and I will decide how I live it anyway.
Unetaneh Tokef makes sure we cannot pretend to have control. But we can take responsibility for the lives we live inside that uncertainty. We can choose our response. We can choose the kind of person we want to be. We can choose what we stand for.
And that is what teshuvah, tefillah, and tzedakah actually are. Actions we take without guarantees. Teshuvah, repentance is our attempt to repair what we can, even though we cannot undo what’s already happened. Tefillah, prayer, give us moments and words to reach beyond ourselves. And tzedakah provides for a greater good, even though we cannot control the outcome of anyone’s lives. This is what responsibility looks like when it is guided by courage.
That may be the courage the High Holy Days ask of us — not the courage to believe nothing bad will happen, but the courage to walk through fear without pretending it isn’t there.
The Hebrew word yirah holds both fear and awe. It is the feeling of standing before something larger than ourselves, something we cannot fully control. And that is where courage leads — not to certainty, but to a life with our eyes open to what we cannot control, and yet, we are still willing to step forward.
Personal, collective fear and existential fear. Three different fears, asking for certainty and safety in the future. One answer to all three: courage.
As we enter this New Year of 5787, I want to challenge us to say: We will be okay.
Not because everything will work out exactly as we want. Rather, because we can choose courage over fear. Because we can speak up when everyone else is waiting. Because we can build a Jewish life shaped by our values and our courageous actions rather than by what we are afraid of.
I challenge us to act with courage. Think of the one moment last year when we stayed quiet when we wished we had spoken. The comment we let pass. The invitation we did not extend. The Jewish star necklace we left in the drawer. This year, when that moment comes again — speak up. Make the call. Wear it proudly.
Fear will always be part of being human. But fear does not get the final word. The bridge will always be narrow. We will walk forward anyway. And if we’re courageous enough to keep walking, we’ll discover that on the other side of fear is not certainty. It is yirah. Awe. Wonder. A life still open to what might be.
In this new year, may each of us find the courage to walk our own narrow bridge. May we find the courage to speak before we know who will stand with us. May we find the awe waiting for us on the other side of our fear.
And may we say, together — not only tonight, but all year long:
We will be okay. Because we will choose courage.
Ken yihi ratzon, may it be God’s will