LOVE – PART 1
THE COMMANDMENT TO LOVE
When God created the world, in verse after verse God saw that it was good. When God finished creation, God looked at the world and saw that it was very good. Then God made a man. And for the first time, God said that something was not good. “It is not good for man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) As long as humans are alone, God’s work is somehow unfinished. People need people to fulfill God’s will in this world. From the very beginning of time, we humans need to connect to other humans to fill our God given purpose.
Perhaps this idea is best reflected in a wonderful passage in the Talmud. “[Ben Zoma] used to say, How many labors Adam had to carry out before he obtained bread to eat! He plowed, he sowed, he reaped, he bound the sheaves, he threshed and winnowed and selected the ears, he ground them and sifted the flour, he kneaded and baked, and then at last he ate; whereas I get up, and find all these things done for me. And how many labors Adam had to carry out before he obtained a garment to wear! He had to shear, wash the wool, comb it, spin it and weave it, and then at last he obtained a garment to wear, whereas I get up and find all these things done for me. All kinds of craftsmen come early to the door of my house, and I rise in the morning and find all these before me.” (Berachot 58a)
For our physical needs, we depend on other people. How much more so do we depend on others for our spiritual needs. Psychologists speak of children who were raised in orphanages, with nobody to hug them, smile at them, or care for them. Often such children suffer from a disability called “failure to thrive.” They shut down emotionally, and often have great difficulty relating to others. That is why hospitals will often seek volunteers just to hug the babies. It is not only children who need other people in order to thrive. Adults also need adults. In the prison system, when they want to punish someone severely, authorities place them in solitary confinement.
To be cut off from other human beings is not only a source of great sadness, but it can sometimes lead to tragedy. When someone is arrested for a particularly brutal crime, the newspaper often writes that “so and so was a loner.” (Think about the unibomber.) Today we often here about road rage and crimes on the freeways in my home town of Los Angeles. People on the freeways are locked in their cars, disconnected from other people, without the moral responsibilities that come from human touch. People need people to be good.
I have written in other contexts that God has given every human being a mission and a purpose for living on this earth. I wrote in my book The Ten Journeys of Life, “Our missions are not private matters that affect only ourselves. Ultimately, we carry out our missions in the midst of others, each carrying out our own particular task. Each of us carries a piece of a giant jigsaw puzzle, and removing our particular piece damages the whole picture.” The Christian theologian Reinhold Niebuhr articulated this idea beautifully, “Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we are saved by love.” Love is about connecting to other human beings.
We are commanded by God to love, because God knows that it is not good to be alone. We humans need other humans. The commandment is explicit with three laws in the Torah. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 18:19) “You shall love the stranger.” (Deuteronomy 10:19) “You shall love the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 6:5) [Important note – The Torah commands us to love our neighbor, the stranger, and God. Nowhere are we commanded to love our parents, our siblings, our children, or even our spouse. We will discuss this further in a future message.]
God has commanded us to love. Love begins through our connection to other human beings. But can a human being be commanded to love? Is love not a feeling, over which we have very little control? This is the issue I want to explore over the next several weeks.
LOVE – PART 2
LOVE YOUR FAMILY
As I mentioned last week, three times the Torah commands us to love. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” (Leviticus 18:19) “You shall love the stranger.” (Deuteronomy 10:19) “You shall love the Lord your God.” (Deuteronomy 6:5) Notice, the Torah commands us to love our neighbor, the stranger, and God. Nowhere are we commanded to love our parents, our siblings, our children, or even our spouse. Perhaps families are too fragile, and the emotions of love too fleeting, to be the object of a commandment. Perhaps family is too important to be subject to the vicissitudes of love. And perhaps, when God gave us the Torah, God realized that we cannot command feelings. We can only command actions, certain duties towards our family.
We have specific, Torah given responsibilities towards our families. First, we are commanded to honor our parents. This commandment is spelled out in the Ten Commandments. Rabbinic law describes this commandment in some detail. We must give parents the respect due their position, even if they were not very good parents and are not necessarily deserving of this honor. We must also be sure they are taken care of in their old age. (The only possible exception is abusive parents, an area treated in great detail by Jewish law.) We honor our parents because, by doing so, we show the importance of the chain of generations. And as I have mentioned in past messages, human redemption takes place only over the course of generations. (Ledor vedor, from generation to generation, as our prayer book teaches over and over.)
