The commandment to love God , codified in the words "ve-ahavta et Hashem Elokekha" that we say at least twice a day (three if you say Shema before going to sleep) presents two related challenges. First, it is always questionable whether God commands emotions, since those would seem to be less malleable than actions. It is easily understandable how God could command us to give money to charity, for example, but it seems more difficult to command love. Second, at a cognitive plane, it seems difficult to imagine what it would mean to love God. Love ordinarily involves a sense of connection with another person or animal, and the connection itself (by blood, by living together, or whatever other way creates such a sense) fosters the feelings of love. Since God is, in some sense, remote and Other (see last week’s discussion of His Unity), what would love mean?

Two different answers seem central to the medieval view of this question. Commenting on the verse in the Torah, Rashi and Ramban both assume that ve-ahavta refers to performing the mitsvot me-ahavah, which for them meant without any ulterior motive. This view relates to the notion of lishmah, of performing the commandments simply because God said to, not for the honor, wealth, health, or whatever other good is seen to come out of that performance. Often, in trying to explain mitsvot to those who are not yet observant, we explain their value; Shabbat, for example, can be seen as restoring perspective to our work lives, as an opportunity to reconnect with family, and so on. All those insights may be true, but keeping Shabbat to achieve those goals would be, in this view, an example of performing the mitsvah she-lo lishmah. Weeding out the desire to achieve certain goals, and keeping the mitsvot simply as a response to a call by the Divine, would count as love. Love here, of course, is not an emotion but a mode of action.

Rambam, in brief in the Sefer haMitsvot and at greater length in the beginning of the Mishneh Torah, mentions two modes of ahavah that focus on a more direct form of love, one that approaches the kind of love we feel in our ordinary lives. First, he mentions that if someone contemplates the universe that God created, and recognizes its wonders, that that can create a sense of love for the One who put all this into place (that experience also fuels yir’ah as we will discuss next week, be"H). This seems to parallel the way in which one can build up at least some love for another person by simply recognizing the various goods the other person performs, and incorporating those realities into one’s picture of that person. I recently read a story of a woman who nursed a man dying of AIDS. Although the man had lived his life as a homosexual, towards the end of his illness, he dressed and shaved himself (a great effort for him), and waited downstairs for the woman who had cared for him. When she entered the house, he proposed marriage to her. The love that had been built between them started (I have no knowledge of the other factors that entered their relationship) from the kindnesses this woman performed for him. While that might only be the starting point of love, in trying to build our love of the Creator, contemplating His kindnesses, and the wondrous nature of the world He created, might be one place to start.

Another type of activity Rambam describes as constituting love of God is to constantly think about Him, as if the Creator were the object of one's affections. Rambam, the arch-rationalist, actually gives the example of a lovesick man, who thinks about his beloved constantly. While Rambam makes clear at the end of the Moreh that this thinking is not meant to be uneducated thoughts (it should be philosophically sophisticated consideration of what is possible and impossible to know of God), the fundamental notion seems to rely on acting as if one is in love. Just as constancy of concern and thought characterizes human love, so too should it characterize our relationship with God.

Rambam has thus offered two models for how to act in a way that is meaningfully referred to as love, even while recognizing that we cannot truly develop that emotion for a Creator we cannot know. We can, however, know that Creator's handiwork (in some sense) by studying the universe with an eye towards appreciating its Cause and, speaking from our perspective rather than His, we can act as if in love, which, in some sense, is as good as so being.

Eli Weber mentioned to me a well-known Sfas Emes, who questions the Torah's commanding us to feel an emotion. His response was that if the Torah obligated us to do something, it must be within our powers to fulfill that obligation. In this view, apparently, we can actually create (manufacture?) or practice the emotion of love to such an extent that we actually feel it regarding God. In all of this, it is worth remembering that a model of our love for God could always be our love for those around us; indeed, it strikes me as likely that God created a world in which humans love each other at least partially to help us find our way to love of Him. Shabbat Shalom.