The Long and Short Way

Understanding the Biblical Command Not To Fear

R’ Yehoshua ben Chananyah said: Once I was walking down the road and I saw a little boy sitting by a fork in the road, and I asked him, “Which is the road we take to the town?” He answered me, “This road is short and long, and this one is long and short.” (Eruvin 53b)

Some time later, the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision. He said, “Fear not, Abram, I am a shield to you; Your reward shall be very great.” (Genesis 15:1)

From there [Jacob] went up to Beer-sheba. That night the LORD appeared to him and said, “I am the God of your father Abraham. Fear not, for I am with you, and I will bless you and increase your offspring for the sake of My servant Abraham.” (Genesis 26:23-24)

And God said, “I am God, the God of your father. Fear not to go down to Egypt, for I will make you there into a great nation. (Genesis 46:3)

Perhaps you will say to yourselves, “These nations are more numerous than we; how can we dispossess them?” You need have no fear of them. You have but to bear in mind what your God the Lord did to Pharaoh and all the Egyptians…(Deuteronomy 7:17-18)

“PERHAPS you will say in your heart: ‎‎‘seeing that these nations are so much more numerous than I, ‎how can I dispossess them? Do not be afraid.’” It is worth ‎our while to look at Rashi who focuses on the word ‎כי‎ at the ‎beginning of our paragraph. He insists that in this instance the ‎word ‎כי‎ is to be understood as ‎דלמא‎, “perhaps.”‎ ‎Rashi has touched on an important psychological ‎principle, namely that whenever we encounter some difficulty in ‎carrying out God’s commandments, i.e. serving Him with all our ‎heart, fear is the greatest enemy to serving God wholeheartedly. If ‎we can resist fear, God will help us to overcome any of these ‎supposed difficulties to serving Him. Questions such as “how can ‎we overcome such a problem as being vastly outnumbered,” are ‎legitimate questions. However, we must not allow such questions ‎to cause us to become fearful of carrying out God’s will. Moses’ ‎remedy in three short words is “do not be afraid of ‎them!” If you can master your fear you will certainly be able to ‎drive them out, to dispossess them!”‎

“If there is no wisdom, there is no fear; if there is no fear, there is no wisdom. (Pirkei Avot 3:17)

The Torah is replete with divine injunctions “Not to fear” (lo tirah). And yet Jewish tradition also elevates “fear of heaven”—sometimes translated as “awe of heaven” (yirat shamayim)—as a divine commandment and virtue. “The beginning of wisdom is fear / awe (yirah) of the Lord.” An easy way to parse this apparent discrepancy is to say that we should fear God alone, and that if we fear God alone we will have no reason to fear anything else. Another way is to say that one type of fear is tied to a specific outcome, while another is more open-ended: if you fear a certain result, you’re fears will come true; if you focus on how you want to be, irrespective of outcome, nothing will shake you.

Don’t fear death by lions; do fear that one must give a full account of one’s life, whether it ends violently or peacefully. In Heideggerian parlance, one type of fear is an “average,” “everyday,” and “inauthentic” occurrence, while the other type is “singular,” “ecstatic,” and “ownmost.” Heidegger calls the former type Angst, and the former type Furcht. A Stoic variation on Heidegger might read, “Fear what you can control, not what you cannot.” Alternatively, when focused on what one cannot control, one will fear; when focused on what one can control, one will not fear.

The Torah uses the same word for both the fear of the spiritual novice and the fear of the spiritual master, raising a challenge: is the point simply to distinguish the perfect form of fear from the degraded form, or is it to understand and appreciate the inherent ambiguity of fear, which always moves us in two different directions. Awe carries a fearful subtext; fear carries with it the transcendent possibility of awe. If so, then the goal is not to efface fear but to direct it properly.

In Eikev, Moses repeats a theme that we’ve seen throughout the Torah—just as God tells Abraham and Jacob not to fear, Moses tells the people not to fear. But the people are allowed—or simply forecast—to question whether their enemies are too numerous for them to defeat. They aren’t commanded—this is Kedushat Levi’s point—to forgo their doubts; they are commanded to hold their doubts alongside their faith. The more they doubt the more they have an opportunity to free themselves from those doubts.

A rationalist would say that the initial doubts need to be diligenced, but can eventually be refuted. If God could free us from Egyptian bondage, then we have nothing to fear. God’s track record de-risks us. A non-rationalist would say that one can never fully diligence or refute a doubt, but one must believe anyways, living in a state of tension between what one knows and what one intuits. After all, is the argument that God took us out of Egypt a slam-dunk? Past performance is no guarantee of future returns. And, if we fast forward, Jewish history has not always been one in which we’ve won every battle. Far from it. In fact we can see the very word eicha, (woe, or alas) embedded in this very Deuteronomic verse:

כִּ֤י תֹאמַר֙ בִּלְבָ֣בְךָ֔ רַבִּ֛ים הַגּוֹיִ֥ם הָאֵ֖לֶּה מִמֶּ֑נִּי אֵיכָ֥ה אוּכַ֖ל לְהוֹרִישָֽׁם

Throughout history, Jews have wondered if God would save them, and, in contrast to the conquest of Canaan, found no overt savior. After the Temple was destroyed, Jews turned to a theology rooted not in God “the shield,” but God the companion, or even just a “daughter of a voice,” a murmur, an echo of an echo. The divine presence goes into Exile with us, which is a consoling idea, but not one that inspires martial confidence. This, too, is hinted at in Moses’s question, “How?” How will we prevail?

Anticipating the people’s Eicha—their lament—Moses says, “Find a way to engage your fear without being overtaken by it.” One way that people overcome fear is “Exposure therapy.” A person afraid of being humiliated in the course of public speaking can overcome the fear by speaking publicly and realizing “I can do it.” But an even deeper way to conquer the fear might be to receive the public humiliation one always feared, and then realize “That wasn’t as bad as I thought.” Read in this way, Moses may be understood to be saying not that God guarantees victory in every case, but that failure itself is not to be feared. The people are rightfully attached to their desired outcome—entry into the land, protection from enemies; but the Eicha reading suggests that even in the worst case, they’ll be resilient, and find a way to survive and to maintain their purpose.

“Do not fear” means do not take your fear as an ultimatum. Find the utility in it. Indeed, it is reasonable to fear a multitude of enemies and to plan accordingly. But do not be ruled by fear, assume defeat, or even assume you know what true defeat is. The non-rational—but not irrational—seeker accepts a dual mandate: to voice skepticism about the means of success, while staying committed and connected to the possibility of success. Question God, challenge God, ask if the tactics make sense, but don’t assume that skepticism = truth; leave for room for the possibility that your reason is limited and that you don’t know everything. Leave room for the possibility that your definition of victory and failure may need to change along the way. Leave room for the possibility that “the long way” is “the short way.” If you are mission-driven, you’ll find what you need to achieve that mission, even if the obstacles are fearsome. The obstacles will turn into boons, providing definition and texture to a singular journey.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins

Etz Hasadeh