Two Kinds of Fear

Shabbat Eikev Sermon. We are afraid of fear. Our culture recoils from the word as if it were a poison. But it wasn’t always that way. It seems almost strange now, but fear was once considered a virtue, to be striven for and carefully cultivated. To describe someone as “God-fearing” was to compliment them. What was it that once made the idea of fear so appealing, and how has it fallen from its place of esteem in our contemporary religious conversation?