The young Jew laying tefillin on a plane from New York to Louisville had no idea that fulfilling a ritual mitzvah was going to shorten the flight because of a skittish flight attendant who believed he was strapping on a bomb while mumbling foreign words that sounded menacing. In many Jewish circles, the young man was a model Jewish male dressing himself for his morning prayers. He knew his duty, but his naiveté created an unexpected and unintended context for his behavior.

At a glance, Shemini Atzeret looks like it punctuates our festival calendar like sof pasuk, the end of a Torah verse. The Torah ordains Shemini Atzeret as a festival separate from Sukkot, with its own sacrifice. Yet it is treated as an eighth and ninth day of Sukkot. Despite the Torah’s intentions, “shemini” means “eighth.” While it is not the eighth day of Sukkot, the day after Shemini Atzeret, known as the ninth day, became the day for completing and restarting the Torah reading cycle. It was only in the Middle Ages that the “ninth day” became Simchat Torah.

There is nothing to fear but ourselves. Ernest Becker cites Abraham Maslow in “The Denial of Death” about “Freud’s greatest discovery”: “the great cause of much psychological illness is the fear of knowledge of oneself — of one’s emotions, impulses, memories, capacities, potentialities, of one’s destiny….”