The Platonic Meaning of Emotions in Jewish Law

A memorial volume for R. Asher Aharon Sonnenschein – 5777

With God’s help

Introduction

In this article I will try to argue a claim that touches all the commandments that deal with emotion, of which the commandment of rejoicing is only one: the commandments imposed on emotion are Platonic in character. That is, their concern is not the emotion as such, but some background that can, though perhaps need not, find expression in emotion. The basic motivation for this claim is the assumption that it is unreasonable to suppose that Jewish law commands emotions that arise spontaneously. Jewish law addresses our choosing faculty, that is, the intellect and the will, not emotion. Note well: I do not mean the well-known ancient problem of how emotions can be commanded at all, but a different problem. My assumption is that there is no value in commanding an emotion as such, even if that is possible. I therefore propose a different definition that will give meaning to the commanding of emotions, and not merely show its feasibility.

This subject is closely tied to the question of the Platonic character of the Talmud and Jewish law in general, which was discussed at length in the eleventh book of our Talmudic Logic series.[1] In the second part of that book we dealt with commandments of emotion and their Platonic character. In this article I will examine three types of commandments that address emotions: commandments of joy, commandments of love, and commandments of hatred, and show that Platonic elements can be found in all of them. Of course, in each such commandment there are different approaches that disagree with one another, and I will not survey all the commandments and all the views here. What I will try to show is only the aspect relevant to our discussion, in order to present a coherent picture that illustrates the Platonic character of commandments of emotion in Jewish law.

How can one command emotions?[2]

Jewish law contains many commandments, positive commandments and prohibitions, that address emotion. For example, the prohibition of coveting, the prohibition of vengeance and bearing a grudge, the prohibition of hatred, the commandments to love God, one’s fellow, and the convert, the commandment to rejoice on the festivals, and more. An obvious question arises here: how can emotions be commanded? Commentators disagree over whether emotion can in fact be controlled, and therefore whether it can be commanded. Some hold that emotion can indeed be controlled, and thus the Torah can command emotions and in fact does so. Others maintain that the Torah does not command emotions, but acts that express emotions.[3] Some define certain emotional commandments as commandments to perform acts that bring about the emotion (their implicit assumption is that emotions can be controlled through relevant actions).[4] The two articles cited in the note contain a survey of the opinions and sources on this issue, so I will not enter into it here.

The Platonic character of emotions

In this article I will examine a somewhat different question. Assuming that emotion can be commanded, what is the nature of the emotion expected of us? Is it spontaneous or shaped? Does it stand on its own, or does it arise against some background? Is it accompanied by emotional turmoil, or is it something more intellectual, cool, and serene?

Platonic love[5] in its original sense, as described in Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus, is love channeled into spiritual avenues, thereby enabling pleasures loftier than sexual pleasure. Over the generations, the concept of Platonic love acquired several related meanings. One of them is a kind of experience that is not emotion. Love without desire, and perhaps love as a value-ideal without the emotional turbulence of love. Thus, in Platonic love, a person loves another because of his wisdom or good character and not necessarily because of his beauty or physical, material qualities. Such qualities generally do not stir us into turmoil, and therefore the emotion accompanying such love is likely to be calmer and cooler, if it exists at all. Perhaps one can speak of such love in a sense that is not emotional at all. Beyond this, the Platonic nature of love is distinguished by the fact that there is some reason for the love, unlike ordinary love, which does not come as the result of a decision or deliberation but awakens in some spontaneous way. Even ordinary love can be conceived in terms coined in ancient Greece. But this time it is not Plato, but Cupid’s arrows. Cupid shoots an arrow into a person and arouses love for a woman. The arrow expresses the fact that love is aroused by an external factor and not by the lover’s own deliberation. Love of wisdom and good qualities, by contrast, may perhaps also arise spontaneously, but it can also be seen as the result of deliberation. A person decides that good qualities or wisdom deserve a loving attitude, and thus a colder and less emotional love is created. Sometimes the boundary between love for a wise or good person and appreciation of wisdom and good qualities as such is very blurred.

We can now say that the other emotions can also be discussed in Platonic terms. Emotions such as hatred or joy can arise spontaneously, or be triggered by some external factor, and then they are usually accompanied by emotional turmoil. But they can also be Platonic in the same sense as the love described above. Platonic hatred or joy are the results of some reason, and their basis is value-laden rather than emotional. One can sharpen this and say that hatred and joy are not emotions in the ordinary sense, but a psychic-spiritual state. As we proceed, we will discover, not surprisingly, that in emotions of this sort the boundary between an attitude toward a person (which usually has an emotional dimension) and an attitude toward his qualities (which is by nature cooler and more intellectual) becomes very blurred.

The point will become clearer from the examples that follow.

A. Platonic joy: the commandment of rejoicing

The verse commands us to rejoice on the festivals (Deut. 16:14–15):

And you shall rejoice in your festival—you, your son and your daughter, your male servant and your female servant, and the Levite, the stranger, the orphan, and the widow who are within your gates. Seven days you shall celebrate to the Lord your God in the place that the Lord shall choose, for the Lord your God will bless you in all your produce and in all the work of your hands, and you shall be only joyful.

In the Talmudic passage in Moed Katan 8b, the Talmud looks for a source for the rule that one does not marry women on the festival. Four different reasons are brought there, and the second appears in two different formulations:

Rabbah bar [Rav] Huna said: Because he sets aside the joy of the festival and occupies himself with the joy of his wife. Abaye said to Rav Yosef: This statement of Rabbah bar [Rav] Huna is Rav’s, for Rav Daniel bar Katina said in Rav’s name: From where do we know that women are not married on the festival? As it is said, ‘And you shall rejoice in your festival’—in your festival, and not in your wife.

