The hard and holy work of love: Rosh hashanah 5785 day 2

The house that I grew up in was magical in two ways. Items from our house would regularly go missing, disappear completely, without a trace. And for every item that disappeared, another object would appear as if out of thin air, to take its place. And more often than not, these random items would find their way to my room, and would take up residence on my bookcase, or hanging in my closet, or perched just so on the top of my dresser. Their arrival, so inconspicuous that it had the effect of convincing me that these objects had been there all along. And what I learned at some later point was that my mother had been leaving gifts for me throughout the years. Dropping small mementos and sentimental items into my room, into my life. A way of connecting, of giving some part of her to me, passing something down. A way of planting herself in my life– like a bird building a nest, collecting rocks, and sticks, and beautiful leaves to build a home for her chicks. And one of these gifts, that I’ll never forget, was a small wooden music box that played the theme music from the 1970 film, Love Story. 

I heard this music again recently, and I was reminded of what is perhaps the movie’s most famous line: Love means never having to say you’re sorry. This is a beautiful sentiment, but so terribly far from the truth, because love, at its best, means taking responsibility, it means holding yourself and your partner and your community accountable, it means aspiring to something better. Love means saying we’re sorry over and over and over again. Love means committing to doing the work. Love is messy. Love can be painful. Simply put, love is hard. 

Throughout the Biblical text, we are commanded to love G-d. In Deuteronomy chapter 6, which you’ll recognize as the beginning of the first paragraph of the Shema, we read:

וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת ד׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ׃

You shall love your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.

And later in Deuteronomy chapter 30: 

אֲשֶׁר אָנֹכִי מְצַוְּךָ הַיּוֹם לְאַהֲבָה אֶת־ד׳ אֱלֹהֶיךָ לָלֶכֶת בִּדְרָכָיו וְלִשְׁמֹר מִצְוֺתָיו וְחֻקֹּתָיו וּמִשְׁפָּטָיו 

For I command you this day, to love your God, to walk in God’s ways, and to keep God’s commandments, God’s laws, and God’s rules…

But what does it mean to Love G-d? What does it mean to walk in God’s ways? The traditional commentaries understand this commandment as one that is uniquely linked to the observance of Jewish law. We express our love for G-d, the rabbis teach, by demonstrating loyalty and commitment to Halakha. By keeping Shabbat and Kashrut; by giving tzedaka, and observing the holidays. According to this school of thought, love and law are inextricably linked, perhaps even interchangeable. 

The root of ahavah, the Hebrew word for love, is linked to the aramaic הב, which means to give. Loving is fundamentally an act of giving. So maybe, according to the rabbis, we give over something of ourselves, we give over our love to G-d when we observe the Mitzvot. But this, I think, is only part of what is being asked of us, when we are commanded to love G-d. I think loving G-d means giving G-d the very best of ourselves. Giving G-d our first fruits. But to fully give of ourselves, the good and the bad, requires a level of courage and faith that is not always easy to muster. It requires trust to know that the person with whom you are being most vulnerable sees you in all of your complexity, and appreciates the gift you give in sharing yourself with them. And in this way, G-d invites us into a very particular and intimate kind of relationship. In commanding us to love G-d, G-d begs: struggle with me! Question me! Make a mess of your understanding of me! Fight with me and fight for me! Help me become better, help me, G-d says, become the very best version of myself. An endeavor that is only possible if both parties share an appreciation for what can emerge in that place of open-hearted honesty. 

Later in the Psalms, we encounter the notion that the whole world is made of love, or that it ought to be. In Psalm 89, the Psalmist proclaims that the universe stands on love:

כִּי־אָמַרְתִּי עוֹלָם חֶסֶד יִבָּנֶה שָׁמַיִם  תָּכִן אֱמוּנָתְךָ בָהֶם

I declare, “Your steadfast love is confirmed forever;

there in the heavens You establish Your faithfulness.”

The world is built on love, on chesed. We will build a world of love and chesed. 

