Fear God more than people

At least three times, the Rabbis of the Talmud, teach us that ‘Everything is within God’s power, except the fear of heaven.’  God is connected in to the entire universe and its functioning, except that God does not determine that a person ‘fears heaven’, that a person lives with that mysterious mixture of reverence, awe, wonder, and acceptance of responsibility to Jewish thinking and living.  ‘Fear of God’, as one of my recent Bar Mitzvah students wrote in his D’var Torah, ‘is not the fear that we feel at a scary movie,’ the fear of a ghost or other frightening image that will make us jump out of our seat.  The fear of faith is one that, on the contrary, helps keep our feet firmly planted, that reminds us most of all that fear of God should always be much greater than the fear of other human beings.  As our tradition emphasizes, God is an eternal source of Truth, even if God does not speak or act in ways we perceive or understand, whereas human beings are unreliable and unfortunately not as truthful in the practical and larger sense of the word ‘truth’ as we might hope – The poet of psalm 116, one of the Hallel psalms, simply says, ‘kol ha’adam kozev’. 

And even so, we may find ourselves living more in fear of other people than in fear of God, and in doing so we are doing exactly what the Torah warned us against, taking ourselves back to living in Egypt – returning ourselves to living under the oppressive rule of other flesh and blood rulers like the Pharaoh, who’s interests are his and his alone.  Of course, many of us who work for other people do in fact ‘serve’ others and we are accountable to our bosses and supervisors and managers.  The Torah and the Rabbis were aware of these realities and even many of the Rabbis were working people who were responsible to their customers – The ancient Rabis were tailors, porters, blacksmiths, shoe-makers, millers, scribes, tanners, even lumberjacks.  Their teachings though reminded them, and us, to whom we should express our deepest thanks, our most holy devotion, our biggest and most perplexing questions, our pain and doubt.  There are many people in our lives with whom we can talk and share about these feelings, and ideally our spouses, and good friends can help us, but what happens when our loved ones and friends are struggling themselves, or when we’re piled up with work and obligations and cannot carve out time?  For this reason, among others, we have daily prayers, time to have a regular dialogue, and check-in with God and ourselves.

I think we can compare the idea that we should fear God more than fearing other people with the electric power that comes to our homes.  During storms and hurricanes, power may go out at our homes, because there’s a break down of a wire, or a utility pole, but ideally I imagine that at the central station they are well-protected and the power is ‘on’ but simply cannot be transmitted.  The same is true with the fear we’ve been discussing, between us and other people there can be breakdowns for many reasons, relationships can break down, we may suffer in silence without even words to express what is happening, but there at the heart of the universe is God, an eternal and unending source of energy, a source of light we can reconnect to without wires, without circuits, and without limits.