Why Fear God?

The Torah states repeatedly that we should fear God. Why fear? That sentiment is so out of keeping with our modern sensibilities. It seems harsh, counterintuitive: Why fear a loving God?

The Torah does emphasize loving God as well, but there is at least an equal emphasis on fear. The concept of fear of God appears five times in Leviticus alone. Since Talmudic times, our sages have grappled with this issue and arrived at deeply insightful conclusions. Importantly, the Hebrew words “yirat shamayim” can mean “fear of Heaven” but also have other connotations.

In “Yirat Shamayim in Jewish Thought,” Warren Zev Harvey points out the term’s manifold possibilities. He suggests that the concept is the Talmudic response to the Greek belief that freedom is achieved by freeing oneself from fear of the gods. Judaism, on the other hand, embraces the idea of fearing God.

Fear is viewed positively because it reflects an attitude: One’s moral behavior is in one’s control and so one can choose moral virtues. If humans have agency in the moral realm, then we can choose, or not, to govern ourselves according to Divine will. That means that what is really under discussion is better translated as an awareness of the Divine imperative and respect for transcendent truth.

Harvey notes that renowned Bible scholar Nehama Liebowitz considered fearing God a “universal ethical principle,” a “regulatory ethical principle between individuals of different nations, and in particular, between ruling nationals and the minorities.” 

Similarly, the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas asserts that yirat shamayim does not refer to fear of punishment but rather, in Harvey’s words, “a sobering awareness of one’s infinite ethical obligations to other human beings, and in this awareness God is revealed.” According to Levinas, then, the concept is as much about our relationship with one another as it is about our relationship with God.

A modern reader may understand this emphasis on yirat shamayim as relating to a transcendent authority for moral and ethical behavior. We live in a secular culture where many are indifferent or even hostile to religion. And not without reason: Institutional religion has not covered itself in glory over the centuries. Furthermore, lack of religion does not imply a lack of moral and ethical values. Secular people can be as good as, if not better than, religious people.

But a wholesale rejection of religion invites a world of self-centeredness, a lack of the ethical core that was born of religious teachings. The fact that religious institutions have often not lived up to their own ideals does not undermine the value of those ideals. The Torah’s mitzvot are not nullified because some of its practitioners betrayed the message.

Parshat Shoftim (Deuteronomy 17: 18-20) commands a king to write two Torah scrolls and to read from them every day “so that his heart not become haughty over his brethren.” At a time when Pharaohs considered themselves gods, this is an extraordinary demand. The purpose is that the king be reminded that he is not a god and that he treat others as commanded in the Torah, giving all citizens respect and dignity.

With no fear of God, with no transcendent and eternal moral values, people have no barrier to committing whatever evil they want. Instead, other fears take its place: conspiracy theories in which dark forces try to control the world and fear of the “other,” those unlike us, lead to racism and antisemitism.

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson points to an instructive detail in the Moses story. Pharoah orders the midwives to the Jews to murder Jewish newborn boys. He was the mightiest of tyrants, but the “midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live” (Exodus 1: 5-21). How could they exhibit such extraordinary courage if they didn’t believe more in the eternal power than the temporal one?

Interviews after World War II with the righteous who saved Jews in Europe revealed that many did so because they were religious Christians who were guided by spiritual and moral considerations. Like the midwives of Egypt, they made the only possible choice — to save life instead of allowing it to be destroyed.

In “The Great Partnership,” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explores the idea of religion as essential to society’s moral and ethical functioning. He points out that what made “Abrahamic monotheism unique is that it endowed life with meaning.” When a society “loses its religion, it tends not to last very long thereafter. It discovers that having severed the ropes that moor its morality to something transcendent, all it has left is relativism, and relativism is incapable of defending anything, including itself.” 

For Sacks, it is an optical illusion that we can abandon belief in God and leave nothing unchanged. The ramifications of a civilization without religion are profound. We live in a complex, quickly changing world with countless preoccupations and concerns. It is easy to dismiss religion without realizing that its loss only compounds the problems of our troubled world instead of healing it.

Dr. Paul Socken is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and founder of the Jewish Studies program at the University of Waterloo.