We are commanded to be our brother’s, and for that manner, our sister’s keeper. We must take care of our siblings. The Torah teaches that if our brother grows poor and must become an indentured servant to pay off a debt, his brother must redeem him. Our obligations grow out of our obligations to honor parents. As I tell every bar/bat mitzvah in the synagogue, “you honor your parents by taking care of your brothers and sisters.”
Caring for siblings becomes the paradigm for taking care of all our fellow human beings. We learn kindness towards others by how we care for our own siblings growing up. In a sense, every human being is our brother or sister. As the Bible teaches, “Have we not all one father? Has not one God created us?” (Malachi 2:10)
We are commanded to teach our children. In fact, the Hebrew words for teaching Torah, teacher Morah, and parents Horim, all come from the same root. Animals are born knowing by instinct most of what they need to survive. Humans must be taught from the youngest age. The human period of childhood and adolescence is one of the longest in the entire animal kingdom. Part of the reason is that we humans have so much we must be taught. Perhaps most important, we humans must be taught to make moral decisions, to know the difference between right from wrong.
The Torah commands us to marry, not necessarily to fall in love and then marry. In fact, one of the strongest marriages in the Torah was between the patriarch and matriarch Isaac and Rebekkah. Yet the Torah goes out of the way to show how it was an arranged marriage; the couple did not fall in love until they were married. The Talmud defines a whole series of mutual obligations between a husband and wife. Many of these grew in a more gender defined age, with a husband as breadwinner and a wife as homemaker. Nonetheless, if every person would approach their marriage with the question, “What should I do for my spouse?”, we can build stronger marriages. Perhaps if young people spent more time looking for the right kind of spouse and less time worrying about falling madly in love, we could build stronger marriages.
Family is about obligation. We have obligations towards our families of origin, our parents and our siblings. We have obligations towards the families we create, our spouse and our children. These obligations remain, whether we feel the emotional draws of love or not. One of the great pieces of wisdom is that love grows out of actions. We will explore this idea further over the next several weeks, as we talk of the four worlds of love.
LOVE – PART 3
THE WORLD OF ACTION
One of the most powerful ideas that grew out of kabbala, the Jewish mystical tradition, is the image of four worlds. We live simultaneously in four different worlds, each one inside the next one like Russian nested dolls. What happens in any lower world always affects the higher worlds. I have found great insight from a simple question – what does it mean to connect with another human being in each of these four worlds? I have lectured on this idea to both Jewish and secular audiences, calling the lectures The Four Worlds of Love. This is the idea I want to explore over the next four weeks.
The first world, the one closest to the material world of particles and forces, is called Olam Haasiya, The World of Action. The first great insight is that love begins with action. (This is unlike the conventional wisdom that love starts with feelings.) What we do towards our fellow human being is far more important than how we feel. Actions come before emotions. In fact, we need to act lovingly before we feel love. Or as a wise friend once told me, “You can act your way into feelings, you cannot feel your way into actions.”
Actions can be both positive and negative, what we do and what we avoid doing. Love begins by avoiding any action which will be hurtful. It grows through actions which help our fellow humans.
To begin with the negative, what we need to avoid, the most important insight was probably expressed by the Greek sage Hippocrates several millennia ago, “First, do no harm.” The same idea was expressed by the great rabbi Hillel to a non-Jew who wanted him to explain all of Judaism while standing on one foot. “What is hateful to you do not do to others. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.” (Shabbat 31a) Love starts by avoiding any action which harms another human being.
Let me share an example. As a parent deeply involved with adoption, I remember a scene from television a number of years ago. The Baby Richard case was on the news, a contested adoption where a three year old little boy was being taken from the only parents he had known by a birth father who had never met him. The birth father was interviewed by a television reporter. “Why are you doing this?” He smugly answered, “Because I love my son.” With words of love, he was destroying his son’s life.
