Awe That Is All Love

Translated from Rabbi Arush’s feature article in the weekly Chut shel Chessed newsletter. The articles focus on his main message: “Loving others as yourself” and emuna. 

A “Wanted” Ad 

I have a job offer for you. A job that is seemingly not too hard, but is round-the-clock. The demands from you are that you can be called at any given time during the day, and you will have to stop doing whatever you are doing and devote yourself wholly to the job; or you may be awakened in the middle of the night at any time, and you will have no choice but to get up and work.  

For how long will you have to stop whatever you are doing and be awake? There is no guarantee one way or another; it could be five minutes or five hours… 

Oh, yes, there is another small detail: the job entails having to deal with things that are, I‘m sorry to say, not so clean, and they don’t smell so good either. And oh, pardon me! There is another small detail I left out: you get no salary for your work.  

You would think there would be no candidates interested in such work, right? Why should a normal human being agree to take on such a job even for a sizeable salary, not to mention no salary at all? 

You’d be surprised to know: Everyone is interested in this job.  

The name of the job is parenting – being a father or a mother.  

And now you can all understand why everyone wants this job – it is because of love! We love our children very much. They are our own flesh and blood, they are everything to us, and that is why we are willing – and even extremely happy – to take upon ourselves this very demanding, very difficult career that “messes up” our lives and uses up all our energy. 

In marriage as well, there are many limitations to endure. It is very binding and requires much commitment and “steals” from us, as it were, our freedom and independence – and still everyone feels that “it is not good for Man to be alone”, and all people deliberately enter this binding  reality and take upon themselves all the limitations. And why? Because of love for the sake of love! 

So, we see that when there is love, one is very willing to accept upon oneself a list of binding rules that seemingly limit us. 

Everyone Accepts Upon Themselves 

And just like this is the basis for the most basic relationships in our lives, so too it is the deep foundation of our connection with the Creator of the World, a connection that is likened to the connection between father and son, husband and wife. 

The most basic mitzvah of a Jew is saying “Shema Yisrael”¹, called by Chazal, “accepting upon oneself the yoke of heavenly kingship”. Accepting upon oneself a yoke is, by nature, not a pleasant thing. When you take upon yourself a yoke of laws and restrictions, you are no longer doing what you want to do; rather, you are doing what someone else is imposing upon you. This goes against human nature. 

In the holy books this is known as avodah (service) of yirah (awe, fear). Yirah is din and restriction. Serving with yirah is a service in which the person restrains himself and doesn’t do what he pleases; instead, he puts aside his opinions and desires in face of the will of the Creator, the Giver of the Torah. 

Avodat hayira is very hard work on a personal level. It is hard for us to restrain ourselves, to restrict the limits of our choice, and to give up our desires. How can one manage to do this? 

The examples we brought above demonstrate that the only way to maintain one’s yirat shamayim and to continue to take upon oneself the yoke of Heavenly kingship year after year, is to strengthen the middah (trait) of ahavah (love). When one loves Hashem, one accepts the yoke of His kingship, serving Him and being full of awe towards Him gladly and happily, wholeheartedly and willingly, and then not only does the yirah not go against human nature, rather, human nature is to wish for the yirah – out of love. 

And therefore, immediately after we say the passuk of “Shema Yisrael’, in which we nullify all our desires in face of Hashem’s will, we say, “And you shall love Hashem, your G-d…”¹, because our success in taking on the yoke of malchut Shamayim (Heavenly kingship) is completely dependent on the middah of ahavah, on the extent to which we love Hashem. Only through love can one achieve healthy and long lasting yirat Shamayim. 

How Is Yirah Born? 

That is what is hinted to in the passuk with which our parasha begins: “These are the offspring of Yitzchak ben Avraham, Avraham begot Yitzchak.”² The question arises immediately: What’s the connection between the first part of the passuk and the second? Yitzchak’s offspring are his children, Yaakov and Esav, and not “Avraham begot Yitzchak”.  

But we must understand the pasuk according to its pnimiyut (deeper meaning). It is brought in the holy books that Avraham is the middah of chessed and love, as it is written, “Avraham who loves Me”³, and Yitzchak is the middah of yirah, as is written, “Pachad Yitzchak”⁴ (“the Fear of Yitzchak,” referring to Hashem). 

“The offspring of Yitzchak” are his good deeds, as Rashi says on the pasuk, “These are the offspring of Noach”⁵ – “For the main offspring of tzaddikim are good deeds”. Yitzchak Avinu served Hashem all his life with the middah of yirah, and that was the basis of all his deeds. From where did Yitzchak Avinu get the strength to serve Hashem with such a high degree of yirah? What was the source of all his good deeds, done with the middah of yirah? 

The pasuk explains that Yitzchak achieved perfection of yirah especially because he was Avraham’s son. In other words, it was especially because Yitzchak Avinu had absorbed the middah of ahavah from his parents’ home, growing up in a home that was ahavat Hashem through and through – it was in that merit that he could serve Hashem with the highest level of yirah.  

Fear and Love 

It is unbelievable how practical this foundation is for every one of us.  

A life of Torah and mitzvahs according to halacha and yirat Shamayim demand much sacrifice and nullification in face of the halacha, which is Hashem’s will. Is it easy or not? The answer is that if you love Hashem – it is really not hard; it is even necessary, taken for granted and very pleasant. And more so – only if you truly love Hashem, only then can you live a life of complete yirat shamayim and pass it on to your children.  

And the opposite is true as well. If you feel Hashem’s love and love Him in return, you are willing to accept upon yourself Torah and mitzvahs and the yoke of His kingship happily and lovingly. Ahavat Hashem is the strongest tool that helps us be gibborim, overcome our base desires and increase our yirah. Rabbi Nachman writes in Likutei Moharan: “One must have both ahavah and yirah… because the main overcoming [of the yetzer hara] is through love.”⁶ 

From this we see a wonderful foundation that connects to the wonderful message that we have the merit of passing on to the Jewish People: that Hashem loves every Jew personally and does only good for him. The knowledge that Hashem loves me, that awakens a Jew to love Hashem, places ahavah in the center of the relationship between man and his Creator. Hashem loves every Jew, and the Jew loves Hashem.

In many essays we have explained that this knowledge is the heart of emuna (faith). But in this essay we see another angle – that when love of Hashem is in the center, it makes a person be more of a yirei Shamayim (possessing fear of Heaven), more particular in mitzvah observance. He has more strength to withstand trials and to overcome his yetzer hara (evil inclination) without feeling that he’s losing anything, without a feeling of being limited, rather from great pleasure of love and great joy over the merit to do the will of our beloved, the One who loves us more than anyone – the Creator of the World. 

A father loves all his children, no matter what they do, and Hashem loves us independently of our actions, and even after we sin, because a father always loves his children. This is true from Hashem yitbarach’s side as a father. But we, from our side as His children, wish to make our father happy and be good children, children who cause their father pleasure, children who do only what their father loves and wants; and certainly we do not wish to cause pain to our father and do things that are against his will.  

So, we find that our love to our Father in Heaven brings us to yirat Shamayim, to overcoming the yetzer hara and to observing the mitzvahs and doing good deeds. 

Editor’s Notes:

¹ Devarim (Deuteronomy) 6:4-9 

² Bereishit (Genesis) 25:19 

³ Yeshayahu (Isaiah) 41:8   

⁴ Bereishit 31:42 

⁵ Bereishit 6:9 (see Rashi’s comment on this verse) 

⁶ Likutei Moharan I, 5:5