Mishlei: Eshet Chayil, Part 4 — The Fear of G-d

As the saying goes, the choice of a wife should not in fact depend either on her beauty alone or on her grace, above all when these are entirely external. If you are to praise your wife, praise her for her intrinsic values and above all for the fear of G-d — and we will have to define what the fear of G-d is. To the woman, too, we will say: do not seek to fulfill yourself solely through your beauty and your charm. All of that belongs to what time wears away. There is something that time does not manage to cut down, and that is the values proper to each person — and, once again, in the fear of G-d, which we shall come to shortly.

Finally, to every man who is already married, the advice is given not to dwell on the beauty of other women, nor on their grace either; he should rather turn his attention to the qualities his own wife carries. That said, beauty — when it accompanies the fear of G-d, of course — is esteemed at its true worth, and we have the proof. Avraham says to Sarah: “Behold now, I know that you are a woman of beautiful appearance” (Bereshit 12:11). Of Rivkah, too, it is said that she was beautiful. And Rachel “was beautiful of form and beautiful of appearance” (Bereshit 29:17) — beautiful in her appearance and beautiful in her attributes. As for Yosef — masculine beauty too has a reality of its own.

Yosef is a man handsome of appearance and of form (Bereshit 39:6); he has a beauty both inner and outer. In speaking of the king, Scripture insists: “Your eyes shall behold the king in his beauty” (Yeshayahu 33:17) — our eyes will see him; they will witness the coming of the mashiach (Messiah), who will be an exceptionally beautiful being. When David is chosen, the prophet singles out a young man who is ruddy and pleasant to behold, and G-d tells him: this is the one on whom My choice falls. Avigail, too, is esteemed both for her beauty and for her intelligence. […]

[…] In short, the daughters of Iyov were very beautiful. So you see that the Tanakh, when it speaks of the feminine, also associates with it the element of beauty. How, then, can one say “Sheker ha-chen ve-hevel ha-yofi” — “Grace is deceit and beauty is vanity” (Mishlei 31:30)? Several attempts at explanation have been offered on this point. There are those who said that Shlomo ha-Melech, given the number of women he had known, was ultimately sated, and so he said: beauty no longer counts, nor does grace; one should dwell rather on the intrinsic value of the feminine. Others considered Eshet Chayil to be a funeral poem, the eulogy of a departed woman whom neither beauty nor grace accompanied any longer, but rather what she had achieved in her life.

Her works, as the text puts it. This reading is supported by the fact that Eshet Chayil stresses “va-tis’chak le-yom acharon” — “she laughs at the last day” (Mishlei 31:25): she laughs at death, she does not fear it. Another attempt is to say that it is a tribute paid by the husband, who tells his wife: “For me, you count far more for what you are worth in your spiritual and moral qualities.” But we shall not go into the justification of all these readings and interpretations. Let us return rather to the saying of Shlomo — namely, that grace is deceit and beauty is vanity when they are independent of the fear of G-d.

Then, indeed, they are worth nothing — as much by their futility as by the outward flash of things, which leaves one’s relationship with the feminine dependent on an external conditioning rather than an internal one. So when one takes beauty, charm and grace separated from the value of the feminine, cut off from the fear of heaven, from the fear of G-d, then they indeed have no value; they can even become a source of sin, a source of alienation, and the woman can indeed become defined by the seduction or the temptation that she projects outward. She then becomes, in effect, a woman-object, an object of desire. We do not mean by this that a woman should not assert her worth in society and make her mark there.

It is striking that this fear of G-d appears only at the very end of this hymn devoted to the feminine. For up to this point, when one reads Eshet Chayil — we already brought out certain aspects last week — if I were to continue: she goes far afield to seek everything she needs, she recoils before no difficulty; in the face of every trial she shows herself full of initiative and courage, and all this to secure the well-being of her household, with dignity, with courage; her lamp does not even go out at night. In short, it is not an Orthodox woman we are speaking of here; it is not, as people say today, a “religious” woman. That is the woman Shlomo ha-Melech is speaking of. I raise this notion of “religious,” you see, because what is the definition of the Jew according to the Talmud? Quite simply: whoever rejects idolatry is called a Jew (Megillah 13a).

