Eikev Shabbat
August 23, 2008
When we think of Jewish law, we are often overwhelmed by the thought of how many commandments we are supposed to follow. According to tradition, there are 613 of them, although for us, living in the Diaspora, in an era without a Temple, there are only 297 that still apply. And I use the word ‘only’ with some irony.
But then we have verses 12 and 13 in chapter 10 of Dvarim, in our portion today, which seem to take away a little of the burden.
‘And now, Israel, what does Adonai, your God demand of you?…To revere Adonai, your God, to walk only in His path, to love Him, and to serve Adonai, your God with all your heart and soul, keeping Adonai's commandments and laws…’
We can focus on the last phrase, ‘keeping Adonai’s commandments and laws,’ and continue to feel overwhelmed by how much we have to do or we can focus on three other words in those verses which give us a much simpler message. Those three words tell us ‘to love Him,’ to love Adonai.
But even that command isn’t quite so simple when we try to figure out exactly how to do that. How do we make ourselves love someone, anyone, including God? It’s especially confusing considering that we are not physically able to see or to feel God.
A century ago American philosopher William James said that our emotions can be perceived as physiological states. As a therapist, I found that every emotion has a physiological manifestation. When we are nervous, we take shallow, quick breaths; we become hyper aware of our surroundings; we momentarily enter the state of fight or flight. On the other hand, when we are happy, we feel our chest expand and take deeper, slower breaths.
Modern-day neurophysiologist, Antonio Damasio[1] tells us that the reverse is also true. If we behave in a certain way, we can evoke the emotional states that match the behavior. If we smile even when we don’t feel happy, eventually we will feel happy. So perhaps we are being told to act as if we love God and eventually we will feel that love for God.
It’s interesting that in this verse, loving God is a completely separate requirement from any of the other requirements mentioned. In order to love God, we do not have to walk in God’s path; follow the laws that God has laid out for us; or feel the awe of the majestic power of God’s creations. We simply have to love God.
In our personal lives love is an anarchist. No matter how much we experience love in our lives, we are unable to accurately analyze with whom we will fall in love and with whom we won’t. There may be people who, on paper, look like a perfect match for each other. They share the same ethics, interests and creative outlets. But there is just no spark between them, no desire for them to be together. And then there are the people who seemingly have nothing in common with each other but fall in love and live together happily.
We’ve all experienced some pieces of love’s anarchism, either in our own lives or in the lives of those we know.
But the love for God, as it is laid out in our portion, is so much less complex and more predictable. We are simply told to love God without expecting anything back for that love which is very different from the way we love the people in our lives. It’s very unusual to have unconditional love, even for our children. But this verse tells us to have that kind of love for God.
The magic of this kind of love is that as we feel our love for God, we are then able to feel God’s love for us. And in feeling God’s love for us, we are freed up from the need to receive all of our love from the people in our every day lives. God’s love is more filling than any human love.
What our portion today does not explicitly tell us though is that in loving God, we will come to love ourselves and others even more deeply. And feeling God’s unconditional love frees us to be able to love others with fewer and fewer conditions.
It may also happen that as we love God and feel God’s love for us, we may be inclined to follow some or some more of God’s mitzvot which then increases the amount of time that we can feel God’s love for us. This is, our Sages tell us, the reason for the mitzvot, for us to feel closer to God. It’s an endless cycle, loving God, feeling God’s love, following the mitzvot and loving God. This endless cycle brings us to the holiness that God wants us to feel, wants us to experience as often as possible.
May our days be filled with love for God, for ourselves and for those in our lives.