Parashat Vayetzei (5761)

With God's help, on the eve of the holy Sabbath, Parashat Vayetzei, 5761

Between Love and Desire

In our portion, Jacob is described as working seven years in exchange for Rachel, and Laban the Aramean (=the deceiver) switches her

for Leah on the wedding night. Afterward, Jacob continues and works another seven years in exchange for Rachel,

and the Torah describes those additional years as follows: “And they seemed to him but a few days

because of his love for her” (Genesis 29:20).

Several commentators raise a well-known difficulty regarding this verse. If Jacob did indeed desire Rachel, then

the description we would have expected should have looked something like: ‘And they seemed to him like hundreds of years

because of his love for her.’ Usually, when a person loves someone or something, and is forced to wait until

he can reach it, the passing time feels like eternity. Here, however, the opposite experience is described:

time, on the contrary, seemed shorter to him because of his love for her.

A common explanation is that a state of love stands in contrast to a state of desire or yearning.

Our forefather Jacob loved Rachel and did not merely desire her. Time seems like eternity when a person yearns

for something, not when he loves it. Time passes slowly because the object is not yet in his possession,

or the woman is not yet his wife. If the goal is that the woman should fare well—that is, if the person loves

her, and not himself—then whatever span of time passes, however long, will not break him.

It will even seem shorter than its actual duration.

HaGashash HaHiver expressed this in their well-known joke, which asks: Does a fisherman love fish? If so, why does he

eat them? The answer is that he does not love them, but desires them. He loves himself,

and therefore wants to benefit himself and obtain those fish for food. The last thing

it would be correct to say about him is that he loves the fish.

The difference described here is the difference between love and desire. Don Judah Abravanel, in his book Dialogues

of Love (a philosophical work from the Renaissance, which is usually understood, in my opinion,

mistakenly, as dealing with aesthetics), explains the root of the difference between them through the question:

toward whom is the emotion in question directed? Desire is directed toward the one who desires; he wants

the desired object to come to him. Love, by contrast,

is directed toward the beloved thing, and the aim of the lover is to reach it. The lover cares for the beloved, not

for himself.

José Ortega y Gasset, a well-known Spanish writer and thinker from the beginning of the twentieth century, notes that Lorenzo

the Magnificent, for example, writes that love is the desire for beauty. Thomas the Christian summarizes

the Greek theory (which, it seems to me, finds its fullest expression in the myth of Cupid and his arrows) that love

and hatred are two kinds of desire. After Ortega y Gasset rejects the common description of love as a kind

of desire, he writes (in the first essay of his book Studies on Love):

True, at its beginning love closely resembles desire, for its object—thing or person—is

what arouses it. The soul feels that it is being affected, gently wounded at a certain point by

a stimulus that comes to it from outside. This means that such a stimulus has a centripetal direction: from the object toward us.

But the activity of love begins only after this stimulus, which perhaps is better called the awakener.

Love breaks through the breach opened by the object’s arousing arrow [remember Cupid], yet

from the moment of that opening, love moves in the opposite direction from every stimulus and every desire. It moves from

the lover to the beloved—from me to the other—in a centrifugal direction.

The description he ultimately adopts is precisely the description of our forefather Jacob in our portion. Incidentally,

the love under discussion is not only the love between man and woman, but also love of God, love of science or

of art, and the like.

This confusing error is fraught with consequences and implications. At the beginning of the essay, Ortega y Gasset describes

the fact that in recent times people speak much about lovemaking, but little about love. The very term

‘lovemaking,’ which describes an activity whose true root is desire rather than love, expresses this better than anything else.

The immediate result is that love is measured by the degree of attraction between the “lovers” (more

accurately: those who desire). Disappointment will emerge when the attraction is no longer there. Thus separation between spouses

often arises as a result of the waning of desire, or as a result of the awakening of a different desire.

Many attribute the increase in divorce in the modern age to liberalism, which makes this relatively easy

to do, but it seems to me that this is only a result of a deeper phenomenon. A supposed relationship of love

that is in fact nothing but a relationship of desire creates a situation in which, when there is a change in the level

of desire—even sometimes a temporary one—there arises a wish to dissolve the union. Therefore it is also easier to do

this, and social attitudes are correspondingly more sympathetic. This is a result, not a cause. I wonder how many

cases of divorce are rooted in a person’s feeling that he is not managing to give properly to his spouse? Usually

divorce is the result of a situation in which he feels that he is not receiving enough from that spouse.

A genuine relation of love, one that is directed toward the beloved, is far more stable. Even in such a relation,

divorce between spouses can, to be sure, still occur, but it will be rarer. A person does not

measure his spouse on a scale of desire, but by the deep and basic relation toward that person, a relation that tends

less to change for the worse.

Of this the wisest of men already said: “Charm is deceitful and beauty is vain; a woman who fears the Lord, she shall be praised”

(Proverbs 31:30).

A peaceful Sabbath.

This may be deposited for respectful storage in any synagogue or house of study. Comments and responses will be gladly received.

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