And you shall love Adonai your God
With all your heart
And with all your soul
And with all your possessions.
And these words
Which I command you today,
Shall be upon your heart.
And you shall teach them sharply
To your children.
And you shall discuss them
When you sit in your house,
And when you travel on the road,
And when you lie down and when you rise.
And you shall bind them for a sign
upon your hand,
And they shall be for totafot between your eyes.
And you shall write them
Upon the doorposts of your house
And upon your gates.
These words from our Parasha, among the most well-known Biblical passages, beg a number of questions.
Is this passage a commandment? Does it comprise many commandments? If the first line – you shall love Adonai your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your possessions (or, as some translate it, might) – is indeed a commandment, then how do we know if we’ve fulfilled it? After all, love is not quantifiable. Isn’t it impossible to generate an emotion on command? And how can God command us to love God – aren’t our relationships with God more complex than that? Take note: the Torah does not command us to love our parents, or even to love our children. Perhaps there is an assumption that those loves are a given; or, perhaps, there is an assumption that you can’t force love. Or can you? Here, in the fifth book of the Torah, we are being told: Love God.
Various traditional commentators offer a spectrum of insights into these questions:
S. D. Luzzato, (Italian 19th century scholar) wrote the following:
…whomever sets God always before him and is exclusively concerned with doing God’s pleasure and observing God’s commandments will be called the lover of God…the love of God is not a separate commandment, but an underlying principle of all the commandments.
The love itself cannot be the subject of a command.
In other words, according to Luzzato, the passage is teaching attitude, but not any particular behavior. Another approach was taken by the Medieval author of the instructional book Sefer ha-Chinuch, who wrote:
We are commanded to love the Holy One, blessed be He. The main point of this commandment is that we should think about and contemplate God’s creations and works until we understand God as much as we are able, and rejoice in understanding Him with the utmost happiness. And this is the love we are obliged to achieve. (Mitzvah 418)
The Sefer ha-Chinuch, then, suggests that “loving God” is a state of mind. When we put God (and mitzvot, and Torah) at the center of our thoughts, then we begin to understand God. The more we prioritize and contemplate the blockquoteine, the more we love.
Perhaps it is a Midrash, however, that makes the passage most tangible:
The Holy One said to Israel: My children, do I ask that you suffer material loss on My account? What do I ask of you?
Only that you show your love of Me by loving one another, by honoring one another, by respecting one another; that there be found among you no transgression, no dishonest dealing, no unseemly conduct, so that you will always remain unbesmirched, as it is said: It has been told to you, O man, what is good, and what God requires of you: only to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God (Micha 6:8). Do not read “walk humbly with your God”, but rather read, “walk humbly, and Your God will be with you.” As long as you walk humbly performing without display the good deeds God commands, God will descend and humbly walk with you.
Tanna D’Be Eliyahu 141
The V’ahavta, then, may well be about action – but not action toward God. Through active (not passive) love of others (especially those who might be hardest to love) we reach out to God. This week, let us consider how we might find ways to love God through loving God’s creatures – even the most difficult and least obviously lovable. In the evocative words of Yehuda Amichai, in “Poems of Jerusalem”:
In this summer of wide-open-eyed hatred
and blind love, I’m beginning to believe again
in all the little things that will fill
the holes left by the shells: soil, a bit of grass,
Perhaps, after the rains, small insects of every kind.
I think of children growing up half in the ethics of their fathers
and half in the science of war.
The tears now penetrate into my eyes from the outside
and my ears invent, every day, the footsteps of
the messenger of good tidings.
Let us make this a summer of love, in the most spiritual sense of the word.