Face Your Fear: Living with Courage in an Age of Caution

By Shmuley Boteach

A world famous thinker, author, lecturer, and activist, whose diverse, acclaimed and immensely popular body of work covers such subjects as religion, relationships, and bravery, Boteach now turns his attention to America's present state of mind and comes to the conclusion that fear is crippling society with unprecedented force. The only way to escape this climate is to learn what fear is and how to overcome it.

He tackles fear headlong and answers the following questions: What is fear? What is it doing to us? Why is it affecting us now more than ever before? How can we be so powerful a society yet so succeptible to fear? How can we conquer it? Why do we need to conquer it?

Face Your Fear is a book so relevant that it has a chance to be absorbed by society's consciousness and to change the way we think.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Sep 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466853133

Book preview

PART ONE

THE CASE AGAINST FEAR

1

Fear: The Dragon in Eden

The word of the LORD came unto Abraham in a vision, saying, Fear not, Abram: I am thy shield, and thy exceeding great reward.

—GENESIS 15:1

Fear defeats more people than any other one thing in the world.

—RALPH WALDO EMERSON

I’m writing this book because I am afraid.

I have struggled my whole life against fear, as many of you have. I have known fear of failure, fear of humiliation, fear of injury, and sometimes fear of death, either for myself or a loved one. Most of all, I have wrestled against the fear of not mattering, of being cast out because I did not fit in, of being overlooked because I was not significant, and of being shamed because I was not worthy. I have at times been paralyzed by this feeling. I have let it hold me back. And what I now want most is liberation from that fear. I believe that I have found many of the keys that free us from the terrorism of fear. And I am going to share them with you.

To be afraid is to suffer. Fear constitutes the most intense form of human oppression. When you are afraid, you cannot be happy. Fear is the single most destructive emotion in the heart’s armory, the single biggest roadblock that you will encounter in your search for fulfillment and happiness. If you live with fear, you can be sure that you will die with most of your dreams unfulfilled. Unless you conquer fear, it will conquer you. Fear not only prevents you from fulfilling your greatest destiny, but it threatens to rob you of your very identity by destroying everything about you that is unique. To be afraid is to be transformed from a human being of destiny to a creature with no future.

Fear is a permanent tormentor. Unless the world vanquishes it, fear will lead to the rise of more people like Osama bin Laden, who will exploit fear in order to gain power. Unless we overcome superstition, we will never find a true G-d. Fear is an epidemic sweeping America and the world. We are more afraid now, with less cause, than we have ever been before, which largely explains why we are so unhappy, so easily shaken, so easily stirred.

It is time to fight back, to declare that we are not at the mercy of our fears. It is time to join battle in a constant and daily struggle to conquer our apprehensions: to understand why they plague us and to find a way to purge them from our lives so that we can finally be free.

In the modern world, there are tremendous forces bearing down upon us: financial pressures, work pressures, political pressures, familial responsibilities, the fear of random and inexplicable violence, and the fear of illness, just to name a few. We are constantly confronted with the horrors of history and of life: senseless hatred, poverty, famine, lovelessness, loneliness, and death. In a world empty of G-dliness, bereft of soulfulness, we feel hollow on the inside and so succumb to outside pressures.

Learning to Equalize External Pressures with Internal Strength

Of course, if these terrible external pressures were all there was to life, you wouldn’t be able to continue. You would collapse under their weight. But if you can fill yourself from within—with a connection with G-d, with the people who love you, with a sense of purpose, with the certainty of destiny, and with the conviction that you profoundly matter—then you grant yourself immunity to those outside forces and win back your life. You are liberated from fear and can begin to really live. Imbuing your life with substance will empower you to withstand the weight of those pressures.

Like a deep-sea diver, who must equalize himself internally with the outside pressure if he is not to be crushed by the water’s force, all of us need to equalize ourselves with the external challenges that threaten to unnerve us. We cannot do so if we don’t understand what we’re up against.

Know this. There is one root cause of all your fears: the fear that you don’t matter. The fear that we’re one big zero is what animates most of our actions. It’s what makes Donald Trump buy gold toilet seats. It’s what makes otherwise content men run for the presidency. It’s what makes teenage girls agree to have sex with sleazy boyfriends. And it’s what made me want to write this book. The scarlet thread running through all these actions is a desire to be noticed, to be recognized. To refute once and for all that inner worry that we don’t matter that eats away at us.

