Main news for 5 August 2025

Commentators, reasoning about the fear of God and love for God, often set them against each other. But the Torah, as we can see, joins them so that one is impossible without the other. True, the fear spoken of in the Book of Deuteronomy has nothing in common with the fear of punishment that a child sometimes feels before strict parents or an adult before the state whose laws he has violated. Otherwise it would be hard to explain how such fear could make the one who fears walk in God's way, since the matter is not formal observance of certain norms and rules, but loving God with all one's heart and all one's being, or "soul."

Here it is rather fitting to speak of the fear of God as sacred trembling, which God's presence always evokes in a spiritually sensitive person, the trembling of a finite created being before the infinite Creator. And this trembling, of course, is not accidental: the gulf that separates us from God is completely insurmountable, neither by the laws of the untransformed world nor by the laws of the Kingdom. There is not and cannot be in the world any nature, transformed or untransformed, that would allow this gulf to be crossed. It is crossable only for God's love. It is precisely God's love that becomes the first cause and spiritual foundation of all revelations, all theophanies, and the incarnation of God itself. But a person can share in this love, enter into it, only if he is ready to turn to God "with all his heart" and "with all his soul."

Indeed, it is the heart, which in biblical language denotes the spiritual center of the human person, that spiritual "I" without which man as the image of God does not exist, that determines who and what a person will be before God and before people. The choice is made in the heart; decisions are accepted by the heart. And what is called spiritual life depends on the choice made and the decisions accepted: relations with God, with Christ, with one's neighbor.

But the matter is not limited to the heart alone, to the spiritual "I" alone. The choice made and the decisions accepted in connection with it, for example the choice to follow the Torah and observe the commandments given by God, will inevitably entail the restructuring of a person's whole inner world, the system of his values and priorities, and then also his way of thinking and behavioral patterns that determine all of life. In fact, it is otherwise impossible to follow the way of God, since the matter is love, and one cannot love partly. One can love only to the end. With all one's heart and all one's being. So that the gulf separating us from God may become crossable.