Love begins by avoiding actions that hurt. This certainly includes avoiding any physical harm, or anything that places someone in danger. When the Torah teaches that we should love our neighbor as ourselves, it begins with protecting the safety and wellbeing of our neighbor. Anything that could be harmful, from irresponsible driving to leaving unsafe tools around to allowing a dangerous pet to run loose are forbidden through this law. The Torah also includes harming anyone financially, by taking advantage of them. That is why it insists on honest weights and measures.
The most important area where we have the ability to harm is with our words. As kids, we learn that “sticks and stones can break my bones but words can never hurt me.” This pithy saying is utterly false. Words can deeply damage another human being. The careless use of words can cause irreparable harm. I have seen honorable people whose reputation was destroyed by gossip. I have seen children whose self-esteem was at rock bottom because of constant put-downs by parents and others. I have seen people deeply wounded by unkind words. Gossip, lies, put-downs, embarrassment, name-calling can destroy. Or as the Bible teaches that “death and life are in the power of the tongue.” (Proverbs 18:21)
Love in the World of Action begins with the commandment, “First, do no harm.” It does not end there. Let us turn now to the positive, the importance of acts of loving kindness. Small actions that help our fellow human being, whether a kind word, a smile, a visit, a loan, a helpful act, or a listening ear, is key to love. This idea is best expressed in a beautiful Talmudic passage. "Rav Hama son of Rav Hanina said, what is the meaning of the verse, `Follow none but the Lord your God?' (Deuteronomy 13:15) Is it possible for a human being actually to follow the ways of God? Has it not already been said, `The Lord your God is a devouring fire.’ (Deuteronomy 4:24) What it means is that we should imitate the attributes of God?
“As God clothed the naked (regarding Adam and Eve), so you should clothe the naked. As God visited the sick (after Abraham's circumcision), so you should visit the sick. As God comforted mourners (Isaac after the death of Abraham), so you should comfort mourners. As God buried the dead (Moses in the valley), so also you should bury the dead." (Sota 14a) These are just a few examples of loving actions towards others. We imitate God through constant acts of loving kindness to help others.
I am often asked, what if I do not feel like acting in a loving way? Is it not hypocritical to act if the feelings are not present? Here is the wisdom of the four worlds vision. The world of action comes before the world of passion, or feelings. We act in a loving way, even if we do not feel very loving. For according to the kabbala, lower worlds affect higher worlds. The pathway of love begins with a commitment to action. It continues as we grow our love through the next world, a theme I will return to next week.
LOVE – PART 4
THE WORLD OF PASSION
According to the kabbala, we live in four different worlds. Last week we spoke about the first world, the World of Action. This is embedded in a second or higher world, known as olam hayitzira, literally “the world of formation.” But the word yitzer also means passions, appetites, emotions. I prefer to call this second world the World of Passion.
When I was in college, one of the most popular singing groups was the duo Simon and Garfunkel. Their hit songs not only gave life to the hit movie The Graduate but were constantly played on campus. I vividly remember one lyric to one of their most popular songs, I am a Rock. They sang about loneliness with the words, “I touch no one and no one touches me.” Nothing could be sadder than to go through life without ever touching another human being or being touched by another human being. Even if we act in a totally loving way, at some point we want to be touched. We want to open up our passion and be drawn to another. It is emotions, appetites, and passions that make us fully human.
If we are fortunate, there are people in our lives for whom we feel a great passion. Such people may be our parents or siblings, the family in which we were raised. They may be our spouse or lover, and hopefully the children we sire and raise. They may be dear friends. We certainly do not feel this passion towards everybody. (If we did, every time we read an obituary page we would go into a deep depression.) But most of us do open our hearts and feel a passion towards some of the human beings we meet in life. This is what most of us mean when we speak about love. According to common parlance, love is in the World of Passion.
There is a danger to this kind of passionate love. Most of us are born with a protective shell to guard our emotions. We lower that shell and allow ourselves to be touched by another human being. If that human being hurts us, we raise the shell once more to protect ourselves. We are far more reluctant to lower it again. This protective shell develops in our youngest childhood. A child who has been wounded by his or her parents will often develop such a shell. Many such children grow up into adults who never uncover themselves for another. Often it takes intense therapy for a child to learn to lower the barriers and open himself or herself to love. Sadly, some adults have such a strong protective shell they never learn to love.