How do you understand that? To reject idolatry — what is idolatry? Well, there used to be places of worship, trees, the sun, the moon, all kinds of extraordinary phenomena in the world. But today that is no longer the case; there has been a transfer of this idolatry. There are celebrities who are idols; there are even rabbis who have become idols. When one stops at an idea and makes it a fundamental principle of life from which one no longer budges, one becomes something of an idolater. Idolatry consists of fixed ideas, and a Jew never wants to consider himself as having reached his end, as having completed his project, as locked inside an ideology — and we know very well today what harmful effects these ideologies have, and these…

“Rav Benizri, you have switched off the microphone again — forgive me.” — And that, too, is idolatry! — “Unfortunately we did not hear the end, because you had cut the microphone.” — I am not cutting it; it has a selective effect — it switches itself off. I was saying that to lock one’s being inside any ideology whatever, however moral and spiritual it may be, would amount to idolatry. So what is yirat Hashem? What is the fear of G-d? Why fear? Why not love? For love, there must be two. With fear, we fear G-d, but He does not fear us. We can fear a power, but the power does not fear us. In fear, we stand face to face with ourselves, and we are bound to walk with measured steps, because in any case —

— here we are; “against your will you live” (Avot 4:22): we were brought into the world without being consulted. But we have the reflex of pain, which we began to feel while still young through certain physical disorders — and for those one can find a remedy. Moral disorder, however, spiritual disorder — that is what will strike at our life, at our conduct, at our walk, and throw our existence off balance: our havayah, the havayah of the being, the existence that is his — but this existence in the absolute. We will not live in fear of death tomorrow. No: we walk with the will to move forward without stumbling, without falling. What we fear is letting go. It is not for nothing that our Sages established a connection between yirah, fear, and re’iyah, sight: to see a goal before oneself, but to see it in the absolute, to see it as an uninterrupted walk, means that we have at that moment left the domain of idolatry; the compartmentalization of our being — we have set it free; we keep moving forward toward discoveries, step by step, in daily life. That is yirat Hashem. Yirat Hashem means clinging to the reality of life and seeking no escape into spiritual spheres or into some moral ethic or other; it means realizing what is my ideal, my aspiration, within reality, and trying to go beyond that ideal or that reality. That, in sum, is how we function, how we walk — but these doses of spirituality must not be greatly reduced relative to our will to progress in life, to persevere. And that is why yirat Hashem is important. Here we have the conclusion of everything we have said: namely, that this feminine which lives on the alert, in expectancy, in permanent struggle, which will not give up and is always active on several fronts in order to discover what forms the cement of love — that is fear. This fear, then, which it deploys in its progression toward the ineffable, the absolute, everything that escapes the rationality of the being and belongs rather to the adherence of the heart to what I do — for our Sages are wary of any will to rationalize life at all costs: just as one does not rationalize love, one does not rationalize life. And just as one embraces life without holding back — except that one takes care not to stumble, not to fall — well, that is what matters most. Now we can understand a little what the king means in his text: what the woman undertakes in life espouses an uninterrupted walk of vision, of unveiling after unveiling; and in this uninterrupted walk beauty and grace lie hidden. There is no joy like that of dispelling every doubt and lifting every secret — and those we keep with us. Everything that is outward beauty, everything that is outward grace, is overtaken by wear.

We have the fervor and enthusiasm of love in the first years; we will not keep finding it after thirty years, after forty years, if we have not sustained it through a will, each day, to unveil something — something that lies beyond my daily routine, the repetition of my comings and goings. That is why here the text does not speak of ahavah, love; it speaks of yirah, fear. And yirah is what makes a person luminous — in this case the woman, of course — because it is the yirah of chen, of grace. Where does this word come from? From “be-hilo nero alei roshi” — “when His lamp shone above my head” (Iyov 29:3): the glow, the third eye, one might say, which is beyond my head, from where I see things, where I consider things differently, from a certain height, and I never tire of them.

The person I have before me, the children I have before me — day by day I discover them; day by day I take pleasure in praying that I may not see them make any misstep, and in satisfying them as best I can. That, I would say, is the primary idea of yirah. And that is the reason why, when G-d wanted to sum up the whole Torah — “What does Hashem your G-d ask of you, but to fear…” (Devarim 10:12) — He says: I ask of you a little restraint, a little fear; that you be on your guard — but on your guard before the ineffable, before the absolute, before the mystery of life. For there are things you will never explain, which are part of you; you live with them, but you have not given them the dimension they deserve. So sometimes they become a burden, because you try to hide them away, and you drag them along like a ball and chain. No — try to confront them, taking care; little by little you will discover them, little by little they will become one with you, and together you will give them their own light. And when you unveil them, you will be the Eshet Chayil. Why? Because you, Eshet Chayil, have an intuition that the man does not have.

