Bearing public witness isn’t Jewish custom. We confess our collective sins corporately on the Day of Atonement. But an editorship at First Things is not a seat on a Wall Street trading floor, or a teaching gig at a conservatory of music; it is a position of public trust, and I owed the readers of First Things an accounting of a path to faith that was unusual, to put it mildly. I put this on our website this morning under the title, “Confessions of a Coward.”
That probably was autobiography enough for one decade, but I can’t help adding a thought about fear. An extra review copy of the late Rav Joseph Soloveitchik’s book And From There Shall You Seekhappened to be around the office, and I made the mistake of taking it along to read over dinner one night. Written more than six decades ago in Hebrew, it was not published in the original Hebrew until the 1970s and not translated until just now. Reading the Rav’s discussion of the Song of Songs I had something close to a panic attack—no exaggeration. It hadn’t really dawned on me until Soloveitchik spelled it out that the Song of Songs was not only about the beauties of divine love, but also about its terrors. The “Good God/Bad God” apposition that naïve writers posit between Old and New Testaments is not only wrong, but it is drooling idiocy. God’s love is what is terrifying, for it consumes the individual ego and annihilates the human sense of self. If you don’t believe the Rav, go read St. Teresa of Avila.
To approach the sacred is dangerous. The people of Israel are kept back from Mt. Sinai; Aaron’s sons die after bringing “strange fire” into the Tabernacle; one of David’s men bearing the Ark into Jerusalem dies after touching it. These are not the arbitrary punishments of a vengeful God; it is we who are vessels too weak to hold the infinite and terrible longing of God’s love. That, I think, is why none of us ever is entirely free of idolatry: we find ways of worshipping that which we are capable of approaching. I tried to capture this idea in a “Spengler” essay entitled, “The gods are stupid.”
Those who oppose love and fear of God miss the point. God self-reveals through love, and we come to know God through love – but to know the passionate God, the Bridegroom of Israel, is also to fear Him. I’m plenty scared. But I’ve stopped running.