If we are emotionally healthy, we learn to open our hearts and our emotions to other human beings. We learn love with a deep passion. With such love, we are vulnerable and can be easily hurt. But with such love, we feel most human, most connected. That is why there are so many pithy sayings such as “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” As we go through life, we all deserve to feel the passion of love. We need to fully open up and emotionally connect with other human beings.
Nonetheless, there is another danger to love in the World of Passion. Often people tell me they are in love with another person. In speaking to them, I learn very quickly that they are really in love with themselves. As an old Yiddish saying teaches, “The man and the woman were deeply in love, he with himself and she with herself.” What often passes for love of another is really a form of self-love. We love because we expect something for ourselves from the other person. As the Bible teaches, Isaac loved his son Esau because he brought him food to eat. If Esau stopped hunting for his dad, would his dad still love him?
This kind of self love is probably best illustrated in a wonderful Hasidic story. A Hasid catches a huge carp and keeps it alive to give away as a gift. The carp is very frightened, until he hears the Hasid say that he is going to give the fish to the local nobleman. "He loves carp." The carp feels much better. If the nobleman loves carp, he will certainly protect him and keep him safe. The Hasid brings the carp to the nobleman, who immediately orders his servants to cut it in half, cook it, and serve it for dinner the next two nights. The carp screams. "I thought you love carp. You don't love carp; you only love yourself."
We love ourselves. Too often love becomes a way of meeting our own needs, rather than the needs of our beloved. When our beloved fail us or disappoint us, we become angry. Why else would divorced couples, who once vowed their love for one another, begin to hate each other with such intensity? Love becomes hate when that love fails to meet our needs.
In the Talmud, the Rabbis speak of two kinds of love. (Avot 5:18) Conditional love, love that depends on meeting our personal needs, can never last. Only unconditional love, love without any strings attached, can last forever. Real love must begin when we put ourselves, our needs aside, and focus on our beloved. Only then will we be ready to lift ourselves up to the third world of love.
LOVE – PART 5
THE WORLD OF REFLECTION
We have spoken of love in the first two kabbalistic worlds, the World of Action and the World of Passion. The third world is known as Olam Haberiya, usually translated the world of creation. Animals can exist in the first two worlds, but the human soul is able to reach into the third world. This is the world where we humans put our own selves aside and truly see the other. That is why I like to call this The World of Reflection. Only humans can reflect on the other.
When I try to teach this idea to young people, I begin by talking about my dog. Each morning at about 6:30 am I put my dog outside. Often the dog starts barking at our neighbor’s cat, in spite of the fact that my wife is still asleep. I tell my dog, if you really love my wife, you would not bark so early in the morning. But my dog does not listen. Dogs can learn actions. Dogs can even feel emotions. But dogs have not learned empathy, the ability to put one’s own appetites aside and reflect on the needs of the other. Love in the World of Reflection is a uniquely human quality.
The Bible already hints at this idea. Animals certainly have sex. But only humans use the term “to know” when speaking about sexual intercourse. “Adam knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore a son.” (Genesis 4:1) In fact, humans are one of the only animals who usually have sexual intercourse face to face. Sex is tied to knowing. So, all human love reaches its ideal level when we put ourselves aside and reflect on the other human being. Love means moving beyond ourselves to meet the needs of our beloved.
Deepak Chopra teaches that love is expressed through three a’s, attention, affection, and appreciation. Love starts by paying attention. That is why simply being there, in the presence of those we love, is so important. I will never forget an experience I had while taking my children out to eat when they were much younger. They sat around the table waiting for their food while I read the newspaper. A total stranger tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “You should not be reading the paper when you take your children out for breakfast. You need to pay attention to them. Your time with them is too short.” I was annoyed at the time, but looking back, I realize he was absolutely right. Now that they are young adults, I long for moments to sit face to face with my children.
Attention means being able to listen, with no strings attached. I remember a woman who said, “I don’t understand my daughter. She never listens to me.” Perhaps the woman had it backwards. Perhaps she would understand her daughter better is she listened rather than making her daughter listen. The first step of love in the World of Reflection is being present, listening, and paying attention.
