6. Toldot: "There is Nothing to Fear But the Fear of Fear"

According to Kabbalah and Chassidus, the two primary emotions of the human are Love and Fear. And being as such, it is fair to say that Love and Fear are the primary emotional needs of the human. Yet, while most people are nodding in agreement concerning the human need for the experiencing love --in both, the giving and the receiving--, nevertheless, with very few exceptions, most are vehemently nodding their head in disagreement, concerning the human need of experiencing fear.

Well, for starters, the emotion of fear received a bad rap in recent history. Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected as the 32nd President of the United States of America, in the times of the Great Depression, in his inaugural speech, paraphrased  Henry David Thoreau, “Nothing is so much to be feared as fear”), by saying, “So, first of all, let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is … fear itself.” A little more research as to the origination of this quote will take us to the great sixteenth century French writer Michel de Montaigne, who wrote, “The thing of which I have most fear is fear,” after which, in the seventeenth century, the English writer, Francis Bacon, wrote in his 1623 book De Augmentis Scientiarum: “Nil terribile nisi ipse timor,” or “Nothing is terrible except fear itself.”

Moreover, as the ancient wisdom of Martial Arts made its way to the shores of America, many taught and perceived a severely perverse notion of the maturity in one facing his inner-fears, with an immature slogan of, “No Fear!” as if this was a desired ideal for the perfection of humanity.

This is not true at all. Rather, one would best embrace, “There is nothing to fear but the fear of fear!” Fear, in itself, is a divine emotion, deeply embedded within the human being precisely because (-Genesis 1:27), “And G-d created man in His image; in the image of G-d He created him.” However, as has been the history of human intervention into the course of nature, mankind has oft set themselves to remove what they understand to be but an unnecessary unpleasant component, only to realize that by doing so, they have upset the greater balance of the ecosystem, the biology system or the human psyche system. So, I say, “Give fear a chance!”

In this lecture, based primarily on a maamor the Rebbe delivered, on this Shabbat in 1953, we are going to explore the divinity of the emotion of fear, as it serves to the human’s healthy state of mind