In classic Jewish literature, two Hebrew words describe the human being's feelings toward God: ahavah and yirah. 

Ahavah easily translates as love.  

Yirah is more difficult to translate: perhaps fear, perhaps awe, perhaps reverence.  The following three sources either use the word yirah יראה, or the related verb tirah תירא.  I include these sources not for deep study, but so you can start to get a feel for the meaning of the word in varying contexts:

As you read, consider:

1. What emotion does the word yirah seem to be describing in each of these three text?

​The Bible itself demands that we experience both ahavah (love) and yirah towards God.  

Before reading the biblical source for this commandment, you might discuss with your study partner:

1. What might it mean to love God? To feel yirah for God?

2. Is it possible to simultaneously feel love and yirah?

3. What might that feel like?

As you read the biblical source that follows, consider:

1.  According to the biblical commandment, how does a person show ahavah and yirah towards God? 

2.  What is the relationship between ahavah and yirah in this text?

In the following famous passage, Maimonides (Rambam) describes the dual commandments to feel ahavah (love) and yirah towards God.

As you read, you might consider: 

1.  How does Maimonides understand the feeling of yirah?

2.  Just as there are different types of yirah, there are also different types of love. How does Maimonides understand the feeling of ahavah - love- towards God?  How is it different, or similar, to the love you might feel towards specific people in your life?

3.  According to Maimonides, what actions must a person take to experience ahavah and yirah towards God?

4.  What is the relationship between these two emotions?

5.  Do you recognize these emotions in yourself?  Can you recall particular moments when you experienced either or both of these emotions, or particular circumstances that tend to evoke these emotions in you? 

6. Does this passage from Maimonides contradict or compliment the biblical text above?

Ahavah is a mutual emotion.  

As you read the following prayer from the morning service, consider:

1.  How does God express God's love, or ahavaha, for us?

2.  How is God's love for us different from or similar to our love for God?

3.  What other emotions does God express towards us? Is there a parallel to yirah?

Now that you have an understanding of yirah, what do you think of the second sentence of the modeh ani prayer, which transmits an older idea from the Talmud?  The following two sources are the full modeh ani and the Talmudic source referenced in the second sentence of the modeh ani:

The following are excerpts from an article by Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, printed in the periodical Tradition in 1978.  The article is entitled "Majesty and Humility".

As you read, you might consider:

1.  Can you relate Soloveitchik's dialetic, majesty and humility, to the classic dialetic, yirah and ahavah?  (It is probably not a simple, direct relationship.)

2.  Do you recognize the emotions Soloveitchik describes? Can you recall particular moments when you experienced either or both of these emotions, or particular circumstances that tend to evoke these emotions in you?

9. Majesty and Humility

...Man is, quite often, a captive of two enchanting visions, summoning him to move in opposite directions. He is attracted by opposing norms, by two sets of values; two stars infinitely distant from each other beckon to him. Man must decide which alternative to take, which route to choose, which star to follow. The clash is staggering. Man, confused, kneels in prayer, petitioning God~ who has burdened him with this dialectic, to guide him and to enlighten him...

The basic dialectic of man and his morality was beautifully captured in two midrashic homilies quoted by Rashi. In his comment to the verse "And God created man dust of the earth," Rashi says:  

• "God gathered the dust (from which man was fashioned) from the entire earth - from its four corners.
• He took the dust (from which man was made) from that spot which was designated by the Almighty, at the very dawn of creation, as the future site of the altar. As it is written: "An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me."

Man was created of cosmic dust. God gathered the dust, of which man was fashioned, from all parts of the earth, indeed, from all the uncharted lanes of creation. Man belongs everywhere. He is no stranger to any part of the universe. The native son of the sleepy little town is, at the same time, a son of parts distant and unknown. In short, man is a cosmic being...

