Ekev

The Fear Factor - Miriam (Feldmann) Kaye 

Miriam (Feldmann) Kaye is a Jewish philosophy educator. She studied at Midreshet Lindenbaum, and has degrees in religious and interreligious philosophy. She is about to embark on a PhD in Postmodern Jewish Philosophy in Israel.

"Now, Israel, what does Hashem, your God, ask of you? Only to fear Hashem, your God, to go in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve Hashem, your God, with all your heart and with all your soul, to observe the Mitzvot (commandments) of Hashem and His decrees, which I command you today, for your benefit." Devarim 10:12

Memories of our fraught relationship with God abound in this week's Parasha - Ekev. We are reminded of our repeated rebelliousness in the desert such as our worship of the Golden Calf, and we are accused of being a 'stiff-necked people'. Immediately after this listing of events comes the verse cited above which commands, as well as encourages, our fear and love of God.

It strikes me as strange that we are commanded to fear God. How can feelings be commanded? Is this the basis of a healthy relationship - one based on fear? Should fear propel us to obey God? Yeshayahu Leibowitz, the twentieth century Israeli philosopher, asks the question of how we can be forced to fear or love God. He connects fear of God with service of God and states that ultimately they are interlinked: we are commanded to love and fear God in order to encourage us to obey God's Mitzvot - only once we are within the halakhic (legal) system do we have the freedom to think and explore as we wish. Leibowitz says that fear ultimately gives us freedom, albeit a restricted freedom.

A non-Jewish response to this question was offered by the eighteenth century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, who used the example of the Akeda (Binding of Isaac) to depict the problem of serving God out of fear. Kierkegaard describes Abraham as a 'Knight of Faith' who is ready to murder his own son for the sake of obeying God's will. Kierkegaard is appalled by Abraham's would-be actions, and decides that the power of faith must override any sense of 'what is right'. Kierkegaard says fear of God (what he terms 'the Absurd') should overrule our own sense of ethics for the greater purpose of serving God.

A second Jewish response is given by Rav Arama, a Mediaeval Spanish philosopher. He cites the following Talmudic story: at the moment of Revelation, God held Mount Sinai over the heads of the People of Israel in order to force their acceptance of the Torah (Tractate Shabbat 88). Although acceptance of the Torah was enacted through fear, it ultimately brought good things to us. Fear, says Arama, flies in the face of complacency. Without fear we would feel more comfortable with ourselves - but fear shakes us up, and forces us to look beyond ourselves and into the future. A lack of fear, he says, breeds fatalism - a lack of desire to know the unknown. Leibowitz agrees with Arama that the world of obedience, regimented as it may sound, provides opportunities for exploration and discovery within a particular world.

Arama retells the story of when the apostate Elisha Ben Abuya found out that he would never be allowed to repent. It is told of Elisha Ben Abuya, that he became fatalistic because he knew his end - he would die an apostate without being given the chance to continue his personal theological quest. He would never be able to acquire 'yir'ah' - fear - ever again, which had the potential to force him, in a Kierkegaardian sense, into the unknown.  Once we live within a committed Jewish life we may well lose some freedom, but our gain is that our lives become journeys of discovery into the magnificent unknown.

Shabbat shalom.