Why here, precisely, in Eshet Chayil: “a woman who fears G-d, she is the one to be praised”? Because of yirah. In this sense our Sages said: “Is the fear of heaven, then, a small thing? Yes — for Moshe it is a small thing” (Berachot 33b). Moshe is someone whose feet are not on the ground; he is on the heavenly mountain, he can ascend. But we are not like Moshe — we are not like Moshe. Indeed, when our Sages expounded “Sheker ha-chen ve-hevel ha-yofi,” they said: “Grace is deceit” — that is the generation of Moshe and Yehoshua; “beauty is vanity” — that is the generation of Chizkiyahu; and “a woman who fears G-d” — that is the generation of Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai (Sanhedrin 20a). One may well ask why, may one not?

So grace — grace belongs to the time of Moshe. Yes, Moshe: he benefited from a revelation from above, and beauty was granted to him. After all, the beauty innate in a person is not of our own doing; that foundation was given to us. Grace, likewise, is a gift from heaven. So they had grace: Moshe had grace, Aharon had grace. Now, beauty — Chizkiyahu is king of Israel, but, well, he was born into a royal dynasty; he lacked nothing. But fear of G-d must be sought in Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai. Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai had nothing to eat; he lived in utter poverty.

And the disciples of Rabbi Yehudah bar Ilai, in order to study Torah, shared a single tallit to cover themselves as they sat — they would sit covered by it together to unveil the secrets of the Torah in a state of poverty, through constant effort, defying every difficulty and sharing responsibilities: the guarantee of each toward the other, the responsibility of each toward the other. Well, that is yirat Hashem. So yirat Hashem is not like ahavat Hashem, the love of G-d. Ahavah comes from above — you see, we will discover it later on, we will reach it later — because it can slip through our fingers. But yirah is what keeps us in a constant walk, watching for every obstacle and trying to avoid it, and continuing to walk at all costs, without giving up, without stopping — and, more than that, with this quite simply in the background: the will to serve. This shared wisdom, this knowledge that one wants to share with others — that is yirat Hashem. Now, as we know, everything is played out among three spheres: the head, the heart and the hand. The hand will carry out what the heart feels; the head […]. Perhaps — I say perhaps, because not all intellectuals, all moralists, all philosophers are consistent with themselves; they can have extraordinary knowledge, but in reality they do not feel from within what they say, they do not live it from within; they remain strangers to their own way of thinking. That is merely a charm, a beauty — an outward beauty of a thought, a charm that seduces through its diction, through its eloquence. No, no, no: it must be an expression of the heart, and that is a vision, another vision — what one calls the vision of the heart, which vibrates to all things and is afraid of losing its way. That is indeed yirat Hashem. In that case, we can regard this verse, “Sheker ha-chen,” as the conclusion of all the attributes set out above throughout Eshet Chayil — namely: “Rabbot banot asu chayil,” “Many daughters have done valiantly” (Mishlei 31:29), many daughters have made progress.

They did these things, but they did them in a scattered, fragmented way. It is not a unity of life, not a unity of walk. One could then say that the Eshet Chayil does not exist in reality, but that it is a feminine group that realizes the Eshet Chayil. But the Eshet Chayil, the true Eshet Chayil, when she realizes herself in her individuality, in her unity — she is the one who, in sum, has combined wisdom, her knowledge and her emotional life in such a way that the two live in a permanent struggle of adjustment between thought and lived experience, and its realization in the yad, its extension into the hand. And that is what makes the Eshet Chayil: she is never finished. She lives with the consciousness of the unfinished — no, I would not say the unfinished: the consciousness of the infinite. Is the consciousness of the infinite also a kind of endless questioning of oneself?

