Fear and Awe

Jacob awoke from his sleep. 'God is truly in this place,' he said, 'but I did not know it.' He was frightened (va’yira). 'How awe-inspiring this place is!' he exclaimed. 'It must be God's temple. It is the gate to heaven!'   Genesis 28:16-17 Jacob was very frightened and distressed. He divided the people accompanying him into two camps, along with the sheep, cattle and camels.                            Genesis 32:8 “Jacob was very frightened”: he said: “all these years, Esav has dwelt in the Land of Israel, perhaps he approaches me with this merit in hand.”                                    Yalkut Shimoni, vaYishlach 131

            Both the beginning and end of Jacob’s personal exile involved his feeling fear, and it is instructive to note that his fears were connected to the Holy City and the Holy Land. 

            While his descendants will be instructed to be in awe (also “yir’ah”) of the place of the Temple, Jacob’s first fear (yir’ah) is not an expression of this awe, rather, as Rabbi Y. Ch. Bigelayzen explained, the result of his failure to perceive that “God is truly in this place.” Jacob felt he should have appreciated the sanctity of the place immediately upon reaching the Temple Mount. My father commented that a Jew must appreciate the sanctity of the Land immediately upon reaching Israel. Certainly, this is equally true of the extra sanctity of the Holy City.

            Rabbi Shmuel Mohliver, one of the fathers of religious Zionism, notes that it seems strange that Jacob, who testified of himself that he fulfilled all the mitzvot [Rashi on verse 5] should fear Esau because the latter fulfilled the single mitzva of dwelling within the Land (and all the more so in light of the fact that Esau certainly did not live in Israel with the intention of fulfilling the mitzva). Rabbi Mohliver posits that the necessary conclusion is that even a gentile’s dwelling in the Land (and even without intention to fulfill a mitzva) is equal to several mitzvot performed by a completely righteous person, such as Jacob!

            Rabbi Mohliver wrote the above words more than a century ago, less than a decade after the creation of the Zionist movement, and added the following comment:

How much truer is it that when a Jew dwells within the Land, even when he dismisses some mitzvot, it is very dear to God. It is not for naught that our Sages commented: “The Holy One, blessed be He, said: ‘Would that My sons be with Me in the Land of Israel, even if they defile her.’”       [Yalkut Shimoni, Eicha 3]