Three for One
King David, according to tradition, was the author of all 150 psalms in the book of Psalms. In one of these, Psalm 27, he addressed God with a particular request:
“One thing I ask of the Lord—this is what I seek—to dwell in the house of Lord all the days of my life; to cast my eyes upon the Lord’s pleasantness; and to inquire in His temple.”
“Hold it, David!” God responded. “You said you were asking for one thing, but it turns out you’re actually asking for three.”
“But Sovereign of the Universe—am I not doing exactly what You did [in this week’s reading of ‘Ekev]? There it says: ‘And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only that you fear the Lord your God and follow in all His paths; and that you love Him, and serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul, keeping the Lord’s commandments and His laws, which I am ordering you this day—to your own benefit’” (Deut 10:12-13).
David had a point. God certainly seems to be asking an awful lot in this one sentence. One might even say that this sentence basically summarizes everything that we are required to do in Judaism. So why the “Only”?
Pondering this issue, some rabbinic interpreters inserted a mental Stop-sign in the first sentence, as if it read, “And now, O Israel, what does the Lord your God ask of you? Only that you fear the Lord your God.” Period. Read in this way, the verse might seem to be supporting the famous maxim attributed to Rabbi Ḥanina bar Ḥama, “Everything is in God’s hands, except for the fear of God.” What Rabbi Ḥanina meant was that God is in ultimate control of everything, but the one thing that you can contribute is the fear of God.
This is certainly a worthwhile message, but it seems to run counter to something mentioned here some months ago, about the difference between two expressions in Hebrew that seem to say nearly the same thing, the “fear of the Lord” and the “fear of God.” They’re not interchangeable.
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The “fear of the Lord” generally means “the worship of [Israel’s] God.” As such, it is something that had to be learned: “Come my sons, listen to me and I will teach you the fear of the Lord” (Psalm 34:12). The king is required to keep a copy of the Torah with him, “Let it remain with him and let him read it all the days of his life, so that he may learn to fear the Lord his God, to observe faithfully every word of this Torah” (Deut 17:19); similarly, “and let their children, who do not yet know, listen and learn to fear the Lord your God” (Deut 31:13).
Here’s a specific incident that shows the same thing: When the Assyrians conquered and deported Israel’s northern tribes and replaced them with foreigners, at first the foreigners “did not fear the Lord, so the Lord loosed lions against them, who killed some of them… Then the Assyrian king gave an order: ‘Send back one of the Israelite priests (kohanim) whom you have deported. . . and let him teach them the practices of the God of Israel. So one of the priests whom they had exiled from Samaria came and settled in Bethel; he taught them how to fear the Lord.” (2 Kings 17:25-28).
The “fear of God” has an entirely different meaning; in fact, yir’at elohim might best be translated in some instances as “fear of the gods,” because it is in no way restricted to the people of Israel and does not necessarily refer to Israel’s God. The usual meaning of the expression yir’at elohim is “common decency,” that is, the minimal set of moral values that any ordinary person could be counted on to possess.
This is the point of Abraham’s remark to Abimelech in Gen 20:11: Abraham didn’t reveal that Sarah was his wife because “I thought to myself: there is no fear of the gods in this place, so they may kill me for my wife.” Similarly, when the Egyptian king ordered the Hebrew midwives to slaughter every newborn Hebrew boy, “they feared God [or: “the gods”] and did not do as the Egyptian king had ordered; instead, they spared the boys” (Exod 1:17).
Even in an entirely monotheistic context, “fear of God”—in this case, our God—retains this basic sense of common decency. “You shall not curse the deaf, and you shall not place a stumbling block before the blind, and you shall fear your God; I am the Lord” (Lev 19:14). “You shall stand up before the elderly and show respect to the aged, and you shall fear your God; I am the Lord.” Anyone with common decency wouldn’t put a stumbling block in front of a blind person, nor would such a person fail to get up and give his seat to an old man on the bus—this is just the minimum of human decency.
So, going back to the maxim of Rabbi Ḥanina bar Ḥama, “Everything is in God’s hands, except for the fear of God”: what Rabbi Ḥanina seems really to have meant was that God can grant you this or grant you that, it’s all up to Him. But the one thing that He doesn’t have to grant you is the fear of God, because everyone already has that. Like those cold gusts in Sepphoris that Rabbi Hanina knew so well (on which see j. Shabbat 14,3 [p. 14c; also Leviticus Rabba 16:8 (p. 364); Deuteronomy Rabba, Liebermann edition, p. 80]), the fear of God strikes the heart of every person, even the crudest savage. The saying is thus what used to be called a “pretty paradox”: Whatever happens to a person is in God’s hands, it can go this way or it can go that way—but there is one thing that can go only one way and that is the most important thing, the fear of God, since He gives that to everyone.
Shabbat shalom!
