THE FIGHT/FLIGHT OF FEAR THE LOVE OF LIFE

Whichever way you look at it, Fear and Love or backwards, Love and Fear, it is an experience of high emotional feeling, all the six senses are active, the hormones secretions from the glands escalate, you be in a tizzy of passion, desire, bent over in a bow, and "kneeling three times a day" as is required, it so says in The Chumash, Jewish Bible. 

There are three Festivals we must attend at a Temple per year: Three??? Yes, three: Shavuot, Passover, Sukkot. Three? Dial the number three anytime during this message. How can we change the number three into a friend? Capitalize it: THREE. And use the numerical system: 3. The letter 3, is E turned backwards. E as in Equation. E as in Equal. E as in Excitement. E as in EL. EL being a way to say God.

What is LOVE? Love is belovedness, sweetness, care and concern, a kiss, holding hands, shaking the hands of a fellow, a high five, building a snowman with the kids, an Eskimo fort, buying a new dog from the shelter, feeding the birds, Red Cardinals, Bluebirds, a birdbath for them both to meet. Eating blueberries in one's oatmeal. Going to a spa with your friends. Love is goodness and GREATNESS. As GREATNESS, love is affection. To be fond of someone. To be proud of your kids. To be selfless in your love for your family. To take your high school graduate to different colleges for him to choose where he would like to study. A University of IL in the south farmlands, and also a sister-school University of IL in the big city of Chicago. 

So, then we're with you. Then what is FEAR? Fear is Halloween! Comes once a year. A pagan holiday, to be approached by an AIDS victim in his sexual pursuit. This is real FEAR. To must fight for your life if a beggar/thief demands your purse. This is fear, yes, to lose your cellphone, to have someone use it when you no longer have it and they dial out of the country, and it goes on your bill. To must leave your home because your boyfriend is abusing you domestically. To need the safety of a Shelter for the Abused, to eat their pig slop everyday, to have excruciating pains in one's stomach. To sleep at night with a bowl of rat poison "food", next to one's pillow. To be chosen as the one there who brings all the garbage (ten bags) to the dumpster to compress it. Large black plastic garbage bags. To try as you might to get out of there. To find another place to live. Not to end up in a jail, a prison, for stealing a loaf of bread, there to sleep on a cot, with a smelly never-cleaned toilet bowl at your headrest. 

If we say we love and fear our Lord, we are sated, it is not like loving or fearing others in other situations when the love may not be returned. The Lord loves and fears us back, so we always have requited emotions, His emotion for us to mimic and we can choose which one, love or fear, in which of these mind states we would like to be.

To have the help of beautiful sing-song Hebrew language words, straight from The Torah, living Words with melodic tropes. Hebrew words we like as we pray and meditate, so these words bring us the love we need as we use them to speak love to God. 

Words like what? Mercy, lovingkindness, strength, understanding, truth, beauty, charity, compassion, empathy, sympathy, honorableness, dignity, appreciation, thankfulness, meditation, mega-thinking, prophesy, mental telepathy, prayer, blessing, philosophy, highly powered hearing, speaking, singing, chanting. 

The use of these afore-mentioned words to be sung in song, to be chanted with other members of one's Minyan (Jewish prayer group), to feel the love and courage of one's Rabbi and other minyan members, to feel the almighty power of the LOVE and FEAR of our Sovereign. Our LORD. To love God in return.