That fear looms larger than ever right now because we are largely detached from all that is eternal. We have become unmoored from the stabilizing forces in our lives that grant us a sense of permanence.

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We have become fixated on the ephemeral and transfixed with the transient. Bigger home alarm systems, a stronger military, and a better diet are how we have responded to an age of terror and heart disease.

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We have forgotten that real security comes from a feeling of inner connectedness, a sense that we live not only for ourselves but for a higher purpose. Without an anchor to moor us, we are easily traumatized by the evil around us. Immersed in an age of uncertainty, thrown into a sea of material confusion, we have developed precious little immunity to fear. The emptier the carton of milk, the easier it is to shake it. The weaker the roots of the tree, the easier it is to uproot it. And the more disconnected you are from meaningfulness, the more easily you are persuaded that your existence can be easily terminated.

Many people believe fear is an emotion too primal to govern, a reflexive emotion as outside our control as jumping when you are surprised by a loud noise, as intuitive as the fight-or-flight response. This is the most dangerous myth about fear. Living in fear is a choice, much as living in a hot or cold climate is a choice, and if you try, you can create a reality without it: in fact, you must, if you are to survive with your hope intact. To move beyond fear, you must recognize that the Band-Aids and dressings you are applying to your fears aren’t helping but are actually making your wounds even worse.

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The foundation of all serious achievement lies in overcoming fear.

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Human greatness begins where submission to fear ends. You cannot become wealthy like Bill Gates without first casting aside the fear that you will fail, without risking capital and prestige. You cannot become a Winston Churchill if you are intimidated by the evil power that you must fight. You can’t get a college degree if you’re afraid of taking tests, and you can’t win an Olympic gold medal if you’re afraid of losing a race.

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It is courage, not caution, that leads to great success.

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Much more important than the ephemeral victories of money and honor are the inner triumphs. You cannot marry your soul mate unless you first overcome your fear of commitment. You cannot become the parent you wish to be unless you first transcend the fear of bringing a brand-new life into a cold and uncaring world. And you can never maximize your potential if you live in the permanent fear that you just won’t measure up.

I have written several books before this one, but this is the first time that people have thanked me when I told them my subject. People are desperate to get out from under these paralyzing fears. As the stories poured out of people, I realized they were all saying the same thing: So little of what I do in my waking life is what I actually want to do. Most of what I do is motivated by apprehension. I have no authentic identity. I’m a robot controlled by my fears.

The nurse at my doctor’s office looked sad one day and told me that her boyfriend did not wish to marry her. She said she had read my book Why Can’t I Fall in Love? to find out what she should do. What book are you working on now? she asked. I told her I was writing a book about overcoming fear. Oh, I prefer your books on relationships. One on fear won’t apply to me. I’m pretty courageous. Really? I said. But you just told me that you can’t get your boyfriend of four years to commit. If you weren’t afraid, you would have resolved the situation long ago. You would have given him an ultimatum or at least confronted him strongly about how miserable you are. But you have refrained from doing so because you’re afraid of losing him, being alone, not finding someone you love as much, or all of the above. You’re stuck in the mud only because you’re afraid of moving either forward or backward. She stared at me in silence and then went back to her work.

A friend of mine who is an assistant rabbi at a synagogue told me that he doesn’t get along with the senior rabbi. The man is mean and unfriendly. He treats me like garbage. He’s not mean or unfriendly, I chimed in. He’s only afraid. He’s afraid you’ll upstage him, steal the spotlight. So he tries to undermine you. He’s probably a decent guy. But his fear makes him mean.

We are so afraid that we have been numbed by fear; we have made ourselves blind to the grip it has on us.

How many of us worked hard at school not because we loved learning, but because we were afraid of bad grades? How many of us became workaholics, sacrificing our personal relationships, not because we loved our work but because we were afraid of ending up as big nobodies? How many of us allow our marriages to languish because we’re afraid to confront the emptiness of our relationships?

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Overwhelmingly, human action is motivated by fear.

