Another obligation of awe which is incumbent upon every person is the commandment to fear the wise men, as Chazal extrapolated from the verse “You shall fear your G-d!”, which contains the extra word “ESS”, which is inserted to obligate us to fear the wise men. We see here that the Torah equates the fear of wise men to the fear of Hashem. Even if the wise men in our generation are not on the same level as the wise men of previous generations, there is nevertheless an obligation to fear the wise men of each generation as they are, and anyway in the same way as the wise men are on a lower level, so too the laymen are not on the level that they used to be, and we know that “Yiftach in his generation was considered like Shmuel in his generation!”.
