Wisdom in the Fear – Yitro 5783

This D’var did not appear in the Modern Torah podcast, but I wrote it and wanted to share it with you…enjoy

—Nate

In 2008, in the middle of the night, I woke up and thought to myself, “I think the walls are shaking.”

I put my glasses on and looked again, the walls were definitely shaking, but there was nothing to do, so, although I was scared, I went back to sleep.

The next day all anyone could talk about was the earthquake, which was how I knew it wasn’t a dream. A 4.6 magnitude earthquake had hit the Louisville, KY area in the middle of the night, and having woken up I had somehow gone back to sleep.

That was the only earthquake whose impact I’ve ever actually felt. And it was scary, but I went back to sleep because ever since I was a little kid, I’d been preparing for The Big One, and this didn’t seem like it, so it must not be so bad.

The Big One, which is how my elementary school teachers described it, was the much anticipated still yet to happen explosion of energy building in the earth beneath a fault line underneath New Madrid, MO, just across the Mississippi River from Kentucky, and about four hours from where I grew up. It violently shakes about every 100-150 years, we learned. And when it does, the impact is devastating. The last time the fault erupted, four earthquakes between December 1811 and February 1812 made church bells in Boston ring, and could be felt as far away as Canada. Bowling Green, KY fell in the yellowy orange zone of destruction, which meant that in addition to fire and tornado drills, we had regular earthquake drills in elementary school.

Maybe it’s because of this ever present never materializing danger of my childhood, that I’ve never liked the idea that the giving of the tablets and the Law, from G-d to Moses atop Mt. Sinai, was accompanied by violent tremors and shaking of the entire mountain and the valley below. It sounded too much like the earthquake I’d grown up fearing.

Everett Fox, in his commentaries on the Torah, says that “To try and pin down exactly to what natural phenomena the story alludes, be they volcano, earthquake, or the like, is somewhat beside the point; what speaks through the text is the voice of an overwhelming experience.” I imagine overwhelming is exactly what the experience of standing beneath Sinai must have been like. Overwhelmingly terrifying.

So the ground shakes when G-d is present at Sinai, to invoke an overwhelmingly fearful experience. But why fear?

Terror is an emotion often paired with the presence or coming presence of G-d. When an angel of G-d stops Abraham from sacrificing Isaac, the angel extolls Abraham’s fear of G-d. The same Hebrew word, יִרְאָ֠ה, is named in Deuteronomy as one of the few things that G-d demands of Israel. :” Fear of the Lord is G-d’s treasure,” says Isaiah.

The 15th century Spanish Rabbi Isaac ben Moses Arama points out that the Hebrew word Torah, יִרְאָ֠ה, translated here as fear, has a dual meaning. One is what he calls, the “instinctive, unreasoning fear of a physically stronger phenomenon….” He cites the fear that Jacob has of his brother Esau, as an example of this type of fear.

My fear of The Big One, the eventual rupture of the New Madrid fault in a cataclysmic earthquake in the heart of the United States is another example.

But, “another kind of fear,” ben Moses writes, “is that which recognizes superior moral or intellectual qualities in someone whom one confronts. In effect, this fear is reverence. When Miriam and Aaron discussed Moses’ marital relationship, G’d takes them to task for having failed to display that degree of reverence that is due a prophet of Moses’ calibre. Pirkei Avot urges that reverence for one’s teacher should be on a level similar to that accorded G-d directly. Whereas the former kind of fear is common both to the sinner and the devout person, the latter, the reverence is a form of fear that sinners do not know.”

And it’s this type of fear, or fearful reverence, that the shaking of Mt. Sinai is intended to provoke.

There’s a story that the Talmud tells, of a particular individual who stood before the ark one day as prayer leader, in the presence of Rabbi Hanina.

“He extended his prayer and said: God, the great, mighty, awesome, powerful, mighty, awe-inspiring, strong, fearless, steadfast and hoaqery ground shake. How we respond to our fear, however, and more importantly what types of fears we respond to, is in our hands. And there’s no better motivator to spur actions that fear, whether awe inspiring or just plain terrifying.

“Anyone whose fear of the Lord is priority number one,” ben Moses wrote, “will try and do more than their wisdom dictates.” Perhaps that’s what the Psalmist meant when they wrote that “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord; all who practice gain sound understanding.”

And that scares me, but perhaps there’s wisdom in the fear.

Shabbat Shalom.