There’s a type of awe that surrounds the Jewish High Holy Days that is solemn, fearsome. People beating their chests, dressed in all white, lying on the ground.
During these 10 Days of Awe, God is said to be deciding who will and will not be inscribed in the Book of Life for the coming year. Even the word itself is tinged with dread: Etymologists traced “awe” back to the Middle English “ege,” which meant fear.
I grew up more religiously observant than I am now, so that awe used to feel easier to come by. At synagogue, reciting prayers, I was tuned into the divine, the otherworldly. More recently, I have spent these holidays curious about a different kind of awe, one that is more based in wonder than in fear.
In his book on the topic, aptly titled “Awe,” Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that the sensation is not mysterious or unknowable. Instead, he writes, it is an emotion that scientists can detect. Keltner and his team collected 2,600 accounts of awe from people around the world and created a taxonomy of activities that spark it.