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If you are honest with yourself, you realize that most of what you will do in life is motivated not by something positive but by the negativity of fear and insecurity. Rather than running to the light, you’re running from the darkness. Are you staying in that dead-end job because you love it, or because you’re afraid to take risks? At a dinner party at which people have political views sharply different from your own, do you refrain from disagreeing with them because you can’t be bothered, or because you’re afraid of appearing out of sync? Have you avoided that conversation with your teenage son or daughter about whether they’ve taken drugs because you don’t care either way or because you’re afraid of hearing the answer? I know a mother whose two children are careening out of control. One has a dirtbag boyfriend who once slapped her face hard in the presence of her mother. The other has terrible friends, several of whom are junkies. I’ve softly encouraged the mother to do something to rescue her teenage girls from their downward slide, but she always tells me that I exaggerate how bad the situation is. The mother is not blind; she can see as well as I can exactly what’s going on. Rather, she is afraid; She’s terrified that she has failed as a mom. It’s easier to deny the situation than to face that fear.

Fear is usually self-fulfilling; it leads to the realization of what it’s designed to ward off. A man who goes to a job interview fearing that he won’t get the position will usually oversell himself and become tiresome, or undersell himself and appear unmotivated. A man who wants to date a woman who, he fears, doesn’t reciprocate his affection will either never ask the woman out or overdo his overtures. Virtually every survey indicates that women find self-confidence to be the most attractive quality a man can have, after a sense of humor. Yet many men cannot even summon the courage to ask a woman her name, because they fear rejection. Often a man will tell me that he saw a woman at a party to whom he was attracted but could not summon the courage to introduce himself. Why not? I’ll ask him. She was out of my league is the stock reply. You mean she was out of your league for even a conversation? What kind of insecurity has gripped you that you think you aren’t worthy to talk to another human being?

To live with fear is to live with your potential permanently imperiled and imprisoned, and to overcome fear is to set yourself free. In his award-winning book on the Rwandan genocide of 1994, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, Philip Gourevitch tells the story of Thomas, a Tutsi marked for slaughter, who somehow survived the machete-wielding Hutu executioners:

Thomas told me that he had been trained as a Boy Scout to look at danger, and study it, but not to be afraid. And I was struck that each of his encounters with Hutu Power [who perpetrated the genocide of the Tutsis] had followed a pattern: when the minister ordered him back to work, when the soldiers came for him, and when they told him to sit on the street, Thomas always refused before complying. The killers were accustomed to encountering fear, and Thomas had always acted as if there must be some misunderstanding for anyone to feel the need to threaten him.

In life it may be true that people will try to kill you, but they stand a far greater chance of succeeding if fear has already transformed you into a victim.

The instructions for overcoming fear that you will find in this book do not consist of abstract concepts, appropriate only for meditation and inapplicable in the real world. This book is a spiritual book that seeks to identify the underlying causes of fear. But, it delivers extremely practical strategies and techniques that you can use in your everyday life to put fear behind you, even while you walk in dangerous times.

Fear Has No Redeeming Quality. Period.

To make use of these techniques, you must first abandon all thoughts that fear serves a useful purpose in your life. This book will make an important demand of you, without which you will not mine its usefulness: you must accept that fear is not only harmful but evil, not only unhelpful but deeply destructive. Fear has not a single healthy application in any area of life. Period. Many argue for the redemptive qualities of fear. No, fear is wholly corrosive; there are no positive consequences to fear that could not be realized through much more positive means. Sure, fear of an accident will get you to drive more carefully, but so will a love of life and health. Fear of a heart attack might get you to watch your cholesterol, but it will also make you into a hypochondriac who runs to the hospital every time your left arm is sore.

My goal in this book is to get you to confront your fears and base your life not on dread and insecurity but on courage and confidence.

Love and Fear: Two Rivers and Their Tributaries

Love and fear are like fire and water, wholly incompatible, mutually exclusive, entirely antithetical. These two primary emotions are two rivers running through your life, and from each there are tributaries. Paranoia, envy, bitterness, self-consciousness, insecurity, and egomania flow from fear, while graciousness and gratitude, joy and happiness, confidence and contentment stream from love. If you can divert the flow of your energy away from the negativity of fear and toward the positive stream of love, your fear will be swept away in its rapidly moving current.