His intellectual curiosity is of cosmic, universal dimensions. He wants to know, not only about the things that are close to him as, for example, the flowering bush in his backyard, but also about things far removed from him, things and events millions of light years away. Human cosmic inquisitiveness borders almost on the arrogant. Man is restless because he has not yet resolved the myslerium magnum of the cosmic drama. Remoteness magnifies, rather than diminishes, man's curiosity. The farther the object, the greater and more hypnotic the curiosity.  Man asks himself: to whom does the universe belong? The answer was given by the Psalmist: "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof"  To whom did God entrust this earth and its fulness? To man who studies and comprehends the cosmic drama. Ownership of the stars, the planets, the dark interplanetary or interstellar spaces, is granted by the Almighty only to those who make the effort to understand them, to those who are curious about them. Man owns the world through his intellectual involvement in it...

man is cosmos-oriented not only intellectually, but emotionally as well. He loves the cosmos. He, in person, wants to be everywhere. Man is questing, not only to know the universe, but also to experience it. Explorer and adventurer, he feels bored by the monotony and the routine of familar surroundings. He is out to "see the world." Man is not satisfied sending up unmanned vehicles to gather scientific data. He is eager to do it himself. He wishes to move, with the velocity of light, into a world of the unknown. Man wants to experience and to enjoy vastness. This quest, in contrast to the first, is of an aesthetic rather than an intellectual nature. If we ask again: Who owns the stars? the answer is: Whoever loves them...

 Let us examine the other interpretation of the verse in Genesis: man was created from the dust of a single spot. Man is committed to one locus. The Creator assigned him a single spot he calls home. Man is not cosmic; he is here-minded. He is a rooted being, not cosmopolitan but provincial, a vilager who belongs to the soil that fed him as a child and to the little world into which he was born...

Yes, man may roam along the charted and uncharted lanes of the universe, he may reach for the skies. Yet the traveler, the adventurer out to conquer infinity, will surely return home. If this homecoming did not occur during his lifetime, because he was too preoccupied with motion and exploration, it wil certainly take place posthumously when his body will be brought home, to the quiet, lonely graveyard which had long been expecting him...

The dust of which man was fashioned was not taken from all parts of the universe, according to the Midrash, but from a single spot on a mountain where an altar was many, many years later constructed. As we said before, each man is created from and attached to a single spot, the origin, from which he cannot escape. The home for which man yearns attracts him like a powerful magnet; -it brings him back, no matter how far he has traveled. "Home is the sailor, home from the sea, and the hunter home from the hill": these beautiful lines by Robert Louis Stevenson contain more than a nostalgic note...

Both cosmos-conscious man and origin-conscious man quest for God, although they are not always aware of this quest. Man yearns for God, both in his feverish haste to get farther and farther from home, and in his lonesomeness for home and his experiencing the spell that home casts upon him. Cosmic man finds God (if ready for Him) in the vastness and boundlessness of the cosmic drama, in the heavenly galaxies billions of light years away. Home-bound, origin-minded man finds God in the limitedness and narrowness of finitude, in the smallness of the modest home into which man was born and to which he willynilly returns. He discovers God in the origin, in the source, in the center of the burning bush.12 Either infinity cannot contain God, or God, if He so wills it, addresses man from the dimensionlessness of a point. What is the center of a bush if not a point! And out of that point, God spoke to Moses...

As we have stated above, cosmic man beholds the vision of God in infinity, in the endlessness of the distance which separates him from God, while origin-minded man experiences God in His closeness to man. As a rule, in times of joy and elation, one finds Gods footsteps in the majesty and grandeur of the cosmos, in its vastness and its stupendous dynamics. When man is drunk with life, when he feels that living is a dignified affair, then man ben.olds God in infinity. In moments of ecstasy God addresses Himself to man through the twinkling stars and the roar of the endlessly distant heavens...

However, with the arrival of the dark night of the soul, in moments of agony and black despair, when living becomes ugly and absurd; plainly nauseating, when man loses his sense of beauty and majesty, God addresses him, not from infinity but from the infinitesimal, not from the vast stretches of the universe but from a single spot in the darkness which surrounds suffering man, from within the black despair itself. Eleven years ago my wife lay on her deathbed and I watched her dying, day by day, hour by hour; medically, I could do very little for her, all I could do was to pray. However, I could not pray in the hospital; somehow I could not find God in the whitewashed, long corridors among the interns and the nurses. However, the need for prayer was great; I could not live without gratifying this need. The moment I returned home I would rush to my room, fall on my knees and pray fervently. God, in those moments, appeared not as the exalted, majestic King, but rather as a humble, close friend, brother, father: in such moments of black despair, He was not far from me; He was right there in the dark room; I felt His warm hand, as it were, on my shoulder, I hugged His knees, as it were He was with me in the narrow confines of a small room, taking up no space at alL. Gods abiding in a fenced-in finite locus manifests His humility and love for man. In such moments humilitas Dei, which resides in the humblest and tiniest of places, addresses itself to man.