Ahava and Yirah: The Twin Forces of Creation

There was a season when I did not know who was growing inside me.

First pregnancy. Early weeks. The ultrasound was scheduled but hadn't happened yet, and I spent those weeks in the kind of wondering that changes how you move through the world. Not the anxious wondering that constricts, that makes you hold your breath and brace for impact. Expansive wondering. The kind where you name possibilities before they solidify into facts, where your imagination becomes a form of participation in something larger than yourself.

Twins run in my family. Eleven known sets across the generations, the most recent born to my sister. So when I imagined possible birth configurations, I was not being fanciful. I was being practical. One child, two children. Sons, daughters. One of each. And because I am who I am, someone who believes names carry weight, that what you call a thing shapes what it becomes, that language is not description but invocation, I considered names.

If I had twin girls, I decided, I would name them Ahava and Yirah.

Love and awestruck wonder.

I should tell you about the season before that wondering began.

For a year after my wedding, I took a pregnancy test every month. Not hoping, but confirming. Confirming I was not yet pregnant. And every month, the negative result brought relief. I was not ready. The timing was not right. The test was a ritual of reassurance.

Then one month, something shifted.

The result was the same. Negative. Not pregnant. But instead of relief, I felt grief rise in my chest, sudden and undeniable. I told my husband I wasn't pregnant, and he looked at my face and asked if I was happy about it. I started crying. I said, I'll never be a mom. Surprised, he asked if I wanted to be a mom now.

I did. The wanting had arrived without my permission, surprising me with its certainty. Something had awakened in the night, in the accumulated days, in whatever mysterious process turns not yet into now. I asked how he felt, and he said if I was ready, he was ready. So we prayed together, right then, speaking our desire out loud. Naming what we wanted before it existed. Asking for a child before we knew if one would come.

I conceived the next month.

This is the pattern I have come to recognize:

Love reveals itself. Sometimes it surprises you. Sometimes you have been carrying it for longer than you knew, and one day it simply announces its presence, undeniable. The irrational yes that precedes all rational justification. The wanting that does not ask permission.

And alongside the love, awe arrives. The wonder of standing at the threshold of something sacred. The recognition that you are about to participate in creation itself, that you are asking to bring into existence something that has never existed before, something that will bear your imprint, carry your genetic material, live beyond you in ways you cannot predict or control.

You name it anyway. You speak the desire before you have the evidence. You call forth what does not yet exist.

And sometimes, it comes.

In Hebrew, ahava is love. Not romantic love exclusively, though it includes that. It is the love that builds, the love that returns to the difficult work again tomorrow, the love that creates without needing permission or guarantee. The root of the word carries a sense of giving, of offering. Ahava is not a feeling you wait to have. It is a posture you choose. It is the yes that precedes all rational justification.

Yirah is harder to translate, and I have spent years circling it. It is often rendered as "fear," but that misses the texture entirely. Yirah is awe. Wonder. Reverence. The feeling you have standing at the edge of something vast: the ocean, a birth, the blank page before you write the first word. There is trembling in it, yes, but not the trembling of terror. The trembling of recognition. The trembling that comes when you understand you are in the presence of something holy.

I came to these concepts through my religious upbringing and through years of studying phenomenology, specifically how humans experience the sacred. The divine is both attractive and overwhelming, drawing you in and making you tremble simultaneously. Rudolf Otto called it mysterium tremendum et fascinans: the mystery that awes and fascinates, that humbles and attracts in the same breath. You cannot truly love without holding some measure of awe. And you cannot truly hold awe without some measure of love underneath it. You do not tremble before things that do not matter to you.

I wanted daughters named for these two forces because I believed, and still believe, that they are inseparable. That they are twins themselves. Two faces of the same orientation toward what matters most. Two responses to the same holy encounter.

I did not have twin girls.

My first child came singular, not plural. A daughter whose name means "G-d answered our prayers," because she is. She is the answer to the prayer we spoke that February night, the desire we named before we knew if it would come. My second child, a son, whose name means "my secret is G-d." My third, another son, whose name means "he will yield strength."

