When I was a child, I learned that I was afraid of heights. It came to me after an IMAX theater experience ended and my parents led us from the dark theater into the bright light, outdoors. With a pressing crowd behind us, we quickly approached three flights of stairs to the ground level, which were open steel walkways. I could see all the way to the bottom below us. I remember instinctively reaching for the walls and holding on for dear life. I couldn’t move. My fearful reaction scared my parents. Carefully, they peeled my hands off the wall and we moved together down the stairs to the ground.

If you suffer from this or another fear, it isn’t easily overcome. It triggers a response. The solution is to avoid it or to find a stabilizing force. Today, my wife knows that stairs without risers between the steps or a glass elevator require us to find another way up or down. Such phobias or fears are similar to a suddenly unfamiliar event or an earth-shattering experience. They’re all times that require a place to sit, a hand to hold, or a reason to believe.

In Neil MacGregor’s book, Living with the Gods, he wrote about religious works of art. He cited Rowan Williams (former Archbishop of Canterbury), who explained, “…Originality is not what you prize. What you look for and value is reliability, for a way of entering into the on-going stream of a common life.”

Originality can create awe. In Judaism, it can happen when we look at an old Torah scroll from the Middle Ages, or even a facsimile of the Sarajevo Haggadah. It happens because the original thing, like something from Mt. Sinai, holds the source of all that power depicted in our expectations of faith. But its rarity is what moves Williams to conclude that originality is “not what [we] prize.” It can’t be. We can’t rely on originality for faith; it’s too rare and unreachable.

Instead, he wrote that we should value reliability. When a religious experience connects us to an “on-going stream of common life,” we are part of what was past and what is present. In Judaism, we call them mitzvot. Engaging in Torah or participating in a Passover Seder with a Haggadah, are just two examples. These reliable Jewish experiences provide connection, community, and stability. Similarly, Jewish objects, though not icons or idols, connect us, too. It happens when we make Shabbat with our grandparents’ candlesticks or our b’nei mitzvah kiddush cup. Likewise, regular participation in mitzvot, such as our annual mitzvah project to serve meals to families at Ronald McDonald House on Christmas Day, is a reliable religious experience that engages us in the “on-going stream of [an otherwise] common life.” All these reliable religious acts transform “common” events into holy or elevated deeds, because they respond to our covenant with God, past and present.

Like my fear of heights, fears and phobias require safe places from which to regain our bearings. But the ambiguities of daily life also require safe places where we can center ourselves and revive hope in our outlook. Reliability, and not just originality, can propel us to seek and find in religion what we need.

Rabbi Sam Karff^z”l used to teach, “We’re all spiritual; the greatest expression of that spirituality is participation in one’s own religion.” As the world grows ever more complex, we have the best materials in a rich inheritance of Torah, writ large. In Judaism, we find our reliable faith.

L’Shalom,