Surrender to Fear

What does He ask of you?

In this week’s portion, Moses pleads:
מה ה’ אלקיך שואל מעמך, כי אם ליראה את ה’ אלקיך
“What does the Lord your God ask of you? Only to fear Him.” (Deuteronomy 10:12)

Only to fear. That’s the scriptural demand.

The Talmud asks:
וכי יראה מילתא זוטרתא היא? אין, לגבי משה מילתא זוטרתא היא.
“Is fear of Heaven a minor matter? The answer: Yes. For Moses, it is indeed a minor matter.” (Berachot 33b; Megillah 25a)

For Moses, who dwelled in the presence of the Divine and attained heights most of us cannot imagine, simple fear was indeed a minor thing. Fear was merely a natural aspect of his being. But when Moses speaks to us, to those who do not dwell in that extraordinary light, what does “only to fear” mean? How are we to approach a demand that seems so difficult to attain?

The verse itself does not stop at fear. Moses piles it on: love Him, walk in His ways, cling to Him. There is nothing minimal here. Each verb evokes action, commitment, intimacy. Yet the Talmud seems fixated on a single word. Why focus so narrowly on fear? Why does the conversation revolve around fear being minor when the demand is for far more?

Then there is an even stranger move. The Talmud states:
תניא היה רבי מאיר אומר חייב אדם לברך מאה ברכות בכל יום שנאמר ועתה ישראל מה ה' אלהיך שואל מעמך
Rabbi Meir would say: A person is obligated to recite one hundred blessings every day, as it is stated in the verse, “And now, Israel, what [ma] does the Lord your God require of you?” (Menachot 43b)

Rabbi Meir reads the verse as though it said one hundred (me’a) instead of “what” (ma). One hundred blessings a day, extracted from a single, dangling syllable in Moses’ speech. If the central demand is fear, why bring in the arithmetic of blessings? Why derive one hundred blessings from a verse about fear?

The Fear We Flee

Perhaps the answer lies not in the fear itself, but in what makes fear so difficult for us.

The pain of negative emotions rarely stems from the emotion itself. It arises from our resistance, our desire to avoid it. Suppression, distraction, and rationalization require elaborate defenses that obscure our path, clouding both heart and mind.

Fear is natural. It is ever-present. We all live with it—fear of loss, of power, of the unknown. The Israelites in the desert did not need to manufacture fear; it enveloped them, raw and unfiltered. At Sinai, the mountain blazing, God’s presence splitting the world open, fear was rational, inevitable. Real fear, in the presence of ultimate power, was the only sane response.

But living with that fear, making space for it, is where we fail. We don’t want to stay in fear’s presence. It unsettles, unmoors, reduces us to something fragile. Ego rises as a defense mechanism. The same ego that tries to be self-sufficient, to keep control, to maintain dignity, now recoils from this vulnerable state, smothering fear before it can change us.

So we distract, we suppress, we rationalize. We fear the fear itself.

At Sinai, the Israelites saw the fear, felt it, and turned away. “Moses, you speak to us. Don’t let God speak to us directly, lest we die.” (Ex. 20:16) “Lest we die” is the ego speaking; it fears loss of its perceived existence more than anything. The Talmud in Avodah Zarah 5a states:
תָּנוּ רַבָּנַן: ״מִי יִתֵּן וְהָיָה לְבָבָם זֶה לָהֶם״, אָמַר לָהֶן מֹשֶׁה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל: כְּפוּיֵי טוֹבָה בְּנֵי כְּפוּיֵי טוֹבָה, בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁאָמַר הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא לְיִשְׂרָאֵל: ״מִי יִתֵּן וְהָיָה לְבָבָם זֶה לָהֶם״, הָיָה לָהֶם לוֹמַר: תֵּן אַתָּה

We are called ingrates, not because we felt fear, but because we rejected the gift hidden in that fear, the invitation to transcend ourselves. The tragedy was not fear; it was refusing to walk through fear to what lay beyond. Instead of praying, “God, help us hold this,” we said, “Take it away.”

Only to Fear

That is why Moses says, “only to fear God”—only. Not to fear being afraid, but to fear God. Not to build elaborate defenses around awe. Just stand as you are, small but real before the infinite.

Thus when the Talmud (Berachot 33b; Megillah 25a) asks: “Is fear of Heaven a minor matter?” it is not referring to fear itself, but to the egotistic defense that blocks us from accepting that fear. The answer—that for Moses it was minor—is a guide to what is blocking our fear. Moses, the humblest of all men, had his ego dissolved, and humility carved away his resistance. For him, fear of Heaven was effortless. This recognition tells us why we struggle with fear.

This very idea may be hidden in the Hebrew word for 'what' - Mah. In Exodus (16:7), at the crisis of the manna, Moses expresses his radical humility with the words 'ונחנו מה' - 'and we are what?' He declares his own ego-dissolution, his 'nothingness' in the face of Divine providence. Read in this spirit, Moses' question, 'Mah Hashem Elokecha shoel mei'imach', contains its own answer: It is this very state of 'Mah', this surrender of self, that God asks of you as the prerequisite to fear Him. (Credit YYF)

The Hundred Chisels

But the Talmud (Menachot 43b) recognizes that we aren’t Moses. We live fortified. Our lives are fortresses of habit and self-importance, and a practical path forward is needed to close the gap.

So what is the path for us? The sages don’t offer a grand mystical technique or an overwhelming demand for purity. They give us something mundane, almost tedious: one hundred blessings a day.

Why? The answer is twofold. One, to live in gratitude, to recognize the blessings, including those in difficult emotions. To no longer be ingrates, כפויי טובה. But also because ego, so stubborn in the face of disruption and even Sinai, can be worn down by repetition. Each blessing yanks our perception back towards surrender from our sense of control. This bread, this sight, this moment—they aren’t mine. Each pause says: I am not self-sufficient, there is a giver and a gift.

A hundred times a day, we chip away at the hard shell, not by trying to be fearless, but by allowing the cracks in control. Slowly, steadily, the blessings train us to recognize what Sinai’s generation rejected, the vulnerability and reality of being a recipient, not an owner.

Each blessing says: Here is the gift, recognize it. Each blessing says: Here is your ego, let it dissolve. Over time, awe becomes possible. Not terror, but the quiet, sustaining knowledge that life is not mine to command.

In this discipline, the slow, daily chiseling, fear can finally become love. The mountain, once too bright and too loud to bear, can finally be climbed not by escape, but by surrender, one whispered blessing at a time.

So, Moses’ “only” stands, not as dismissal, but as invitation. Not necessarily to be like him, but to become more truly ourselves: capable of bearing awe, one habit at a time.

FDR famously said during his inauguration, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Perhaps we ought to say, the only thing we have to fear is the fear of fear itself.