Rav expounds the verses cited above and determines that one must rejoice in the festival and not in his wife. What does that mean? When one reads the wording of the verse, its plain sense is that the festival is the time marker. When should one rejoice? On the festival. But the homiletic reading brought here changes the way the verse is read. According to this midrashic interpretation, the festival is not the time in which one must rejoice, but the cause of the joy. If the festival were only the time at which one must rejoice, the obvious conclusion would be to marry and hold all our other celebrations specifically on the festival, for in that way we ensure that we rejoice on the festival. But once we interpret the verse so that the festival is the cause of the joy, and not merely its timing, then other causes of joy have no place on the festival. Notice that it is forbidden to marry on the festival, and not merely that one is not obligated to schedule it then. Marrying distracts us from the joy of the festival, because there is here another cause for joy. Indeed, the first formulation of the exposition, that of Rabbah bar Rav Huna, teaches us that rejoicing in one’s wife distracts one from the joy of the festival. That is, marriage on the festival is an improper thing, and not merely something that need not be scheduled then. This is a nullification of the positive commandment of festival joy.

It is possible that this can also be supported from the end of the following verse, which instructs us, ‘and you shall be only joyful.’ What does ‘only joyful’ mean? One might have understood that it is an instruction not to mix sorrow with joy, but to rejoice in a pure joy. But according to the exposition above, one is led to interpret this too as meaning that the Torah instructs us to be joyful only in the festival and not in something else, for example in one’s wife.[6]

The meaning of this reading of the verse is that the Torah does not command us merely to feel joy on the festival, but also not necessarily to perform acts that bring joy, such as meat and wine. It commands us to rejoice with a Platonic joy in the festival. The joy demanded of us is not spontaneous, but joy that has a goal and is created through deliberation. Joy arising from another cause is invalid, because it prevents us from rejoicing in the proper and expected object. We are required to understand the essence of the festival and rejoice in that. This is a joy that has an intellectual basis and a basis in decision, not a merely emotional joy that arises spontaneously. The joy must not be aroused by something external, like Cupid’s arrow, but by deliberation that emerges from seeing the festival, its meanings, and its virtues. If we rejoice with a spontaneous, Cupid-like joy, and it happens to be on the festival, we have not fulfilled the commandment. The commandment is to rejoice because of something, not simply that a feeling of joy arise within us.

The conclusion is that, according to the definitions proposed in the previous section, joy on the festival is Platonic joy. It is likely that such joy will be less turbulent and emotional than ordinary spontaneous joys. Its cause is not an event that naturally makes us happy, but a spiritual, ethical, philosophical reason, precisely as we saw with Platonic love.

B. Platonic love[7]

Love of the convert

In the middle of a passage dealing with our commitment to God, in Parashat Ekev, we find a commandment to love the convert (Deut. 10:17–19):

For the Lord your God, He is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who shows no favor and takes no bribe; who executes justice for the orphan and widow, and loves the convert, giving him bread and clothing. And you shall love the convert, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

It seems that the fact that God loves the convert serves as a reason for our obligation to love the convert. In addition, there is also here the reason that we ourselves were strangers in Egypt.

A parallel commandment appears in Parashat Mishpatim as well (Exod. 22:20):

And you shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

This commandment does not deal with loving the convert, but with the obligation not to hurt him, or not to defraud him (there are several other interpretations brought by commentators on the Torah). These obligations are grounded here only in the fact that we too were strangers in Egypt, and not in the fact that God loves converts as in the previous case.

To understand the difference between the reasons the Torah gives in the two contexts, we must remember that the term ger in Parashat Mishpatim refers to someone uprooted from his place, a resident alien, and not necessarily to a halakhic convert (see Rashi there). This is also proven by the comparison to our being strangers in Egypt, which certainly was not conversion in the halakhic sense. By contrast, in Parashat Ekev the reference is to a gentile who converted and became a Jew (see Sefer HaChinukh, commandment 431). It is therefore clear that the commandment to love the convert cannot be based only on our being strangers in Egypt, and the addition that God himself loves converts is therefore required. Conversely, the reason that God loves converts serves as a reason for the commandment to love specifically one who converted, and not every outsider.

It seems that the difference between the reasons also lies in the content of the commands. In Parashat Mishpatim we are dealing with a prohibition, that is, a prohibition against hurting a ger in the sense of a displaced person, a stranger, and its natural basis is our own being strangers in Egypt. This is a moral and human obligation, and not a commandment about emotion but a practical commandment. By contrast, in Parashat Ekev we are dealing with a positive commandment that speaks about emotion, an obligation to love the convert in the halakhic sense, and the reason given for it is also that God loves converts. Against this background, we can understand why in Parashat Ekev the orphan and widow are treated differently from the convert. The orphan and widow are presented as those for whom God executes justice. By contrast, the convert is presented as one whom God loves. Therefore it is reasonable to see this as a reason for the obligation to love the convert, and not merely not to hurt him.

At first glance, we have dealt here with the reasons for the commandment of loving the convert and the prohibition against hurting him. But we will now see that these are not only reasons for those commandments, but part of their halakhic definition.[8]

The question raised in Pahad Yitzhak: love of the convert and love of one’s fellow

The Sefer HaChinukh, in commandments 63 and 431, asks why a special commandment is needed to love the convert and a special prohibition against wronging him, when these commandments are included in the corresponding commandments regarding every Jew. After all, the obligation to love every member of the Jewish people includes the obligation to love the convert.

Maimonides already addresses this in Laws of Ethical Dispositions 6:3–4:

A person is commanded to love each and every one of Israel as himself, as it is said, ‘You shall love your fellow as yourself.’ Therefore one must speak in his praise and be protective of his property just as he is protective of his own property and desires his own honor. But one who honors himself through the disgrace of his fellow has no share in the World to Come.