Questioning oneself is not really questioning oneself; it is the will to climb the rungs of this ladder that stands on the ground and whose top reaches the heavens, on which one goes up and comes down — one cannot only climb. Well, it is an ascent, a dizzying ascent, and however much we might want to insist on climbing, there are duties in life that oblige us to make descents. And this descent — as one might well put it — serves to bring with us something that we neglected in our uninterrupted walk. And one must take care not to let the children run along behind. Yes, one must know how to take them along with oneself, and that is very important. It is very important, because sometimes we have achieved our life, yet we wonder why we have not managed to pass it on to our children, and we see them going somewhat backward; they have not followed our example — perhaps we did not inspire them by example, we did not know how to transmit it to them ourselves […]. To give this child the awareness of an uninterrupted vision and an uninterrupted struggle — which never allows him to stay in bed for long and sleep in.

“Rav Benizri, I would like to come back a little more to the actual expression ‘fear of G-d.’ I fully understand your exposition, but I find it hard to connect with the literal meaning, because in ‘fear of G-d’ there is a notion of being afraid of G-d. What you are saying is so disconnected from the primary sense — or at least from the apparent one — that it is hard to fit the explanation to it.” — Yes, that is my fault. — “No, no.” — No, really, because I skipped some stages, and in principle I should not. For before arriving at yirat Hashem, there is yirat ha-onesh, the fear of punishment: we are afraid of punishment, afraid that something will fall on our head.

Always, isn’t it? One must not break the dishes. Next there is yirat ha-chet, the fear of sin — of the wrong step, the misstep. That is inherent in our life; only the child lacks awareness of it, throwing everything down when he is a baby. You will not give him a crystal glass to hold and drink from — he will throw it at you; he does not yet know the value of things, but he will become aware of it. Then comes yirat shamayim, the fear of heaven. The fear of heaven is fearing what is higher than us, or beyond us — sometimes sitting an examination all a-tremble, not sure of ourselves.

What awaits us? And yes, it can happen: we can lose our assurance on the spot, fear can make us lose all our means, and we answer haphazardly. That is yirat shamayim. Yirat Hashem is something else. I have a great deal of assurance; I have moved beyond all that. I do things with care; I break nothing in my path; I respect everyone; I prepare well for everything that awaits me, even my lecture. But I am apprehensive about something that is missing in my development, something that has remained closed in my way of seeing things and to which I have paid no attention. I cannot claim to explain everything, I cannot claim to understand everything — all the more so since there are things which, when they are of no immediate interest to me, I set aside.

Let me tell you: Boaz was declared an ish chayil, a man of valor; and Ruth was recognized as an eshet chayil, a woman of valor. So the only eshet chayil who earned this title is Ruth — and, incidentally, it is because she is a convert. A convert, when she is honest and sincere, has this thirst — since it is through the conversion of ideas that we all fulfill ourselves. Each time it is a teshuvah, a recovery of oneself, but in another mode of thought, in another mode, on another musical stave. Thought belongs to reason; music belongs to feeling — to the way one sings, to the heart, to the approach one has to that feeling. Now, it has been said of Ruth and Boaz […] that there was an interest, a gratification inherent in their commitment, and that it was not entirely gratuitous, since it was not done in order to share freely what one holds, what one has. For it to be yirat Hashem, it must be stripped of all self-interest; because if, in the end, I do it because I want to be respected, because I want to be recognized, then there is already an attraction that is entirely external and does not belong to inner beauty.

In principle, it is this inner beauty that must illuminate the outward aspect; it is not the outward aspect that must illuminate the inner. For it to be so, it must be truly disinterested, moved by this wisdom of the fear of G-d. The fear of G-d is a wisdom “omedet la-ad,” “enduring forever” (Tehillim 19:10); it has a character of eternity, a value of eternity. And if it has a value of eternity, it knows no death. That is the ultimate, the ultimate yirah — when one has gone beyond yirat ha-onesh, yirat ha-chet, yirat shamayim, yirat ha-sechel, the fear of the intellect. Yes: we are indeed afraid of stumbling, of reasoning badly — or even of sensing things wrongly. We can be mistaken; we are sometimes the victims of our own naivety, or of our own uprightness, let us say it.

