Followers

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

CAN YOU COMMAND "LOVE" OF GOD?



In the Hebrew Bible we are often told “to love” God, such as “Love (AHB) the Lord, all you faithful? (Ps. 31: 24), or “You shall love (AHB) the Lord your God” (Deut. 6: 5). 


Here we can raise two issues: 1. Can you command love? , and 2. Even though some people easily understand that one can “love” a spouse, a child, even a country, many have a hard time conceptualizing what it means to “love” God. 


Historically speaking, the concept of “loving” God comes from the treaty terminology of the Ancient Near East, and simply means “to be loyal to.”  Especially in ancient Anatolia, many Hittite rulers signed treaties with their vassals requiring them to “love” their overlord. Similarly, in the Amarna letters we find that Rib-Abdi of Byblos stating that the city is divided into two: “half of it loves the sons of Abdi-Ashirta, and the other half (loves) my lord” (EA 138:71-73), or in the Vassal Treaties of Esarhaddon we read: “If you do not love the crown prince designate, Ashurbanipal,….”(here some curses follow; See ANET, 537). We have a reflection of this meaning in the Hebrew Bible, when it states that “Hiram [King of Tyre] loved (AHB) David always” (I K 5: 15). The Latin-Vulgate translation uses here the term “amicus” [friendly]. In the Canaanite Akkadian of Amarna, the verb ramu, the functional equivalent of AHB, meant “to favor.” So, in the past, “to love” primarily meant “to be loyal.” It had nothing to do with the emotional content that the verb “love” implies today. 


What about in Jewish sources? In the early ones, such the Talmud, to “love” God simply meant to study rabbinic texts, minister to scholars, and generally do God’s will by carrying out the Mitzvot (See, for ex. Yoma 86a). During the medieval times, the mystics (like Bahya ibn Pakuda) stressed that to “love” God is to have an intense longing for the nearness of God and a desire for communion with God, whereas many rationalists argued that “loving God” simply means to have a knowledge of God. Maimonides puts it this way: “According to the knowledge so the love” (Mishne Torah, Repentance 10: 6). 


What about us today? I maintain that, even though love cannot be commanded, actions leading to love can be ordered. As W.G. Plaut’s Torah Commentary puts it, “Each Mitzvah [commandment] done in the right spirit is an act of loving God” (p. 1211). Thus, our practice of Judaism must be done in the highest spirit of loyalty to our Jewish tradition, a tradition that should be maintained, strengthened and, at times, adapted to the needs of our times. Our prayers must be offered with devotion, our holidays observed with appropriate joy, and our rituals carried out with a sense of reality and necessary re-interpretation to make them relevant to our needs today.  


As to the second issue, I am more comfortable with the Maimonidean rationalistic approach that states that thinking and studying about God is to love God. In my non-theistic view, to love God is to find out what God stands for. This is manifested in the commitment we make to discover of the mysteries the universe, and the realization that we stand in awe before the awesome energy, namely God, that keeps it going. 


How do we get there? Hassidic masters have taught us that the Torah commands us three times to love; twice our neighbors (Lev. 19: 18, 34) and then God (Deut. 6: 5). We love humans first and then we love God. Not the other way around. Only after we have learned how to love people can we come to the “love”-namely, the understanding and appreciation of God.


Rabbi Rifat Sonsino, Ph.D.

Nov. 2016
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Books by Rifat Sonsino:

FINDING GOD (URJ; Behrman House)
THE MANY FACES OF GOD (URJ; Behrman House)
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I DIE? (URJ; Behrman House)
DID MOSES REALLY HAVE HORNS? (URJ; Behrman House)
SIX JEWISH SPIRITUAL PATHS (Jewish Lights; Turner)
THE MANY FACES OF GOD (URJ; Behrman House)
AND GOD SPOKE THESE WORDS (Commentary on the Decalogue; URJ; Behrman House)
VIVIR COMO JUDIO (Palibrio)
MODERN JUDAISM (Cognella)
MOTIVE CLAUSES IN HEBREW LAW (Scholars Press)