Love of the convert who has come and entered beneath the wings of the Divine Presence involves two positive commandments: one because he is included among fellows, and one because he is a convert, for the Torah said, ‘And you shall love the convert.’ It commanded love of the convert just as it commanded love of God Himself, as it is said, ‘And you shall love the Lord your God.’ The Holy One, blessed be He, Himself loves converts, as it is said, ‘and loves the convert.’

That is, the Torah repeats and refocuses the commandment to love converts because the two commandments have different grounds: love of a fellow Jew is love of one’s fellow, whereas love of the convert is love grounded in merit, because he has entered under the wings of the Divine Presence.

But this explanation is difficult. In the Ninth Root, Maimonides determines that commandments with overlapping content are not to be counted separately. If the Torah repeats the same command several times, we count it only once, because the remaining commands do not introduce an additional commandment and therefore are not to be counted as independent commandments. According to this principle, the commandment to love the convert ought to have been included in the commandment to love one’s fellow, since it has no content of its own that is new.[9]

Indeed, R. Yitzhak Hutner, in his book Pahad Yitzhak on Passover (sec. 29, para. 4), asks Maimonides why he counts love of the convert and love of one’s fellow as two separate commandments. Moreover, in Laws of Ethical Dispositions Maimonides does not even trouble to explain this, but simply points to the duplication between the commandments and the difference in their reasons. He does not explain why both are counted. The Sefer HaChinukh there also offers explanations for why the Torah needed to command separately regarding love of the convert. But those explanations justify why it is important for the Torah to emphasize these obligations with respect to converts; they certainly do not answer the essential difficulty. In the halakhic sense, these commandments are still included in the commandments of loving and not wronging an ordinary Jew, and there is nothing unique in their content that would justify setting them apart and counting them as separate commandments. At most one can understand why the Torah repeated them, but it still is not clear why the enumerators of the commandments count them as two independent commandments.

The essence of the commandment of love

R. Yitzhak Hutner resolves the difficulty there, and prefaces it with an introduction concerning the essence of the commandments of love in Jewish law:

To explain this, let us look at the corresponding case on the side of love. Reuven loves Shimon, and Shimon is in fact a member of the covenant, that is, a Jew, but Reuven is mistaken about him and thinks he is not a member of the covenant. Shall we say that Reuven thereby fulfills the commandment of love of one’s fellows? Certainly not. For every love has a reason, and the reason for the love is also included within the commandment of love of one’s fellows. That is, the commandment of love of one’s fellows is not interpreted as meaning that one should love a person who is Jewish, but that one should love a Jewish person because he is Jewish. For the reason for the love is also included within the commandment. The meaning of the verse ‘and you shall love your fellow’ is that you should love him specifically because he is your fellow.

And it therefore follows that if Reuven loves a person from Israel and does not recognize that he is Jewish, then the cause of this love is not the Jewishness of the beloved. This is simply ordinary love, without the reason required in this commandment, and therefore the commandment of love of one’s fellows is not fulfilled by this love. And the same applies on the other side, in the realm of hatred[10]…

R. Yitzhak Hutner explains that there is no commandment to love a Jew, but rather the commandment is to love him because he is a Jew. In the commandments of love, the reason for the commandment is part of the definition of the commandment itself. We might have thought that one who loves Reuven without knowing that he is Jewish fulfills the commandment to love a fellow Jew unwittingly, that is, he fulfills it without knowing that he is doing so. R. Yitzhak Hutner’s innovation is that such a person has not fulfilled the commandment at all. This is not a deficiency in intention, but in the fulfillment of the commandment itself. To fulfill the commandment of loving one’s fellow, one must know that he is Jewish and love him for that reason. The reason for the love is part of the fulfillment of the commandment of love itself.

We can now understand the duplication in the commandments of love of the convert and love of the Jew. The commandment to love a fellow Jew is because he is a Jew. The commandment to love the convert is because he entered under the wings of the Divine Presence, that is, because he converted. If so, there is no duplication here at all. One who loves a convert because he is a Jew fulfills only the commandment to love one’s fellow Jew, but not the commandment to love the convert. And conversely, one who loves him because he is a convert has not necessarily fulfilled the commandment to love a fellow Jew. Thus, the commandment to love the convert adds halakhic content beyond the commandment to love a Jew, and vice versa. That is why they are counted as two commandments. If we look carefully at Maimonides’ wording in Laws of Ethical Dispositions cited above, he says this almost explicitly.[11]

R. Yitzhak Hutner now adds that although in many cases the Torah tends to link the convert with the orphan and the widow, because all of them are lonely and vulnerable, with respect to the commandment of love there is no such connection, because love of the convert is because he is a convert and has entered under the wings of the Divine Presence, and that does not apply to the orphan and widow. Earlier we inferred this from the wording of the verse itself: regarding the orphan and widow the Torah commands a practical obligation, whereas regarding the convert it commands love. The same is true regarding God’s relation to them: with respect to the orphan and widow it says that He executes justice for them, whereas regarding the convert it says that He loves him.

In this way R. Yitzhak Hutner explains why specifically regarding love of the convert, which is love grounded in merit, Maimonides adds that God loves him and does not merely do justice for him, and in this he differs from the orphan and widow, for there the issue is love of the unfortunate and vulnerable, not love grounded in merit. Maimonides also adds that one must love the convert as one loves God Himself, for just as love of God is love grounded in merit, so too love of the convert must be because of his merit.

Defining Platonic emotion

We can now see that this parallels exactly what we saw regarding the commandment of rejoicing on the festival. There too we saw that the festival is not merely the timing of the joy but the cause of the joy. If someone rejoices on the festival but for another reason, for example because of a wedding, he has not fulfilled the commandment of joy, and apparently has even nullified the positive commandment of festival joy. So too, one who loves a convert for another reason, not because he is a convert, has failed to fulfill that positive commandment. And one who loves him because he is Jewish will fulfill the commandment of loving one’s fellow, but fail to fulfill the commandment of loving the convert. Above we saw that the joy we were commanded in is Platonic joy, and now we see that the love we were commanded in is also Platonic love.

