Parshah Commentary

Last month, I watched in horror as anti-ICE organizers were prosecuted for possessing books that I, too, own. A week later, as I walked down the street in Washington DC, where I live, a police officer with a canister of pepper spray in his hand told me they were about to start “clearing the sidewalks.” Later that day, a squad of National Guard soldiers walked down my quiet side street, and I turned around to tell my neighbors smoking weed on their porch that armed troops were coming. I yelled at the soldiers to quit their jobs—the same sentiment that a college student was arrested for expressing a few days later. As I reflect on these recent experiences, I know that I am among the safest in this city, protected by my whiteness and class position. There are so many others around me who face far greater risks, and this knowledge often feels staggering in its horror; we are living in very scary times. 

As Moses begins his retelling of the Israelites’ 40-year trek through the wilderness which will comprise the bulk of the Book of Devarim, beginning with our parshah, fear is a subtle but persistent companion to the journey he recounts. Moses, in describing their travels and the conquest of the land of Canaan that will follow, uses the root “y-r-h”, meaning “fear,” six times. The word is deployed in two different but intertwined ways: God’s message to the Israelites not to fear others, and God’s message to the Israelites that others will fear them. Notably, all of these usages refer to conquest, and specifically to the Israelites’ encounters with the residents of Canaan and its environs. The proposed resolution to their fear revolves around the question of divine favor. As the final line of the parshah puts it, “Do not fear them, for it is the Eternal your God who will battle for you.” God’s support is the reason the Israelites should not fear entering into violent conflict with others—and it’s the reason those others, the Torah promises, will come to fear the Israelites. 

Fear, then, is determined in our parshah by the Israelites’ relationship to God—or, perhaps more accurately, by God’s relationship to the Israelites. The other nations fear the Israelites because God is on their side, whereas the Israelites are told not to fear the peoples of the Land of Israel for the same reason. In this formulation, the Israelites don’t overcome fear so much as they overcome others, which then alleviates their need to fear. 

But this kind of fear—and this relationship to it—is not the only one mentioned in the Torah. Outside of our parshah, the Torah provides other examples in which fear exists not in the context of domination but as a resource for strength. More than four decades prior to our narrative, we encounter two righteous women: the midwives of the Israelites, Shifra and Puah, who are summoned before Pharaoh and ordered to kill all Israelite baby boys. But “the midwives, fearing God, did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live,” the Torah tells us. If the midwives feared Pharaoh, the text does not tell us. The relevant fear is their fear of God.

The feminist author and activist Audre Lorde, in an essay that was originally delivered as a speech to lesbian writers, describes the importance of “learn[ing] to work and speak when we are afraid,” because, as she warns, if “we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.” In other words, we can never overcome fear; we must instead work while afraid, because the world we are seeking is more important than the fear we feel in confronting it. 

Jewish thought views “yirah,”and especially “yirat Hashem,” or fear of God, as an important catalyst for action. We might also translate “yirah” in such contexts as “awe”—our encounter with wonder and reverence, before which all other concerns pale. Awe can push us to elevate the sacred imperatives of what we owe to each other and to the future, which stand above the fear of the moment. Viewing fear as bound up with awe makes fear itself a comrade: accompanying us in our work, giving us the strength to act against and despite the smaller and manifold fears that we face. 

Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.