On Rosh Hashana, Don’t Fear G-d; Rather Fear what G-d Fears
“What does the Lord your God ask of you? Only to fear the Lord your God….”
מָה יְ-הֹוָה אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ שֹׁאֵל מֵעִמָּךְ כִּי אִם־לְיִרְאָה אֶת־יְ-הֹוָה אֱ-לֹהֶיךָ
Mah A-donai E-lohecha shoel me’imach, ki im l’yirah es A-donai E-lohecha.
(Deuteronomy 10:12)
The simple understanding of this often quoted verse is that Moses is telling the people that God asks only that they should fear Him. But the Maggid of Mezeritch examines the peculiar wording of the verse, and reveals a mind-blowing secret that completely transforms our understanding of the concept of “fear of God.”
There are no extraneous words or even letters in Torah. So why, the Maggid asks, are the words “the Lord your God” repeated at both the beginning and the end of the verse when it could have more succinctly concluded with “only to fear Him.” Furthermore, what of the word “es” before the final words which generally goes untranslated?
The hidden meaning of the verse, the Maggid teaches, is that God’s primary request of us is not that we should fear Him, but that we should fear LIKE Him. ‘Fear of God’ here implies not fearing God, but experiencing God’s fear, the fear that He experiences.
But is God afraid of anything? How could He be? Not only is He omnipotent, He is the One and only true existence. There is nothing for Him to fear, because there is nothing other than He.
But the Maggid explains that God does fear one thing: Sin.
Why would God be afraid of sin? Because each “sin” is an act that distances His child from Him. What God fears is that His beloved children should be unaware of their connection with Him; that we should not recognize that we are Godly ourselves, and that we should therefore act in ways that further conceal our essence and distance ourselves from our Source and our deepest truth.
Man, the Maggid teaches, generally fears punishment. But that is a myopic, human fear. Punishment is the corrective measure for sin, the Maggid teaches. He provides the analogy of a child who has a splinter embedded in his foot – he fears the pain when his parent removes the splinter, but the parent does so out of love so that the foot will not become infected. Rather than fearing the removal of the splinter, God wants us to be more careful of where and how we walk so that we do not contract the splinter in the first place.
“What does the Lord your God ask of you? Only to fear LIKE the Lord your God….” He only asks us to look beyond our limited framework and see with the Godly vision with which each of us is inherently endowed. If we do so, we will recognize our divine nature and our infinite potential. We will cherish our closeness with our Father, and we will tread carefully so that we do not lose our way and distance ourselves from His loving embrace.
With this understanding, we will not fear G-d’s anger and punishment on Rosh Hashana. Our fear is of ourselves and our ability to lose sight of our essential nature and His consummate love for us. We will therefore ask G-d not simply for His forgiveness, but for His assistance in seeing ourselves the way that He sees us, and guarding us from those things that cloud our vision and draw us away from Him.
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Pnei Hashem is an introduction to the deepest depths of the human experience based on the esoteric teachings of Torah. www.pneihashem.com