We then are ready to show our affection. We do this by meeting the needs of our beloved. It is not enough to say we love our parents, our spouse, or our children. We need to ask, what do my parents need, what does my spouse need, and what do our children need? Our role is to meet their needs. There is a well-known Hasidic story told by Rabbi Moshe of Sasov, who said that he learned true love from a peasant in a tavern. The peasant put his arm around another man at the tavern and said, “Ivan, do you love me?” “Of course, I love you.” The peasant then asked, “Do you know what gives me pain?” “No, I do not know what gives you pain.” So the peasant finally said, “If you do not know what gives me pain, how can you say you love me?” Love is about meeting the pain of the other. But we cannot do so until we put our own needs, wants, and appetites aside.
Finally, we show our appreciation. For here is the irony, we serve others and meet their needs. But in the end, we find purpose and meaning in our own lives. As the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore wrote, “I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy.”
We have come to the heart of love – love as presence and service to the other. This is the love we should strive to achieve, the love that makes us human. Then if we are lucky, we will have moments where we will experience love in the fourth or highest world.
LOVE – PART 6
THE WORLD OF SPIRIT
We have looked at love in the first three kabbalistic worlds –the World of Action, the World of Passion, and last week the World of Reflection. In this third world we are able to put ourselves aside in order to focus on the needs of the other. This is the true goal of love, to serve the needs of the one we love. Evolution is not only a phenomenon in biology but a phenomenon in our relationships. Love can evolve from one world to the next.
There are moments in life when we reach a fourth world, the highest we can reach while we live this material existence. Kabbalists call this Olam HaAtzilut, literally the world of emanation. I often call it the World of Spirit. It is a moment when we connect with another human being on a truly spiritual level. The World of the Spirit is a world beyond space and time, a world where the material falls away. We are only aware of the one we are with.
Most of us have experienced such moments of total encounter with another human being. Sometimes such moments can come with a total stranger. I remember years ago, when I studied in Israel, taking a brief vacation to Athens. There I met another traveler and spent the evening exploring and talking with him. It was a one evening encounter; I do not remember his name and I am sure he was not Jewish. But I walked away from that evening thinking seriously about entering Rabbinical school. An encounter with a stranger, a moment of spiritual connection, set my life in a particular direction. In the Bible Joseph met such a man. “And a certain man found him, and, behold, he was wandering in the field; and the man asked him, saying, what do you seek?” (Genesis 37:15) Joseph’s encounter with this stranger set his life in a direction that would change the history of ancient Israel.
Usually such encounters are not with strangers, but with people with whom we have built strong powerful relationships. We are with another one, a family member, a friend, our spouse or lover, and we are totally present. After a while, time stands still. Space seems to fall away. We are aware of nothing but the other. We are connecting on the highest spiritual level. There is something serendipitous about such moments of spiritual connection. We cannot force them to happen. We need to be there, be present, and allow time to stand still. Martin Buber had a name for such encounters. He called them I-Thou.
Buber taught that an I-Thou encounter will not last forever. Invariably the timeless moment must end, and the relationship must reenter the world of space and time. Nonetheless, we walk away from such encounters transformed by the experience. In these moments of absolute love, love in the World of Spirit, we find our direction and sense of purpose in this world. That is why such love is a transformation experience.
Buber makes one other beautiful comment. “Each Thou is a glimpse through to the Eternal Thou.” At such timeless moments of encounter, we glimpse the One Who lives beyond time and space. We meet God in these moments of oneness with the other. It is through love in the World of Spirit that we find our deepest sense of God’s presence.
This is perhaps best illustrated by the symbolism of the ancient tabernacle which the Israelites carried through the desert. The tabernacle was built with an ark which carried the tablets of the Ten Commandments. Above the ark were two cherubim, child like figures with touching wings who stood face to face. (Mystics saw the cherubim not as two children but as a man and a woman in a sexual embrace. But that is a discussion for another time.) Where was God’s presence in the ancient tabernacle?
God did not speak from within the ark, as holy as that spot was. Rather, God’s presence was found between the faces of the Cherubim. “And there I will meet with you, and I will talk with you from above the cover, from between the two Cherubim which are upon the ark of the Testimony.” (Exodus 25:22) The symbolism is powerful; when two human beings encounter one another face to face, there we find the presence of God.