Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven
In shul this morning, I came upon this passage from the Talmud: “Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of heaven.” It’s an arresting thought, on two grounds.
First, we tend to think of omnipotent power as causing fear, even terror. Yet the one thing, the Talmud says, that omnipotent power cannot determine is whether we are afraid of it.
Second, we tend to think of our fear as something we don’t control, as an automatic and instinctual response to some power or threat. Yet here is the Talmud suggesting that everything within us is out of our control—except for our fear.
As it happens, these two claims are similar to the arguments I’ve often tried to make about the politics of fear: that fear in politics does not reflect a simple, automatic, instinctive response to threats; that our sense of what is threatening in politics is mediated through our prior moral and political beliefs; that when it comes to the objects of our political fear, we have choices, our responses are not predetermined.
Fear is a serious constraint on our freedom, but it is also an opportunity for freedom, an occasion to exercise moral and political choice, to make a determination about whether to be afraid or, failing that, to make a determination about how we should respond to the object of our fear, whether to flinch, flee, or fight.