In the terminology of the Mishnah in Avot (5:15), one may say that the commandments of love require from us a love that depends on something, that is, on some quality of the beloved. Usually, with such love, if the thing ceases the love ceases, and for that reason the Mishnah in Avot criticizes such love. That is self-interested and temporary love. Admittedly, someone’s being a convert or a Jew cannot cease, so in practice love toward them should not cease through the cessation of the thing on which it depends. But still, on the essential plane, this is love that depends on something. Precisely as the commandment of joy requires from us a joy that depends on something, joy in the festival, and not just joy in the abstract or joy in something else. Platonic emotion is emotion that arises from a reason, unlike emotion that is aroused spontaneously or by a side cause external to it, in Cupid-like fashion. But here the dependence of love on something is an advantage and not a defect. This love is not a spontaneous emotion but an ethical and ideational decision. Precisely dependence on something makes the love purer, because the something on which it depends is not interest but value and merit. To the credit of halakhic love, it may be said that it depends on something, that is, on an idea, and therefore if that something were to disappear, the love ought to disappear. This is not a drawback of that love, because if the quality by virtue of which we were commanded to love the person were truly to disappear, he really would no longer be worthy of love.

A note on the question of commanding emotions

The picture presented here seemingly offers a solution to this difficulty. From the picture described above it emerges that one who loved Reuven without being aware that he was Jewish did not fulfill the commandment to love one’s fellow. Why not? Apparently because he did not love the correct object. The commandment is to love Jewish Reuven, or Reuven because of his Jewishness. Reuven without that feature is someone else, who is not the object of this commanded love.

Parenthetically, I note that this definition of commandments of emotion somewhat softens the difficulty of how one can command love. We are not dealing with an ordinary spontaneous emotion that arises on its own, but with a directed and focused emotion. One might perhaps say that it is an intellectual emotion. Even if spontaneous emotion is hard to control and therefore seems unlikely to be commandable, here we are dealing with a directed emotion that arises by force of decision and understanding. One might perhaps say that this is more an experience and a consciousness than an emotion in the ordinary emotional sense.

At first glance it seems that the commandment to love is an obligation to love a value or an idea and not a person. Indeed, it is very hard to love a person whom I do not love, and therefore the difficulty arises of how the Torah can command us to do that. But to love a person because of his Jewishness is a more understandable command, for this is love of an idea and not of a person. In essence this love is not wholly emotional, but an adoption of values that deserve appreciation. True, it is still difficult to carry this out, but one can understand that it is possible, and therefore also commandable.

Is this love directed to a person?

Up to this point we have seen that the love is really directed toward the idea that we are to love, the conversion or the Jewishness, and not toward the person himself. That idea is expressed in the person, just as horseness is the essence of the horse that expresses it. In light of this distinction, there is room to discuss someone who loves Reuven’s Jewishness, but does not love Reuven the person at all. Has he fulfilled the commandment to love a fellow Jew, or must the love ultimately be directed toward a person and not toward an idea?

On the one hand, the definition we proposed leads to the conclusion that the object of love is an idea and not a person. On the other hand, common sense suggests that the obligation to love one’s fellow or the convert refers to people, and not only to ideas and values. The recipient of love is a person with certain characteristics, but not the abstract value or feature itself. Think of a great lover of the Jewish people, as in the well-known joke, who loves the Jewish collective very much but does not get along so well with the individuals. Does he thereby fulfill the commandment to love Jews? Therefore it is more reasonable to say that the love should be directed toward the convert and the Jew, and not toward conversion and Jewishness. But now the question returns: how does this fit with what we saw, that the reason for the love is part of the very definition of the commandment? If the commandment is to love Reuven himself, and only the reason is that he is Jewish, then seemingly we have returned to saying that this is only the verse’s rationale and not the halakhic definition of the commandment.

It seems that R. Yitzhak Hutner means to say that the commandment of love deals with the entire process. The reason for the love is part of the definition of the commandment itself, but in the end it cannot stop with love of an abstract idea; it must conclude with an attitude toward a concrete person. The commandment is to love the concrete human being Reuven, but to love him because he is Jewish. The process ends in love of the person, but the reason for the love is also included in the fulfillment of the commandment.[12]

What happens when Reuven has a corrupt personality that is not worthy of love? Or when I simply do not feel love for him as a person? And what if he is a sinner whom there is a commandment to hate, as we will see below? Seemingly I must overcome that tendency and nevertheless love him. But that love need not cover over the crimes, in the sense of love covers all transgressions; rather, it must occur despite awareness of the crimes, because he is Jewish. This is the essence of viewing this commandment as a commandment about the entire process. Put differently, one must love him because he is Jewish, and at the same time not love him, and perhaps even hate him, because of his deeds and his character. Once we are dealing with Platonic love and hatred, then although they are directed toward the person and not only toward an idea, one can conceive of a situation in which both dwell side by side within us. When the reason is part of the commandment of love itself, different reasons can create different psychic states simultaneously. One may say, by way of paraphrase of Rav Kook’s well-known saying that it is preferable to fail through gratuitous love than through gratuitous hatred, that it is preferable not to fail in either. Rav Kook assumes that one cannot love and hate simultaneously, and therefore recommends that in doubtful cases one choose the path of love and at worst fail through gratuitous hatred. By contrast, in the Platonic model proposed here, there is no need to choose. Even in doubtful cases, that is, where there is both an obligation of love and an obligation of hatred, we must experience both simultaneously. That is the advantage of the Platonic model over emotionality, which does not permit such psychic separation.

