On Love: Divine and Human (for Parashat Kedoshim)

What does it mean to love God?

We talked about this question this week in my Tefillah Workshops in relation to the second line of the Shma, ve’ahavta et Hashem elokekha, the command to love God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.

One theme that emerged from these conversations is that true, lasting love involves dedication and steadfastness through thick and thin. Rabbi Akiva says: bekhol middah umiddah shehu moded lekha, with every measure that He metes out to you, whether a measure of good fortune or a measure of suffering – whatever you receive, you will remain loyal, or, as some of us thought, whatever you receive you will use as an opportunity for loving God. Bekhol -- with everything. It is all part of the relationship – the good, the bad and the ugly. To love God means to stick with Him through it all, through hard times and good times, through periods of clarity and faith as well through periods of anxiety and doubt.

And also with every piece of our selves will we love God –bekhol levavekha, with both the good and the evil inclinations, goes one interpretation. We bring it all into service of God because to love God with steadfastness also, on some level, means to love ourselves with steadfastness – to hold all pieces of ourselves in kindness, not to reject any piece but to bring it all into service, to stick with ourselves through all of our changing states of mind with compassion and constancy.

And coming to this week’s parsha, there is the corollary in relation to other people. Here is the other big ve’ahvta in Judaism -- ve’aahavta lere’akha kamokha, Love your neighbor as yourself. As yourself. Learn to be steadfast in relation to yourself and you will learn to love others in the same full embrace, to forgive them their failures and inadequacies and annoyances and live with them through their troubled times. Be a good friend to yourself and be a good friend to others – be like Ruth who stuck by her mother-in-law. To love is to be steadfast.

As if to complete the circle, the love your neighbor pasuk ends with Ani Hashem , “I am the Lord.” It is the steadfast love of God – both our sense of the constancy of His love for us as well as our own attempt to be loyal in return – it is this bedrock love that stands behind our divine –like ability to love ourselves and each other with the same steadfastness. To love is to be like God, loyal and steadfast and forever giving, to tap into the flow of hesed that continually keeps the world alive.