To be sure, I am not arguing against shoring up our external defenses. In this age of terrorism, we should strengthen our military and aggressively pursue the cold-blooded killers who stalk us. In this age of economic instability, we must find ways to establish greater financial security. And in this age of unpredictable health scares, we must seek to exercise, eat sensibly, and lead more balanced lives. But none of these external remedies can ever compensate for the far greater inner vulnerability to fear. Once the fear of Osama bin Laden or of cancer creeps into your soul, even the 101st Airborne and the Mayo Clinic can’t give you a good night’s sleep. Whether you live or die becomes immaterial, because you have already become the living dead, petrified by each new dawn, terrified by the advent of night. You must fight an inner battle against fear and conduct a personal assault on insecurity, inner fear by another name. I’m certainly not telling you to throw caution to the wind, mortgage your house, and put all the money in the stock market, or to walk the streets of Riyadh wearing an I love George Bush T-shirt. But I am telling you to scrutinize your fears objectively, refute them, and lead your life based on wisdom and intelligent analysis rather than on irrational trepidation.

We’re Worried We Can’t Cope

In my own ongoing battle against fear, I have gained an important insight. Here’s why: None of us is ever really afraid of something happening to us. Rather we fear our response to the occurrence. Our great concern is that we won’t be able to cope. For example, no woman ever fears breast cancer. Rather she fears her inability to deal with it. She fears her reaction when she is forced to confront it. She doesn’t think that she’ll be strong enough to fight it. Similarly, everyone knows that one day his parents will die. That thought alone is not what frightens a man; what he fears is that he won’t be strong enough to handle the loss.

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No outside force has the power to make me afraid. Fear is a wholly internal emotion based entirely on personal choice.

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No man ever fears not being able to support his family. Indeed, all developed countries have social services designed to ensure that children never go hungry. Rather the father fears that he will not be able to live with the humiliation of having failed to provide for those he most loves. No country is ever afraid of an organization like Al Qaeda. Every country has enemies, and accepting threats is part of life. What the country really fears is the response to the sacrifices that will have to be made in order to confront the danger. And no child is ever really afraid of the dark. Rather they fear what their imagination will invent to fill the all-consuming blackness once the lights go out.

A friend called to tell me how frightened he was that a former employee of his was going to file a sexual harassment suit against him. He asked me how he could cope with the fear. I told him, I don’t believe you’re afraid of the suit. You’re afraid of how you will react to the public humiliation and the possible repercussions. And you’re afraid of what this says about you, both in your own eyes and in the eyes of your wife. It’s not the event that scares you, but your response. So the secret to overcoming the fear is to master the response. Before any suit is filed, don’t be paralyzed. Act now. Get in touch with the woman in question quickly. If the allegations are true, make full and honest restitution. Win her over by showing her that you are a changed man and that you want to make it right. Then go to a spiritual counselor and with him do some real soul-searching: ask yourself why you don’t respect women enough to see them as your equal. And if the matter does become public, prepare yourself for that eventuality as well. Tell yourself you’re a good man who happens to have a significant flaw. Don’t worry what people will think of you. If you make your character better and feel good about yourself, then you’ll live this down, put it behind you, and eventually people will forget. But whatever you do, don’t be paralyzed with fear.

The understanding of fear as something entirely within your control is immensely liberating. You can take a stand against fear by refusing it a foothold in your life. You must convince yourself that there is no challenge you cannot meet, and you must strengthen yourself internally by expanding and deepening your connections with those things that are essential to the inner life of the spirit: family, friends, community, and G-d.

This is the most important book I have ever written.

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Freedom is the essential blessing of life without which all else is cursed.

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And freedom is achieved primarily by liberating ourselves from the prison of fear. The American colonists were not free until they liberated themselves from the fear of George III. And today’s American people will not be free of Osama bin Laden until we see him for the desperate thug he is. To be sure, there is no quick fix in the battle against fear. Just as the battle against darkness and death will stretch from here to eternity, so will the battle against its tributary, fear. That truth should not be disheartening. Engaging in the battle against fear is life-affirming and thrilling. Nothing can make you feel more alive than the everyday triumphs over fear. The impossibility of ever triumphing completely against fear means you get to be part of a jailbreak every day. With every victory over anxiety and fright, you will feel born anew. You do not take one big breath and subsist on it for ten years. Life is expressed through constant activity, constant struggle, which keeps you warm and generates light. And the light of life pushes away the darkness of fear.