Perhaps the model proposed here also offers some solution to the problem of how one can command love of a person. This is not merely love of a value, as we wanted to say above. It is love of a person. Yet the difficulty of loving generally arises from various negative qualities present in him, and over these we are commanded, at least partially, to prevail in the name of his belonging to the Jewish people. This is not only the definition of the commandment; it is also the path by which to succeed in carrying out this difficult inner obligation. At most, we will love him on one plane and simultaneously hate him on another.

Love between emotion and intellect

Commandments relating to love, as well as to other mental states and functions, raise the question whether the command is truly directed to emotion or to intellect. At the beginning of this article I noted that beyond the difficulty of how it is practically possible to command and control emotions, there is also the question whether the Torah is really interested in commanding emotions. Does the Torah demand from us that we have certain feelings at all? Emotions are, after all, only a psychic state. At face value, it would seem that the Torah should command us with regard to actions and values, that is, decisions, and not emotions. Therefore we would expect the Torah to command us to recognize the value of Jewishness that stems from its merit, that is, to give some intellectual meaning to the term love, and not to demand the feeling of love itself. According to this suggestion, the Torah commands us to appreciate the qualities of conversion or Jewishness and not to feel some emotion of love. The emotion is at most a means of arriving at appreciation of the qualities themselves. But as we saw above, that is not so. Appreciation of lofty qualities must find practical expression in the form of love. It is not clear how far this is an emotion or some spiritual experience, but this abstract philosophical decision must have some psychic-mental expression.

To sharpen my point, I will now briefly discuss trust in God, without sources and without a full discussion. It is commonly thought that the obligation of trust depends on a person’s spiritual level. The higher his spiritual level, the stronger and more comprehensive the trust in God demanded of him. Should a Jew who falls ill go to a doctor, or trust God to heal him? A common claim is that if he truly believes that God is the one who heals him, then he may, and perhaps is even obligated, there are different formulations among the medieval and later authorities on this question, to rely on God’s healing. The claim is that a person’s proper conduct depends on his level of trust. The question I wish to raise is this: what should be said about a Jew who believes with complete faith that God is the healer of all flesh, but has not internalized this on the emotional-experiential level? Should such a person conduct himself like one of complete trust, despite the fluttering and fears that remain in his heart, and impose the intellect over the emotion? Or is the category dependent on his psychic state and not on the level and intensity of his intellectual belief? It is possible that a person who believes in God intellectually still feels fear at behavior that refrains from going to a doctor. Is such a Jew considered a complete and perfect believer, and therefore required to overcome himself and not go to the doctor? Or does that obligation depend on the experiential plane and not on the intellectual one? What matters, after all, is what a person thinks and not what he feels. Emotion is at most an expression of what he thinks, but it is hard to see it as an end in itself.

Likewise one may ask whether the commandments of love deal with the heart or with the intellect. Is the obligation to love the convert emotional or intellectual? Is its goal to arrive at a correct appreciation of conversion and of the convert, while the feeling of love is only a means or an expression of that but not the desired end? Here we can go one step further than what we saw above. Above we saw that the emotion must be Platonic, that is, it must arise out of deliberation and decision and not spontaneously. Now one may perhaps say that what is demanded of us is not emotion at all but an intellectual-conscious state, of which emotion is at most an expression. Perhaps this can also be said regarding joy on the festival: what is required of us is a state of consciousness, that is, an understanding of the festival, its importance, and its meaning, and the emotion is at most an expression of that state and not the desired end of the commandment. True, this psychic-conscious state must be directed toward the person and not only toward ideas, but it is a state of consciousness and not necessarily emotion in the ordinary sense. This is a further intensification of the Platonic conception of emotions presented thus far.

Love and desire

After Jacob was decreed to work another seven years in order to merit marrying Rachel, the Torah describes his feelings as follows (Gen. 29:20):

And Jacob served seven years for Rachel, and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her.

This verse seems very puzzling. If Jacob indeed loves Rachel so much, why did seven years of labor seem to him like a few days? We know the opposite phenomenon: someone who loves a woman and waits years to marry her feels every day as eternity. A well-known answer to this question[13] is that we apparently know mainly people who love themselves, not others. When a man wants to marry a woman and cannot wait for the fulfillment of his desires, that happens because he really wants her for himself. He himself is at the center, and the desire to realize his own wishes is what drives him and deprives him of patience. But our patriarch Jacob loved Rachel, not himself. From his perspective, if this is the right thing, then nothing is burning urgently for him. He works for her, and the seven years seem to him like a few days.[14]

By the way, I note that it greatly surprises me that the early biblical commentators do not remark on this at all. The verse seems to be received by them with complete equanimity. Perhaps they naturally grasp the concept of love in this simple way. We are accustomed to a different concept, desire, and we mistakenly substitute it for love, and therefore this description does not seem fitting to us. We speak about desire, about a will to dominate and conquer, not necessarily in a forceful sense, but more in the sense of possession, and not about love. The desire to dominate gives us no rest, and we have no patience to wait for its realization. That is the way of impulse. Pure love, however, is something that is not only instinctual but also intellectual and volitional. It is a gentler and calmer force, and therefore is also endowed with greater patience. It is less stormy and more Platonic and serene.

The concept of love has been discussed by a number of philosophers,[15] and we will not treat it here in detail. The main claim accepted by most of them is that love is the opposite of desire. Love places the beloved at the center, a centrifugal process, and everything is done for him. Desire places myself at the center, a centripetal process, and everything is done for me. Action for myself is instinct, whereas action for someone else cannot come from sheer instinct alone. Of this the Sages said: a person does not sin unless it benefits him. It apparently comes from another, higher source as well.

From here one can derive another difference. Desire is an instinct, an emotion aroused in us by an influence from outside, and thus we have returned again to the metaphor of Cupid and his arrows. Love, by contrast, is a decision of the loving person. True, it is connected to an external object, but it is not acted upon by it. It has an object toward which it is directed, but the actor here is the lover and not the beloved. He is active and not passive. He is the one who decides to love the other, not someone in whom a desire is awakened to take possession of him. There is an element of decision or deliberation involved in this process. It is not mere instinct.