Each name was an act of invocation. A blessing spoken over them before they could understand language, a purpose declared before they had the chance to grow into it or defy it. I believe in the weight of naming. I believe that what you call a thing shapes what it becomes. I have watched my children embody their names in ways that still surprise me, as if the naming itself called forth something that was waiting to be summoned.

But the twins I imagined, Ahava and Yirah, stayed with me. Not as children I never bore, but as forces I needed to understand. Concepts that had been born in that season of wondering, even though the daughters had not.

Here is what I have come to believe:

When you are building something that matters, when you are participating in the act of creation and calling forth what does not yet exist, both forces will be present. They are signposts. They tell you that you are on the path where the real work happens.

Ahava is the reason you begin. It is the spark that makes you say yes, this, I want to make this. Before the strategy, before the planning, before you know whether anyone will care. Love is the force that gets you into the chair, that makes you open the blank document, that whispers this matters when you have no evidence that it does.

Yirah is the reason you approach with reverence. It is the awe that recognizes what creation actually is: sacred, weighty, consequential. It is the trembling that keeps you honest, that refuses to let you treat the work carelessly, that understands you are handling something that deserves more than your half-hearted effort.

Love says: I want to make this.

Awe says: I understand what it means to make this.

They are both responses to the same encounter. The encounter with creation itself.

The brands I study, the ones that create devoted followings and become part of how people understand themselves, are built by people who carry both forces.

They love what they are building fiercely enough to keep building when it is hard. The love came first. They did not start with market research or gap analysis. They started with a compulsion they could not explain and did not try to justify. That is ahava. That is the force that begins.

And they hold awe for the work. They approach it with reverence for the audience, for the craft, for the gap between what exists in their imagination and what they have actually made manifest. They understand that they are participating in something that matters, and that understanding makes them careful. Not paralyzed. Careful. The way you are careful with anything sacred.

A brand built only from love becomes self-indulgent. It expects the audience to care simply because the builder cares. It does not do the work of earning attention, creating resonance, building bridges.

A brand built only from awe becomes sterile. It optimizes endlessly, follows best practices religiously, and produces something technically correct that no one remembers. It is so reverent toward the rules that it forgets to love the thing it is making.

But when both forces are present, when you love the work enough to begin and hold enough awe to approach it with reverence, something else becomes possible. Something that inspires devotion. Something that lasts.

I meet them now in different forms, these twins who were never born.

In the work. In the founders who sit across from me and describe their vision with a tremor in their voice, half-embarrassed by how much it matters to them. In the late nights spent refining something no one asked for, something the market did not demand, something that exists only because someone loved it into being and then loved it enough to make it good.

I know the loneliness of that devotion. The way it can feel foolish to care so much about work that others might dismiss. A brand. A business. A body of work that may never be seen, may never find its audience, may never justify the hours you poured into it. Who cares this much about a brand? Who weeps over the meaning of the work, the potential impact, the weight of getting it right?

I do. And if you have read this far, I suspect you do too.

The love you carry for your work is not a liability. The awe you feel in its presence is not naivety. These are the twin forces that have accompanied every act of creation that ever mattered. Every artist who made something that outlived them knew this devotion. Every founder who built something that changed how people live knew this trembling.

You are not alone in it. You are in very good company.

Creativity demands both passion and courage. The passion to begin, to say yes before you have evidence, to love something into existence simply because you cannot bear for it not to exist. And the courage to approach the work with awe, to admit that it matters, to care for it with the reverence it deserves even when caring that much makes you vulnerable.

The world is full of people who create from obligation, who build what the market demands, who optimize for metrics and call it strategy. That work has its place. But it does not create devotion. It does not become the thing that changes how people see themselves. It does not carry the imprint of someone who loved it and trembled before it.

You have something else. You have the twin forces. You have the love that makes you begin and the awe that makes you worthy of what you are building.

So build it. Name it before it exists. Speak the desire before you have evidence it will come. Approach it with all the passion and courage the work demands.

The world needs what only you can make. And the making of it, if you let it, will make you too.

Stay Curious,