In Avot D’Rebbi Natan, the first and longest of the minor tractates of the Talmud the rabbis recount the following story:

Once, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, left Jerusalem, and Rabbi Yehoshua followed after him. And he saw the Holy Temple destroyed. Rabbi Yehoshua said: woe to us, for this is destroyed– the place where all of Israel’s sins are forgiven. Rabbi Yochanan said to him: My son, do not be distressed, for we have a form of atonement just like it. And what is it? Acts of love and kindness, chesed, as it says: For I desire kindness, not a well-being offering.”

Here, in the aftermath of the destruction of the Temple, in the wake of tragedy both communal and individual, Rabbi Yochanan and the psalmist remind us that love transforms the world. That love is perhaps the mechanism that helps us make sense of a world, of a Judaism, devoid of a temple, devoid of any clear way to atone for our sins. Love, we are taught here, is itself a channel to the divine. When we act from a place of love, when we engage regularly in acts of Chesed, lovingkindness, we encounter the divine in a new, and maybe more authentic way. When we honor the humanity and the dignity and the divinity of the people around us, we are proclaiming that G-d is here with us, on the ground, in the weeds. And when we act from a place of love, when we engage in chesed, we trigger G-d’s mercy; we are forgiven, we can forgive, and thus the world is transformed and created anew. 

Obadiah ben Abraham of Bartenura, the 15th Century Italian commentator, most well known for his commentary on the Mishnah, defines chesed in the following way:

…Loving-kindness is to regale grooms and to comfort mourners, to visit the sick and inter the dead, and the like. 

Real chesed, according to the Bartenura, is born of life’s most transcendent and human moments. The moments of elation, joy, ecstasy, and also the moments that bring us to our knees– tragedy, loss, unimaginable suffering. And I see in this teaching from the Bartenura, a challenge– it’s easy to feel love, both human and divine, when we are dancing at a wedding, rejoicing in partnership and the hopeful promise of a shared future. 

It becomes much more difficult to feel loved, but also to give love, when the ground beneath us is shaky. When the world and the certainty of our lives are thrown into question. How can we possibly feel loved by G-d, when we are standing at the open grave of a loved one– shoveling dirt, hearing the grotesque and too-loud sound of the earth hitting the casket? How are we meant to find G-d in the near constant tragedy of our world as it stands? The violence of it all, the injustice of it all. How could love possibly emerge in these moments?

Jewish tradition teaches that acts of chesed and love that are performed in the aftermath of a death are collectively referred to as chesed shel emet, acts of true loving-kindness. Sitting vigil with someone who is on the precipice of death, preparing a body for burial with Tahara, sitting and watching over the met, the deceased, until they are buried. Attending the funeral, bearing witness at the cemetery. Comforting the mourners. Coming to shiva. Nourishing the mourners. All of these mitzvot, these radical acts of love, are the truest and perhaps most elevated form of mitzvah, because they cannot be fully reciprocated. 

We don’t do them out of a sense of pride or self-interest. We show up in these moments, even though it’s hard and awkward and uncomfortable and at times terrible, out of a sense of sacred obligation. In helping a person pass through death with dignity, in helping a family grieve in the fullness of community– that is the most extraordinary example of walking in G-d’s ways– of walking hand-in-hand with the divine to traverse the most difficult and real moments of life on earth. This is how we show G-d that we love G-d’s creations. This is how we show that we love what G-d loves. 

Rabbi Shai Held opens his new book, Judaism is About Love, with a bold declaration:

We are loved. We are loved, Judaism teaches, because G-d loves us. Not because of anything we have done or accomplished, but simply because we are created in G-d’s image. As the Talmudic Sage Rabbi Akiva puts it: “Beloved is the human being, for he was created in the image of G-d.” 

We are loved. This is something that can be hard to hear, because it can be difficult to internalize. But Judaism, Rav Shai reminds us, is a religion that places love at its core. We are loved simply by being created, and created in G-d’s image. The way that we feel God’s love, is to look at our own divine humanity, to see in ourselves what G-d already knows to be true: that we are worthy of receiving love, and therefore, we are obligated in turn to give love.

But love is hard. And being in relationship with G-d, with a higher power, even with community, can at times push us beyond what is comfortable, and can challenge our basic understandings of faith, of the world, of who we are. 