Perhaps this can help us understand why our culture, even though the sources of this are mainly Christian, attributes such lofty and unique value to love and to its realization. This is so in the love of man and woman, in parental love for children, and in love between friends, the value of friendship. Songs are sung about it, films are made about it, and literary works and plays are written about it. If what was at stake here were sheer instinct, the phenomenon would be incomprehensible. Desire is an instinct, which indeed awakened in us somehow, but it is not essentially different from desire for money. Why do we not see value in realizing desire for money? The answer is not only because its content is negative, it is not necessarily negative, but also because it is impulse, or instinct. It is an interest and not a value. Instinct or interest are neither positive nor negative, but neutral. What can be judged positive or negative is only a value grounded in human choice and decision.

We can now return to the question of why the Torah commands emotions. The Torah commands us with respect to love in various ways because halakhic love is an activity that has a cognitive dimension and involves deliberation. The faculty of choice is relevant to it, and therefore there is reason and value in commanding it. If so, love is connected to will and intellect, not to mere spontaneous emotion.

A brief look at love of God

We can now apply what we have seen to another commandment of love, the love of God. Maimonides, in Laws of Repentance 10:3, writes as follows:

And what is the proper love? It is that one love the Lord with a great, exceeding, very intense love, until his soul is bound up in the love of the Lord and he is continually enraptured by it, like a person lovesick whose mind is never free from love of that woman, and who is continually absorbed in her—whether he sits or rises, even when he eats and drinks. More than this should the love of the Lord be in the hearts of His lovers, continually enraptured by it, as He commanded us: ‘with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.’ And this is what Solomon said, by way of metaphor: ‘for I am sick with love.’ And the entire Song of Songs is a parable for this matter.

Maimonides requires everyone who serves God and fulfills the commandment to love Him to be absorbed in His love constantly, as in a man’s love for a woman. At first glance, these words of Maimonides seem to suggest that the character of love, whether toward God or toward a woman, is emotional, as we described above regarding desire. He describes it as a turbulent and powerful feeling that never leaves us. Does Maimonides not accept the distinction I proposed?

Let us return for a moment to sections 1–2 of that chapter, the previous law, where Maimonides explicitly connects love with intellect and wisdom, as opposed to fear, which is based on dread and is thus a more emotional-instinctive fear, of lower value:[17]

Let not a person say: I will perform the commandments of the Torah and engage in its wisdom so that I may receive the blessings written in the Torah, or so that I may merit the life of the World to Come; and I will separate myself from the transgressions against which the Torah warned so that I may be saved from the curses written in the Torah, or so that I may not be cut off from the life of the World to Come.

It is not proper to serve the Lord in this way, for one who serves in this way serves out of fear, and this is not the level of the prophets nor the level of the sages. And one serves the Lord in this way only among the ignorant, women, and minors, whom one educates to serve out of fear until their knowledge increases and they serve out of love.

One who serves out of love occupies himself with Torah and commandments and walks in the paths of wisdom not because of anything in the world, not out of fear of evil, and not in order to inherit good, but does the truth because it is truth, and in the end the good will come because of it.

This passage also contains a description of love as a psychic state that is not dependent on anything, meaning performing the commandments not for any reason external to them. If so, Maimonides sees love as action without an external cause. The lover acts and is not acted upon, unlike the desirous person, precisely as we described above. Love here is doing the truth because it is truth, and nothing more. This is a cool philosophical state, and it does not appear to have emotional aspects, certainly not necessarily or essentially.

If so, there is an apparent contradiction between what appears in these laws, which relate to love in a cool and Platonic way, and the emotional, stormy description brought in the next law, the third section quoted above. There it seems that love of God is intense and emotional, literally like love between man and woman. How can this be reconciled with what he writes in sections 1–2? These are two descriptions that appear in immediate proximity to one another, and they seem to be in sharp and deep contradiction.

It is possible that Maimonides does not intend to liken love of God to the love of man and woman in a full sense. He is dealing here with love toward an object, God, with respect to whom that love can never be actualized in practice. Therefore it is hard to assume that emotional love toward Him is required in the manner of a man’s love for a woman. I therefore propose reading these laws as follows: in sections 1–2 we see that love of God is not an emotional matter, but an intellectual and Platonic one: to do the truth because it is truth. Love of God is basically love of truth, that is, a Platonic and intellectual state more than an emotional one. In section 3, however, Maimonides adds that nevertheless a person must be absorbed in it constantly, as in emotional love between man and woman.[18] He does not mean that love of God itself must be emotional, but that it must accompany us and guide us constantly, just as emotional love does. This description fits very well what we saw with our patriarch Jacob regarding Rachel. His actions were always done for her, out of love for her, but there was not necessarily any desire bound up with them that impatiently awaited actual realization or domination. This is precisely the description we have proposed thus far for the commandment to love God, and perhaps for all the commandments of love in Jewish law.

At first glance, Maimonides is describing here a love that does not depend on anything. We do not love God because He has some quality, or because He has done something for us. But here too there is something on which the love depends: we are supposed to love Him because He is the truth, or the source of truth, as expressed in the phrase to do the truth because it is truth.[19] And again, this is not love because of something external, but loving God because of what He is.

Love of God is necessarily doing the truth because it is truth, for in this case we have no direct meeting with and apprehension of the beloved object. The love relates not to Him directly but to what He represents, namely truth. Therefore one can say that this is Platonic love in several senses. First, it places the beloved at the center and not the lover. Second, it is directed also toward an idea and not only toward an object. Indeed, the idea is what stands at the center of the love, and the object, even if it belongs to the process, is chiefly the medium through which the idea toward which the love is directed is revealed. One loves Him chiefly because the idea appears through Him. In the case of love of God, the idea is truth. And still, here too it seems that the love must be directed toward the object and not only toward the idea that appears through Him.