— But why “Hashem”? What is the meaning of the word “Hashem” here? — Well, it is clear you did not attend the last lecture. Very well. Because “Hashem” is the Havayah, the Name of being: “Hashem” is life, the reality of being. Each of us has a hint of “Hashem” within him, and we try to give it volume throughout our life. And when we give it volume, a connection is made between this hint of the infinite that I carry within me and the infinite in its full dimension. That is when the Havayah of the being becomes Yihyeh — “He will be.” The future is called to become twice yud-heh, because in yud-heh-vav-heh there is a part that is revealed and a part that is hidden, which I try indeed to discover. For it is the keli — the instrument, the lower level, the vessel, the body — that contains the neshamah, the spirit with a small “s,” for the Spirit with a capital “S” is that of the Most High. And so, little by little, what it is will become transparent, and it will become a film, a membrane clinging to the neshamah, clinging to the neshamah. So this Yihyeh makes twice yud-heh, yud-heh. As for the Tetragrammaton, you know that the Name can be spelled out in full — that is, yud equals twenty, heh equals fifteen — and one arrives at the count of seventy-two […].

[…] You know that in the morning prayer, in listing the attributes, we start from emet and arrive at yafeh: “Emet ve-yatziv ve-nachon ve-kayam ve-yashar ve-ne’eman ve-ahuv…” — “true and firm, established and enduring, upright and faithful, beloved…” So we recite all the attributes of the Divine, all the way to yafeh, “beautiful” — yafeh is the conclusion. Well then: truth is inseparable from beauty, and beauty is inseparable from truth. It is this beauty which is not hevel, vanity; it is this chen, this grace, which is not sheker, deceit, because it wholly espouses this search for what is true. And we do not flee from it — very often, of course, truth wounds, because we cannot bear it — but we seek, little by little, to discover it; and the more we discover it, the more we become, in a way, somewhat transparent, and we can carry it further, because we have gone beyond these limits. That is why yafeh closes the course of this hero, of this yozem — how shall I translate yozem? — this spirit given to initiative, to permanent initiative, which does not want to grow weary, which does not tire, which does not want to lay down its arms and wants to keep going. Now whoever wants to keep going by engaging the mind, the spirit of life, eventually reaches, in sum, the limits of exhaustion. The heart, however — the heart asks only to appreciate life more and more and to enjoy this life all along; but sometimes not through oneself but through others — through others, that is, the children, the grandchildren.

That is why he ends his text by saying: “Give her of the fruit of her hands, and let her works praise her in the gates” (Mishlei 31:31). It is her work — not her children, not her grandchildren; that is not what is said. No. She performed deeds. She wanted to give. And what she gave, she never loses. It is invested, and of course, to the extent that she shared it with her children, her children will carry it; otherwise, those around her will carry it too. “In the gates” — there are exit gates for everyone. There we are — another question? — “I had another thought: you spoke of yafeh. It is more of a reflection.”

“This notion of beauty in general — since it is linked with perfection, it is often associated with an idea of death. Is that what you mean when you speak of an outward beauty, or of a…” — No, precisely: I do not associate it with death. Beauty, in any case — beauty was given; it came with the sense of beauty. The sense of beauty is not like the sense of ethics: ethics is something you will, in a way, try to forge for yourself. Beauty — the beauty given to you — is an outward beauty; it comes from heaven, it is a gift from heaven. Just as intelligence is a gift from heaven, beauty is a gift from heaven. Now, this beauty which is a gift from heaven — you know what Rabbi Yochanan said to his disciples, who came to see him and asked him: “But why are you weeping?”

They had found him weeping. “You see, I am weeping for this beautiful face, which will be dragged through the dust from one day to the next.” That sense of outward beauty — he was a very handsome man. So, well, there is this outward beauty: “I regret it; it is for it that I weep. I would so much have liked to take it with me.” So indeed, this beauty dies […]. But this inner beauty, the beauty that indeed accompanies truth — yirah itself — knows no death. It belongs to the attributes of beauty of the Divine. — Thank you. — One cannot say that He is beautiful; we do not know His face. There we are — another question?

“Thank you very much, Rav Benizri. I joined the lecture partway through; I could not join at seven o’clock. It is always such a pleasure.” — Still in the car? — “Yes, I was determined to attend your lecture all the same.” — Very good, very good. Well — we were speaking of this uninterrupted walk; it is good to keep it up even in the car. Will you be able to get there? — “Yes, absolutely.” — “Thank you, Rav Benizri, thank you very much; until next week.” — Thank you. — “Thank you. Thank you very much, Rav Benizri. Thank you so much.”