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Overview
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.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466853133 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 09/17/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 414 KB |
About the Author
The Rabbi of Oxford for fourteen years, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is the internationally bestselling author of many books. He is the host of two radio shows: The Peter and Shmuley Morning Show, which reaches an estimated 250,000 listeners in the New York area, and a nationally syndicated discussion/call-in show on the Talk America Network on weekdays for three hours. Rabbi Shmuley is a weekly columnist for the Jerusalem Post and appears regularly in the op-ed pages of The New York Post and the Times of London. He has been profiled in Time, Newsweek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The LA Times, and The Chicago Tribune. He is a regular guest on American talk and news programs.
Read an Excerpt
Face your Fear
Living with Courage in an Age of Caution
By Shmuley Boteach
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2004 Shmuley BoteachAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5313-3
CHAPTER 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.
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.
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.
The foundation of all serious achievement lies in overcoming fear.
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.
It is courage, not caution, that leads to a great success
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?
Overwhelmingly, human action is motivated by fear.
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Face your Fear by Shmuley Boteach. Copyright © 2004 Shmuley Boteach. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
PART ONE: The Case Against Fear,
1. Fear: The Dragon in Eden,
2. Fear: The Ultimate Terrorist,
3. What Stuff Are We Made Of?,
4. The Media's Campaign of Fear,
5. Fear's Futility,
6. Busting the Myths About Fear,
7. Move Toward the Light,
8. Tell Yourself Not to Be Afraid,
9. Fear Is the Hammer That Beats Our Lives into Dust,
PART TWO: To Conquer Fear,
10. Strengthen Your Inner Immunity,
11. Principle #1: Dedicate Your Life to Something Higher,
12. Principle #2: Believe in Your Destiny,
13. Principle #3: Become a Leader,
14. Principle #4: Face Your Fear,
15. Principle #5: Keep Hope Alive,
16. Principle #6: Redefine Vigilance,
17. Principle #7: Replace Caution with Courage,
18. Principle #8: Embrace the Superrational,
19. Principle #9: Create Your Own Reality,
20. Principle #10: Fight Back Against the Darkness,
21. Principle #11: Do Something,
22. Principle #12: Kill Your Television,
23. Principle #13: Choose Righteousness,
24. Principle #14: Have Contempt for Evil,
25. Principle #15: Recognize Holiness,
26. Principle #16: Connect Your Life with Others,
27. Principle #17: Do Good,
28. Principle #18: Connect with Family,
29. Principle #19: Develop a Primary Relationship,
30. Principle #20: Raise Fearless Children,
31. Principle #21: Build Your Community,
32. Principle #22: Knot Your Spiritual Umbilical Cord,
Conclusion: Living Life in the High Places,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach,
Copyright,