C. Platonic hatred

The commandment of hating the wicked[20]

There is a halakhic prohibition against hating a fellow Jew. Maimonides rules as follows (Laws of Ethical Dispositions 6:5):

Anyone who hates one person of Israel in his heart violates a prohibition, as it is said: ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart.’

Some, however, understood from Maimonides that the prohibition is only to keep hatred in the heart, but there is no prohibition on hatred itself. But most halakhic decisors agree that there is a prohibition against hating a Jew, aside of course from nullifying the positive commandment of loving one’s fellow.

But many authorities understood that nevertheless there is a commandment to hate a wicked person. In the Talmudic passage in Pesachim 113b, the discussion concerns a person who saw his fellow commit a transgression and there is no second witness to join him in testifying. In such a situation, he may not come and testify against him, because the testimony of a single witness is not accepted, and the result is that he merely brings him into disrepute. But the Talmud there adds that this witness is permitted to hate the offender:

Rabbi Shmuel bar Rav Yitzhak said in Rav’s name: It is permitted to hate him.

The Talmud brings proof for this from the verse dealing with helping one’s enemy load and unload his donkey:

As it is stated: ‘If you see the donkey of your enemy crouching under its burden’—what sort of enemy? If you say a gentile enemy—yet it was taught: the ‘enemy’ of which they spoke is a Jewish enemy, not a gentile enemy. Rather, obviously, a Jewish enemy. But is it permitted to hate him? Is it not written, ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart’? Rather, if there are witnesses that he committed a transgression, then everyone hates him as well; why single out this one? Is it not, then, a case like this, where he himself saw in him a matter of sexual immorality.

That is, the verse ‘You shall not hate your brother in your heart’ was said regarding an ordinary person, but a wrongdoer may be hated. A case in which only one person hates someone exists only when that person alone saw the other commit the transgression, and there was no second witness with him.

Rav Naḥman bar Yitzhak holds that not only is it permitted, it is even a commandment to hate him:

Rav Naḥman bar Yitzhak said: It is a commandment to hate him, as it is said, ‘Fear of the Lord is hatred of evil.’

He derives this from the verse (Prov. 8:13):

The fear of the Lord is hatred of evil; pride and arrogance and the evil way and the perverse mouth I hate.

Others bring here the verse from Psalms (139:21–22):

Do I not hate those who hate You, O Lord, and strive against those who rise against You? I hate them with utmost hatred; they have become enemies to me.

The commentators explain that the prohibition against hating a Jew was said about ‘your brother,’ as appears in the verse, that is, one who is your brother in Torah and commandments. A wicked person is not within the category of your brother, not one who acts as your fellow, and therefore this prohibition was not said regarding him.

The contradiction from unloading and loading

The Talmudic passage in Bava Metzia 32b brings a baraita:

Come and hear: If one has a friend whose animal needs unloading and an enemy whose animal needs loading, it is a commandment to assist the enemy, in order to subdue his inclination.

Here we see that if a person has an enemy, he must work on his inclination so that he not hate him.

And Tosafot, s.v. shera’ah, there in Pesachim, ask about the contradiction between the two passages:

If you say that in Bava Metzia (32b) we say: ‘If one has a friend to unload and an enemy to load, it is a commandment regarding the enemy in order to subdue his inclination,’ then what relevance is there to subduing the inclination here, since it is a commandment to hate him?

From the passage in Pesachim it emerges that there is a commandment to hate him, so why should a person have to subdue his inclination so as not to hate his fellow?[21]

Tosafot answer the difficulty as follows:

And one can say that since he hates him, his fellow also hates him, as it is written (Prov. 27), ‘As water reflects face to face, so the heart of man to man,’ and they thereby come to complete hatred, and therefore subduing the inclination is relevant.

Tosafot assume that even a person who is a sinner should not be hated with complete hatred. When he helps him load, he helps himself not reach complete hatred toward the offender, which is forbidden.

What is the meaning of that complete hatred? Later authorities discussed this at some length.[22] According to our approach, this should be explained as a complex picture. Even if I hate the offender because of his wrongdoing, there is no permission to hate him as a person and as a Jew. I must hate the wrongdoing within him. At first glance one may invoke here the Talmudic statement (Berakhot 10a):

There were certain hooligans in Rabbi Meir’s neighborhood who caused him much distress. Rabbi Meir wished to pray for mercy concerning them, that they should die. Beruriah his wife said to him: What is your reasoning? Because it is written, ‘Let sins cease’? Is it written ‘sinners’? It is written ‘sins’! Moreover, look to the end of the verse: ‘and the wicked be no more.’ Once sins cease, then ‘the wicked be no more.’ Rather, pray for mercy concerning them that they should repent, and then ‘the wicked be no more.’ He prayed for mercy concerning them, and they repented.

Beruriah tells Rabbi Meir that he should pray concerning the neighbors who had greatly tormented him that they should repent, and not that they should die. She derives this from the verse ‘Let sins cease’ and not sinners. The sins should cease, not the sinners themselves.[23]

Platonic hatred

We can return to the discussion we conducted in the previous section regarding love. Here too some commentators understood the reference to be hatred of the sin and not of the sinner, but as I argued there, I will say here as well: emotion is supposed to be directed toward a person and not toward an idea. The meaning is that here too, regarding hatred as regarding love, there is an obligation of Platonic hatred. We do not hate the person, but neither do we hate only his bad qualities and his wrongdoing, his being a sinner. We must hate the person because of his qualities. Here too, the reason for the hatred is part of the definition of the obligation in the commandment of hatred itself. As we saw at the end of the previous section, because of the Platonic nature of hatred it can dwell together with love toward that very same person, because of another reason.

