NOTES for Deu 10:12
Commentators, reflecting on the fear of God and on love for God, often oppose them to one another. But the Torah, as is clear, joins them so that one is impossible without the other. True, the fear spoken of in Deuteronomy has nothing in common with fear of punishment, which 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 the way of God: 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 more fitting to speak of the fear of God as sacred awe, which God's presence always evokes in a spiritually sensitive person, the awe of a finite created being before the infinite Creator. And this awe is, of course, no accident: the abyss that separates us from God is completely impassable, neither according to the laws of the untransfigured world nor according to the laws of the Kingdom. There is not and cannot be in the world any nature, transfigured or untransfigured, that would allow this abyss to be crossed. It is passable 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 and enter into it only if he is ready to turn to God "with all his heart" and "with all his soul."
Indeed, the heart, which in biblical language denotes the spiritual center of the human person, the spiritual "I" without which the human being as the image of God does not exist, determines who and what a person will be before God and before people. 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: relationships with God, with Christ, with one's neighbor.
But the matter is not limited, of course, to the heart alone, to the spiritual "I" alone: the choice made and the decisions connected with it, for example the choice to follow the Torah and observe the commandments given by God, inevitably entail a restructuring of a person's whole inner world, his system of values and priorities, and then also his way of thinking and patterns of behavior that determine his whole life. Indeed, otherwise it will not be possible to follow God's way, for the issue is love, and it is impossible to love partly. One can love only to the end. With all one's heart and all one's being. So that the abyss separating us from God may become passable.