Are we truly afraid any more?

Fear (יִרְאָה, yirah) is a theme that runs through Pirkei Avot. We meet it first at Avot 1:3, where Antigonos Ish Socho counsels:

וִיהִי מוֹרָא שָׁמַֽיִם עֲלֵיכֶם

And let the fear of Heaven be upon you.

At Avot 2:11 the highest accolade that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai can give to one of his leading talmidim. Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel, is to describe him as a יְרֵא חֵטְא (“a fearer of sin”). In the baraitot at the end of the tractate, to be בְּיִרְאָה (“in a state of fear”) is one of the 48 modes by which one acquires Torah—and there are other references to fear. But what does the word mean, both inherently and to us now?

Our sages have had much to say about fear. They have taught us to distinguish between fear of punishment, fear of actually doing wrong and the sort of fear one experiences (which we probably equate with awe) when in the presence of something so great that we simply can’t take it in, something that, we intuitively feel, substantiates our belief in God’s role as Creator of the world or His immanent presence. When used by our Sages, the word yirah, in one context or another, seems to span a vast range of human emotions: at one extreme it is a deep sense of terror while, at the other, it is more like a profound form of respect.

What I want to ask here is not what yirah means but whether we really feel it the same way as the early audience of Avot students would have done. This question is sparked off by a comment made by Rabbi Yisroel Miller, The Wisdom of Avos, on Avot 2:1—a mishnah that doesn’t even contain the word yirah. He writes:

“[I] believe without question that on Rosh Hashanah my life hangs in the balance as Hashem decides my fate for the coming year, and yet I do not tremble as much as I did when a policeman once pulled me over for a traffic violation!”

I suspect that this honest personal admission by a respected orthodox rabbi reflects the experiences of many, if not most, of us today. If we truly felt that God was with us and watching us all the time, and genuinely felt that He rewards us for our good deeds and punishes us for our bad ones, our personal experience of fear would no doubt be greatly enhanced.  As it is, in our busy lives we find times to tune in to God’s supervision, for example at times of prayer or when we are preparing to perform a mitzvah, and times when, like a divine App, we do not turn Him off but leave Him running quietly in the background.

This leads to another question: what is the role of fear in our lives today? Is it to be reserved for threats to our physical and economic well-being, leaving us to rely on the censure of our fellow humans and peer pressure instead? And have we really forgotten how to fear?

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When love is not enough, try fear instead

When Abraham and Sarah travelled to Gerar, he told the local king Abimelech that Sarah was his sister. Why did Abraham do so? Because he revealed that, if it was revealed that they were husband and wife, Abimelech would kill him in order to marry Sarah himself. When Abimelech discovered the truth, he indignantly asked Abraham why he had said such a thing. Abraham replied (Bereshit 20:11): כִּי אָמַרְתִּי רַק אֵין-יִרְאַת אֱלֹהִים, בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה (“Because … there is no fear of God in this place”).

In his Hanhagot Adam Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov, author of the Bnei Issaschar, asks why Abraham answers that there is no fear of God in that place.  Why did he not answer: “Because there is no love of God in this place?”

The question is a good one. Of all the Jewish patriarchs, Abraham is the one most closely associated not with fear but with chesed (“kindness”), a quality associated with love. Indeed, Abraham’s fear of God is an as-yet unknown quality. It is only after the test of the akeidat Yitzchak (the Binding of Isaac) that a divine utterance establishes this trait: כִּי עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי, כִּי-יְרֵא אֱלֹהִים אַתָּה (“Now I know that you are a God-fearing man”, Bereshit 22:12). Would not Abraham be just as entitled to tell a lie to save his life on the basis that Abimelech was the king of a people who did not love God?

The truth of the matter is that fear of God, and of the deterrent effect of His punishment, is a more powerful inhibitor of bad behaviour than is love. The Torah itself recognises that we can convince ourselves that doing even objectively harmful and forbidden things to other people is right because we love them and can persuade ourselves that we are only doing what God wants us to do.  Thus in Vayikra 20:17 the word chesed (literally “kindness” but here meaning the exact opposite) is used where a man is unequivocally forbidden to commit incest with his sister. Abimelech’s domain might well have been a place where there was love of God but no sense of deterrence to accompany it. Only fear of God’s judgement will suffice.

Both fear and love receive their due in Pirkei Avot and this is hardly surprising. Both are basic human responses to relationships at many different levels. There is however one almost incidental reference to fear that I’d like to highlight here. At Avot 2:11, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai praises one of his talmidim, Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel as being yarei chet (“fearful of sin”). This is a rather strange sort of praise. Surely we expect every rabbi worth his salt to be afraid of sin; it’s effectively an entry-level virtue for anyone who aspires to be a seriously practising Jew.

But maybe there is more to this praise. Of course we are supposed to be afraid of sinning against God, against offending Him and then being punished. But how many of us can honestly say that we are so fine-tuned to our immediate circumstances and our environment that we are afraid of other people sinning too? When he stayed in Gerar, Abraham manifested his fear of not sinning himself but of other people’s sinning—and it may be that, when Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai commended his pupil for his fear of sin, it was this extra level of sensitivity that he had in mind.

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