Fear No Evil
When we overcome the fear that prevents us from embracing our responsibility, anything is possible
“These are the words that Moses addressed to all Israel on the other side of the Jordan, in the desert, in the Arabah near Suph, between Paran and Tophel, Laban, Hazeroth, and Di-zahab.” – Deuteronomy 1:1
Thus begins Moses’ final speech to the Jewish people just before they are to enter the Promised Land.
Oddly, he begins by saying a list of places, some so far from where he spoke that they can not be a description of where he was. This list has therefore puzzled commentators. Most, one way or the other, follow Rashi in saying that the names are allusions to the sins the Jews committed during the desert journey from Egypt and that Moses spoke this way as a veiled rebuke, veiled in order to show respect to Israel.
On each of these occasions – the complaints before the splitting of the sea, when the children of Israel asked if there had been insufficient graves in Egypt, or the worship of the golden calf and the sin of the spies, etc – fear had driven the people to bad behavior. Fear of Pharaoh, fear of being lost in the great desert to which they had escaped, fear of conquering the Land once they had reached it… It was to these fears that Moses gently alluded as he began history’s first retelling of Israel’s redemption.
It is proper that he began thus, for fear, and the way it can prevent people from living up to their responsibilities, is one of the Bible’s primal and constant themes.
Natan Sharansky is a living person who knows fear in a situation of objective terror few can imagine. For nine years he lived in the Soviet gulag where he endured isolation and beatings in a lonely stand against one of the great evils in all human history. Yet most interestingly, in his most recent memoir, published in 2021, it is neither the terrors of the gulag nor the anxieties he faced as a cabinet member in Israel’s government that he points to as the greatest moment of fear in his life. It was instead simply asking his boss for a letter. He writes,
“No choice I made was anywhere near as difficult as my decision in 1973 to request a letter acknowledging my employment. It should have been nothing… all I had to do was walk down the very familiar hallway in the Institute of Oil and Gas where I worked as a computer specialist to speak to my boss, with whom I got along. But that move was so nerve-racking that I had to take a tranquilizer that morning, for the first and only time in my life.”
The move was so difficult because it was Sharansky’s first public act of defiance against the Soviet system. He was leaving what he terms the world of “doublethink,” of believing one thing but saying another, for freedom. It was, in his own account of an extraordinary life whose greatest achievements were yet to come, the most terrifying and liberating moment of his life.
It connects I think to an extraordinary reading that I once heard from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks who attributed it to Menachem Mendel Schneerson, who said that the real fear of the spies was not for the battles they would fight with the inhabitants of the Land, but fear of the great responsibility that would accompany leaving the desert. Instead of panic at the war to come, they were afraid of leaving the protective embrace of God and living in true freedom in a Land in which they – and they alone – would be responsible for ensuring justice. Once Sharansky crossed from fear into mental freedom by asking his boss for that letter, the physical bondage of the gulag no longer held any fear for him. For the greatest bridge - the passage from fear to freedom and responsibility - had already been crossed.
This challenge – to reject fear and accept freedom and the responsibility that accompanies it - are constant themes in all human history. And there are two major episodes in American Jewish history in living memory that point to the opportunities and disasters inherent in this challenge.
The first was the Holocaust, and while many like to say that the true horrors of what was happening in Europe during the war were not then known the truth is that the grim statistics were transmitted to the world by 1942, when the fires of the crematoriums had only recently been lit and would burn for three years more. While there were notable and noble exceptions, most American Jews and most of their leaders chose during these years to do nothing. From Hollywood studios to Congress, most Jews were reluctant to make the war too much about Hitler’s war against the Jews, lest they raise a similar hatred against themselves here in America.
Eighty years later it is easy to criticize, a criticism that is harder when you realize that then it was not clear who would win the war and that it seemed that advocacy for the Jews could undermine the Allied war effort in a time when the hatred of Jews was, though we face our own challenges, far beyond what we know today.
Only a few decades later, a new challenge arose, different but strangely similar. It was a challenge led by Sharansky and his fellow Jewish refuseniks, who demanded the freedom to leave the Soviet Union and immigrate to Israel. Just like in 1942 when it was not clear that the Nazis would ever be defeated, in the 1970’s the Soviet Union appeared to be an empire destined to live for decades, if not centuries. And like the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, instead of support for their plight, right thinking people with degrees from the right schools who read the right kinds of newspapers and who worked the most prestigious jobs favored “détente,” a fancy word for making a kind of peace with the Soviet Union rather than confronting it.
In this climate, Soviet Jews demanding their freedom were seen as an annoyance at best and at worst a destabilizing force that threatened the peace of the entire world, including potential nuclear annihilation.
American Jews were therefore faced with a similar choice to the one they had faced during World War Two.
And this time they collectively made the decision opposite to the one they had previously chosen. In their shuls and schools and wherever they lived, American Jews came in their numbers and did all they could in their majority to advocate for Soviet Jewry. Many even travelled to the Soviet Union, ostensibly as tourists, in order to smuggle messages from refuseniks to the outside world at great personal risk. Their efforts culminated in December 1987 when 250,000 American Jews showed up in Washington DC in the freezing cold to ensure that the plight of the Jews was on the table when Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev met. Their efforts played no small role in the liberation only a few years later of all people living under Soviet tyranny.
In other words, they put aside their fear and accepted their responsibility. And in so doing they achieved more good than anyone could have imagined possible.