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| Me by the water on Tashlich 2016. |
What if you could cast off fear? Imagine how free you would be.
It happened for me in 2016, during a Jewish ritual called Tashlich, which takes place over the Days of Awe. I cast off fear.
Oxford dictionary definition of "Awe."
"a feeling of reverential respect mixed with fear or wonder."
The "Days of Awe" are the Ten Days of Repentance between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur during which some Jews meditate on ask for forgiveness and transformation. Someone, I forget who, took this picture of me during Tashlich in 2016.
Tashlich is a Jewish ceremony that means "casting off" and is performed during the Days of Awe, typically on the afternoon of Rosh Hashanah.
Simply put, the ritual involves symbolically letting go of, casting off, the previous year's sins at a body of water.
The question I am writing to address is "How to cast off fear?" My answer is based on a personal experience that took place during Tashlich that year.
I believe we cast off fear by way of substitution. In other words, you cast off worldly fear by substituting supernatural fear. You replace trivial fears with a much greater fear -- the fear of the LORD!
On Rosh Hashanah, Jews attempt to be at Mount Sinai with the Blast of the Trumpet. On Yom Teruah (the day of the blast) we hear the call of the Shofar, the Ram's horn that was the substitute for Isaac, who Abraham loved.
On Tashlich in 2016, as I stood at the water with my eyes closed, I prayed to know what to cast off. I honestly didn't know. I waited silently for some sort of answer. Something amazing happened.
A movie began to play on the inside of my eyelids. It was images from when I was toddler, a child, a teenager ... my life was literally flashing before me. Then at the moment the images stopped the answer came to me in one word. Hashem told me to cast off Fear. So I did!
I returned from the water as Jonah. That was the very moment, the exact moment, my name went from Robert Jonah Ritter to just Jonah. My life started over in a way. For me personally, Jonah is a sign of something deeper. That is another story.
The message I want to get across is about substitution.
Fear is programmed into humans by God's design. Our survival depends on our emotions. Every emotion can also be unhealthy and lead to our death. These emotions fill us. They make up the experiences of our life. If we remove them we start to die. So we can't simply eliminate fear. But we can substitute unhealthy fear for healthy fear. That's what I did on Tashlich. I cast off the unheathly fears that filled my life with fear of the Lord.
In a supernatural sense, I cast off a big part of myself. When I became Jonah and I opened my eyes at the water and I saw the world in a new way. I was free.
Hope and pray for the Lord to give you ears to hear and eyes to see. May the Lord guard your way and grant you a sweet New Year.
L'Shanah Tovah Tikateivu.