I am not so naïve as to believe that total immunity to fear can be obtained from a book, just as I do not believe that love of G-d comes from reading the Bible alone. This book should serve as the catalyst by which you can unearth your own dormant resources to combat fear. G-d did not will us to live in a constant state of panic and alarm, and human beings are stronger and more resilient than most of us realize. You have a glorious destiny that is yours to fulfill, but you will not reach the Promised Land unless you are courageous enough to climb up and peer over the mountain. Let the strategies in this book serve as the ladder. The view is entirely your own.

2

Fear: The Ultimate Terrorist

And Abraham said, Because I thought, Surely the fear of G-d is not in this place; and they will slay me for my wife’s sake.

—GENESIS 20:11

Dolendi modus, timendi non item.

To suffering there is a limit; to fearing, none.

—SIR FRANCIS BACON

When I start to write a book, the topic I have chosen becomes the filter through which I see the events of the world around me. When I first committed myself to writing a book about fear, although I understood the enormity of the task, I thought I had a reasonable understanding of fear as a limited motivating force and roadblock to human success. As it turned out, I didn’t have a clue.

In the course of writing this book, I have rediscovered every day just how enormous an influence fear is in our lives. Only after living with the topic for more than two years have I felt that I’ve even begun to approach the vastness of this emotion and the control it exerts on the human consciousness.

More fear exists in our lives than we’re prepared to admit. I was astonished by how driven by fear I found myself, my family, and my friends. When I started listening carefully, every person I counseled, every dinner guest who dropped a name, every friend confessing an indiscretion, every former student who got in touch for professional advice was really saying the same thing: I am afraid. The woman who argued that her husband was not loving was saying, I am afraid that I no longer interest him. The dinner guest who was telling me that he worked with Rudy Giuliani was saying, I am afraid that on my own I would not be very welcome in your home. And the student who complained that he hated his job was saying, I am afraid that I am wasting my life. Lawyers today have unprecedented control of our personal lives and corporate strategies because people are so afraid of being sued. I have more than once had to delete benign anecdotes in books because publishers told me that the lawyers would not allow it. Indeed, the fear of lawsuits is as American as apple pie. I recently saw that bottles of soda now contain a warning that the tops can pop off and take out your eye. Fear of lawsuits in America has forced us into being afraid of plastic bottles.

And it’s not just that my circle is filled with scaredy-cats. My friends reflect the mood of the culture at large. New Yorkers now have Botox parties, modeled on the popular Tupperware party concept. Women used to gather to buy plastic containers; now they gather to buy plastic faces. They choose a mask over a face capable of expressing joy, surprise, or sadness, in the fear that these emotions might leave their trace on their faces. Why would a woman literally inject poison into her forehead, robbing herself of the ability to show emotion, if not out of the terror of looking old? And why shouldn’t she be afraid? She reads everywhere of captains of industry like Donald Trump and Jack Welch trading in devoted wives for younger women without rumples. They read in the Nielsen ratings that advertisers aren’t interested in anyone over thirty-five (which means that I’m already a write-off). They see on magazine covers that the only women who get attention are those with firm bodies and silicone breasts. If I were a woman, I would be damned scared of growing old. Heck, even as a man I have become frightened of growing old. And isn’t that tragic? Rather than looking forward to the mature years, when wisdom will save us from screwing up so much, we instead dread the advantages of age and fear flabby skin.

When I was a kid, I used to calculate how old I would be at the turn of the millennium. It seemed such a proud milestone to live through. But then, as I approached the awaited day in my thirty-third year, rather than enjoying it, I heard from the media that the world was going to come to an end with the effects of the Y2K computer bug. Dams were going to burst, jet airliners were going to plunge from the sky, and nuclear power plants were going to melt down. We were all going to die of radiation poisoning. I had several friends who stocked up on bottled water and canned beans. We got through that crisis, and then along came the mother of all fears: terrorism. September 11, 2001, exploded in our faces, and fear became a permanent fixture in our daily lives. When I suggested to friends that we all go to see the dropping of the ball in Times Square for New Year’s Eve, they looked aghast and said, Are you nuts? Times Square is a really high-profile target. A target! These normal suburbanites were talking like General Tommy Franks, planning their Saturday night as if they were mobilizing