Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past

3. Ahavah: Love as Desire and Purpose

61 chaPter 3 Ahavah love as Desire and PurPose And yet, awe only tells half the story. In classical sources, awe (yir’ah) is paired with love (ahavah). These two impulses are meant to characterize behavioral stances we take in performance of the commandments—so we do commandments motivated by love and awe—and also serve as independent, supererogatory obligations in their own right. For all the merits of yir’at shamayim, awe of heaven, and the importance of awe in religious consciousness, awe pales in comparison to this twin elusive commandment to love God. The centrality of the obligation to love is encapsulated in the words of Judaism’s most familiar prayer, the Shema, taken from Deuteronomy 5: “And you shall love the lord your God—with all of your heart, with all of your spirit, and with all of your might.” The cultural familiarity of the Shema reinforces the significance of this verse for Jewishness, but it should not obscure quite how difficult and complicated its mandate is. What’s more, this is not the only “commanded love”—besides God, the Bible commands us to love the stranger, love the neighbor, and in certain texts, to love the world. Shuva 62 In virtually every one of my Jewish educational environments, we spent time on the essential questions concerning this obligation : How is one commanded to love God—or, for that matter, to express any emotion toward anything? Can God command love of God? Does the outcome of this obligation actually produce emotion and sentiment? Or does the very nature of commandedness undermine the sentimentality that love connotes? What kind of love does this become? These questions contain two separate but related problems. The first problem stems from the assumption that the emotions of the human heart cannot be so easily manipulated. For while the human heart may be malleable—as elsewhere in Deuteronomy, God first asks the people to “circumcise” their hearts, and then several chapters later offers to do so directly, ostensibly to prepare them emotionally to stand in covenantal relationship—can we force an emotion on ourselves? One might try to like something, and may even perform actions out of devotion or obedience. But given the idiosyncrasies of emotional experience, can one ever be commanded to love? The inverse of the problem, a second and related concern, goes to the nature of commandedness in creating this obligation. How would one enforce or evaluate an obligation to love, or assess its proper fulfillment? “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men!” Could it be that the essential, formative commandment, expressed in a text that then emerges at the literal and figurative heart ofJewishprayer,involvesanunindictable,immeasurablecommandment whose proper performance remains locked in the secrecy of the human heart? This question hearkens back to our earlier discussion of commandedness itself, and how obedience interfaces with the voluntary nature of commitment. If a commandment is issued together with a specific threat—as the midrash playfully describes the Sinai theophany, accept this Torah or I will drop the mountain on top of you—then the obedience that emerges can hardly be characterized as voluntary. This in turn makes a commandment associated with an emotion—the obligation to love God—deeply difficult to understand. These difficult questions, however, may be in and of themselves Ahavah: Love as Desire and Purpose 63 problematic, as they are rooted in a specific set of assumptions about love, about who it is we love and how we love. Love, ahavah, tends to be portrayed in the familial sense, and thus involves the sense of attachment that is required between us and those to whom we are already intrinsically related or connected. If love is essentially a familial act, a tool of emotional attachment, then this commandment is indeed problematic. How can we be commanded to emote in a certain way? How can this love ever be tested or evaluated? Who knows the inner thoughts or feelings of another? What’s more, to be commanded to love those to whom we are already intrinsically connected —parents, or God—means that the commandment echoes a sentiment that we are already wired to feel. One of my friends tells of a conversation he had with his rabbi in yeshiva, in which my friend—a struggling teenager—asked the teacher how we knew of the existence of God. Astonished, the rabbi answered that the question itself...