Understanding G-d’s command to love Him

RABBI DAVID WOLPE

SINAI TEMPLE, LOS ANGELES

Let’s start with the drug heroin. When soldiers returned from the Vietnam War, studies showed that some 20 per cent were regular heroin users. Experts assumed we would have a huge addiction problem in the United States. Yet when the soldiers returned to civilian life returned, 95 per cent just stopped using. How did they release themselves from this very addictive drug?

One answer was demonstrated in an experiment with rats. When a rat is put in a cage with plain water and water containing drugs, the rat will drink the drug until he dies. But when a rat is put in a “rat heaven” – with wheels and toys and other rats along with the drug – they will use the drug very sparingly. 

As with veterans who returned home to their family and friends from the isolation of war, there is lots of evidence that connection is a strong part of the antidote to addiction. We are wired to connect to something or someone.

So when people are checking their cell phones or screens all the time, it is the ‘connect wiring’. We need that charge of closeness, even if it is virtual. When surrounded by people whom they love, they can put the phone down, at least for a bit. When the Torah says that you shall love G-d, there are three connection lessons in the command:

1.       To love another human being is to draw close to a spark of G-d. Each person is in G-d’s image. If G-d is in some sense the parent of all humanity, then when you love someone’s children, you are showing love for the parent as well.

2.       When you appreciate the world, when you notice it instead of being slave to a screen, you appreciate the gifts that G-d has given. Gratitude is a ladder to love.

3.       Real love is not an emotion, it is an enacted emotion. When a woman comes to my office, bruised and hurt, and tells me her husband did this “but he loves me”, she is thinking that he feels passionately toward her. But that is not love. Love is how we carry our feelings into the world. So when the Torah says to love G-d, it is another way of saying: Act as G-d would wish you to act in this world. To love is to be loving.

These reasons become clear when the passage we know as the first paragraph of the shema continues with: When you sit in your house, when you walk by the way. In other words, how you act toward your family reflects your love; how you see the world in your daily life reflects your love. If your life is a parade of online games and YouTube videos, it is a genuine failure of love. 

The Jewish tradition is characterised in many ways – a tradition of law, or of ethical monotheism, or of memory. But at bottom it is a tradition of love. 

Rabbi Akiba said that the Song of Songs, that erotic love poem contained in the Bible, is the holiest book in the whole Bible. For love is the root of our culture and our connection. Look into the eyes of another human being; the electric charge you will feel is a pathway to elevating your life in love.

* Rabbi Wolpe has been described as “America’s most influential rabbi” by Newsweek Magazine and one of the “50 most influential Jews in the world” by the Jerusalem Post. He is one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Limmud programme of Jewish learning and culture in South Africa. He is the author of eight books, including the national bestseller “Making Loss Matter: Creating Meaning in Difficult Times”.