Teshuvah, or repentance, is the practice that lives at the center of our High Holiday experience. Beginning in the month of Elul, and through Tishrei, through the swell of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, Shemini Atzeret, and Simchat Torah, we pay closer attention to the spiritual work that each of us must do. We take a close look at who we are, where we missed the mark, how we fell down on our commitments, on our values. We confess the ways we failed ourselves, and our communities. How we failed G-d. 

Teshuvah is a word that is hard to translate. It is a word whose root can mean many different things, namely: to return, to repeat, and to rest or be at peace. 

In contemplating the teshuvah that I know I need to do this year, I was struck in a new way by one of its definitions. To repeat, שוב. And I think this particular meaning caught my attention this year, because it seems to capture the labor of teshuvah, the real, messy, hard work that it requires. Teshuvah is a process. It’s not really something we happen upon for two months of the year. If we are doing it right, if we are serious about it, our Teshuvah should be constant. We should be returning to our behavior, looking inward, reflecting constantly. And in that sense it also acknowledges that we don’t always get it right, we can’t possibly get it right every time. There would be no need for Rosh Hashanah or Yom Kippur if that were the case. What meaning and what texture would our lives have if not for the struggle and blessing to be in a constant state of becoming? 

Teshuvah is hard work– it requires us to be painfully honest, to be vulnerable, to make changes that are uncomfortable and more difficult than we imagined they could be. But we keep at it, because that is what it means not only to honor our humanity, but to lean into the greatest gift we’ve been given by G-d, and that is our tremendously complicated and beautiful lives. And so, to love G-d, becomes its own form of Teshuvah. Loving G-d is struggling day in and day out to make sense of this broken world. It’s asking G-d the tough questions, not letting G-d off the hook. 

But sometimes the difficulty of the Teshuvah, the challenge of admitting where and how and whom we have failed, prevents us from really doing the work. And the same is true with love. We live in a world and in a moment that has taught us to be withholding with our love, because our hearts are precious and we are tender and we have been heartbroken so many times. We have learned not to give our love away because rejection and humiliation and heartache are just too risky. 

But then I reread Rav Shai:

We are loved. We are loved, Judaism teaches, because G-d loves us. Not because of anything we have done or accomplished, but simply because we are created in G-d’s image. As the Talmudic Sage Rabbi Akiva puts it: “Beloved is the human being, for he was created in the image of G-d.” 

And I remember that G-d isn’t afraid to love. G-d isn’t afraid to love us even though we have broken G-d’s own heart countless times– when we ate from the Tree of Knowledge, and when we fell in love with the Golden Calf. But G-d always had a partner who brought G-d back from the edge. From those moments when G-d nearly walked away from us. In Abraham, in Moshe, in Sarah, and Hannah, and Hagar, in Jonah and Jeremiah, G-d  had a partner who reminded G-d of our humanity and G-d’s capacity for mercy. 

We need each other. Because when we are in relationship with the Divine, we see our own capacity for divinity, for boundless love, reflected back to us. And in turn, G-d is reminded of G-d’s innate capacity for mercy, for forgiveness, for renewal.

Our love and our teshuvah must flow freely back and forth between us and G-d. Because love is teshuvah and teshuvah is love– each one its own radical expression of our commitment to soften our edges and grow into the very best versions of ourselves. 

We live in a world that is so desperate for love. The world is begging, calling and crying out for the vision of the psalmist to come true again. The world must be built on love, for it is sustained only through love. 

But love is hard, and love is precious. And in a world of brokenness, sorrow, tragedy, danger, and mistrust, the safer bet is usually to protect ourselves and the love we have to give. I think in so many ways, this world, and this moment have caused us to forget that like G-d, we are creatures who are endowed, created, with an innate desire to love and be loved. 

Love is an abundant and renewable resource. It is not finite. The well of love runs deep. There is enough for everyone.

And so, we have to love like G-d loves: we have to give away our love like we have more of it than we know what to do with. We have to love like we aren’t afraid. 

Shanah Tovah!