On Fear
In my life I have let fear of unfortunate events that were written for me shape me. I shaped my entire life into a defensive posture meant to stop the blow from coming, but as I said, they were written for me. What was not written was how I lived my life and the measure of joy that I could wring from those years. Despite my fear, I did try to live a good life and take some pleasure in my time in this world.
Maimonides believed that we had free will, but a free will that was so tightly constrained and compromised that it can barely seem of consequence. He believed that all the events in our lives are predetermined. The only freedom that we have is the way that we think about them. He lived in a time where a dominant Islamic theology held that everything was predetermined. In that environment, the space that Maimonides opened up, a hidden and private space, was a powerful note of resistance.
I don’t believe that we are capable of such a thorough break between what we think and what we do and say. In fact, Maimonides' understanding is an outlier in Jewish thought. Jewish life is embodied. Midrashic texts teach that we are a combination of animal and angelic souls: mind and body indivisible. In creation, this is what makes humanity unique. (I have argued elsewhere in support of an understanding of some of our fellow animals as capable of some degree of higher thinking and certainly of sophisticated emotional lives. When I say that humanity is unique, it is in the balance between the body and the intellect.)
Fear is a part of our make-up. There are aspects of our response to the world outside us that reside deep in the most primitive parts of our biology. These elements have proven themselves to be beneficial to us. On average, acting on that fear has served us better than ignoring it. We have built more elaborate structures on top of the base of the primitive structure of our brain. We have yoked together other primitive structures into complex mechanisms. Why is green a comforting color for us? Because we are descended from species that lived in trees. When one was in a tree one was safe(r) from predators than if one were on the ground. The solid green color made it easy to pick out contrasting colors that might represent a threat. Marketers know that a good way to get our attention is to place an object against a green background for contrast. Our eyes pop. Our animal nature jumps into action.
Another deeply ingrained construct is our fear of strangers. We didn’t always live in the large societies that we do now. Meeting a stranger in earlier times was always fraught. But fearing strangers no longer works for us across the board. What we need now is the ability to distinguish between who are benign and those who are not, between those who might want to interact with us and those who prefer to simply pass us by. We also need to distinguish between those who treat us, in Buber’s language, as a subject or an object.
Fear of the other is a significant part of Jewish experience and thinking, and not without reason. We have lived as a minority people wherever we were, at the whims of kings and princes. The Holocaust is a central memory, but it is only one of the calamities that have befallen us as a people. The martyrology that we recited on Yom Kippur refers back to Roman times. We have been threatened both physically and spiritually. Israel, as a modern state, has existed largely under a state of siege. It created a mythology of the brave and hyper-masculine Sabra in order to brace itself against the constant fears that the population faced.
Fear is not irrelevant to us as a people, but it is not the sum of our experience. Even if fear is written for us, we do not need to let it master our thoughts. It may be in our bodies, but our minds can push back.
The easiest pitches in the Jewish world are to raise money to fight anti-semitism, remember the Holocaust and defend Israel in moments of crisis. They are easy pitches because they press on our fear responses. It is harder to raise money to support our lives rather than our fears.
The rabbinic letter promoted by the shadowy organization, The Jewish Majority (a call-back to the right-wing fundamentalist Christian political advocacy group, the Moral Majority) is another one of these appeals to fear. Last week I inaccurately stated the Rabbi Elliot Cosgrove was behind this letter. The truth is that, although he gave a sermon that was named as the provocation for The Jewish Majority’s letter, he was not involved with it and is not one of its signatories. It has been a huge disappointment for me to see how many Jewish clergy have signed onto this letter without examining the source or doing any due diligence to understand what the motivations were of those who created it, whoever they are. Whatever those motivations were, their methodology was to engage a fear response in order to more easily manipulate others.
When I ask people to act on motivations other than fear, I have to acknowledge that being able to push back against fear can be a privilege. Our fears are often not unreasonable. The experience that women, minorities (ethnic, racial and gender) face on the streets are different than what the random white dude has to face. I understand that there are legitimate reasons to trust our fears. Nevertheless, the struggle for freedom and a better world shrinks into nothingness if we allow our fears to rule us.
This is all the more true in relation to the Israel/Palestine conflict. If we allow fear to be our only guide, and if we fail to even imagine what the contours of empathy might be for those who angrily oppose us, we will be trapped forever. The benefit of serving our fears is (hopefully) physical survival. And yet, if serving our fears is the sum of our lives, our spirits will atrophy. We will ignore the angelic part of our natures and live purely animal lives.
Ilana M. Horwitz, a professor of Jewish studies at Tulane University, writes in a recent Forward article about her experience with her students. She asked them to tell her what the five most important things were that they wanted to learn about. Anti-semitism and the Holocaust didn’t make the list. It wasn’t because they didn’t care. It was because they were worn down by the subjects.
What they wanted was something different: “While Jewish institutions pour resources into combating antisemitism and defending Israel — crucial work, to be clear — our young people are signaling they need something more. They need spaces where being Jewish isn’t synonymous with being embattled. They need opportunities to engage with Jewish life, learning, and culture on its own terms.”
She concludes, “My classroom revelation taught me this: If we want to engage the next generation, we need to balance necessary vigilance with joyful exploration of what makes Jewish life meaningful. Our students aren’t abandoning the fight — they’re asking for the chance to remember what we’re fighting for.”
Professor Horwitz’s students are struggling past their fears. It is a hopeful sign. The leaders of the American Jewish community should learn from them. So may it be, speedily and in our day.