D. Summary

In this article I have tried to demonstrate the Platonic character of several of the commandments of emotion in Jewish law. Of course, Jewish law contains other commandments imposed on emotion that I have not discussed here, and of course there are also different approaches within each of the commandments, including those I did discuss, and I did not address all of them.

My goal here was to defend the picture according to which halakhic commands regarding emotions relate to them in a Platonic way. The meaning of this is that there is no value in emotion that arises spontaneously. Therefore the mere feeling or sensation of hatred, love, or joy does not constitute fulfillment of the commandment. The reason that brings us to the emotion, the halakhic motivation to feel this way, is not merely the rationale of the verse but part of the definition of the commandment itself.

We saw that a Platonic definition of emotions somewhat blunts the edge of the difficulty of how emotions can be commanded. But even if we assume that a person has control over his emotions and that they can be commanded, the difficulty still remains as to why the Torah would bother commanding emotions at all. Why should it care what we feel? Seemingly there is value only in what is done through choice and decision, not in what simply arises within us one way or another. From the picture proposed here it emerges that the Torah does not command spontaneous emotions, but emotions as expressions of an ethical conception and an attitude toward ideas. It commands conceptions and principled stances, not emotions as such. On the other hand, I argued that the emotions in question are directed toward the object, some person or God, whom those ideas characterize and through whom they appear, and not toward the ideas themselves.

May these words be a light for the soul of R. Asher Aharon Sonnenschein, of blessed memory, about whom I read that he was described as a joyful Jew and a lover of God, whose emotions were directed upward, and whose spontaneity was shaped and directed according to the commandments of the Torah and its aims. May his soul be bound up in the bond of life.

[1] Platonic Thinking in the Talmud, Michael Abraham, Dov Gabay, and Uri Schild, College Publications, London 2014.

[2] See on this Rabbi Baruch Gigi’s article, Love of God (I) – How Can Love Be Commanded?, on the Yeshivat Har Etzion website (VBM). Also in the following online file: https://s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/shiurim/5773/6-7-lesson.doc.

[3] See, for example, Maimonides at the beginning of chapter 14 of the Laws of Mourning, where he defines the commandment of love of God through a collection of actions; see further below.

[4] See, for example, Maimonides, Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2:2: And what is the way to love Him and fear Him….

[5] See Wikipedia, entry ‘Platonic love.’

[6] One may ask how it is permitted to eat meat and drink wine on the festival and rejoice in them. Seemingly here too the joy is not in the festival but in food and drink. But the difference is clear: meat and wine are not the cause of joy but means of rejoicing. We rejoice in the festival, and the way to express and intensify that joy is to eat meat and drink wine on the festival. Marriage, by contrast, is an alternative cause of joy, and not merely a means of creating joy. When we marry a woman, we rejoice in the woman and in the marriage, not in the festival, and therefore one does not marry on the festival.

[7] These matters are explained at greater length in my article, written together with Gabriel Hazut, on emotions in Jewish law, in the book On the Path of the Commandments, Tam Press, Kfar Hasidim 2010 (5770).

[8] On this distinction, see the dispute between Maimonides and Nachmanides in the Fifth Root regarding verses that provide reasons for commandments, such as the verse concerning the king, ‘He shall not multiply wives for himself, lest his heart turn aside.’ See also the article Good Measure on that root; the volume of essays on the roots is currently being edited.

[9] It is not reasonable to distinguish between overlapping commands and a command included within another command. Where there is no new content, there is no reason to count an additional commandment. This is indeed what R. Yitzhak Hutner assumes in the passage quoted immediately below. He proves it from Maimonides’ words in negative commandment 170 regarding the prohibition against taking a share in the booty, which is stated once concerning the tribe of Levi and once again concerning the priests. Maimonides explains there that the prohibition on the tribe of Levi includes the prohibition on the priests, and therefore only one commandment is counted here. See there in Maimonides, who himself elaborates on this principle and brings several further proofs.

[10] For a similar consideration regarding the commandment of hatred, see the next section.

[11] In Sefer HaChinukh, by contrast, that does not seem to be the implication. He writes that if a person loves a convert, he thereby fulfills two commandments. According to R. Yitzhak Hutner’s suggestion, that is not correct.

[12] In our book Platonic Thinking in the Talmud (vol. 2, chapter 7) we proposed a more precise logical formalization of the claim that the emotion is directed toward a person because of a quality, and not toward the quality itself. See there also in the third part, chapter 8, the implications for the discussion of the Third Man paradox and its solution in our formalization.

[13] It circulates in the world, but its source is unknown to me.

[14] It is hard to avoid the association with a sketch by HaGashash HaHiver, in which someone asks: does a fisherman love fish? If so, why does he eat them? The obvious answer is: he may desire fish, but he loves only himself.

[15] See, for example, Don Judah Abravanel, Dialogues of Love, translated by Menachem Dorman, Bialik Institute, Jerusalem 1983. Also Essays on Love, José Ortega y Gasset, translated by Yoram Bronowski, Keter, Jerusalem 1985.

[16] See in this connection Rabbi Soloveitchik’s introduction to his essay And From There You Shall Seek.

[17] See also additional such references in Maimonides, Laws of Repentance 10:6, in Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2:2 and 4:12, and in the Guide of the Perplexed III:51. In all these places Maimonides describes love of God as intellectual cognition, or as a derivative of intellectual cognition. By contrast, there are sources in which Maimonides speaks of a different source for love of God, though it too is intellectual: knowledge of the Torah and its principles. See Sefer HaMitzvot, positive commandment 3, and see the Guide of the Perplexed later in that same chapter, p. 411 in R. Kapach’s edition.

For a discussion of Maimonides’ position on love of God, see Rabbi Shlomo Aviner’s article, Does the Study of the Natural Sciences Lead to Love of God?, in Tzohar 1, autumn 2000, and the responses to it in issue 2, winter 2000. Regarding the connection to the natural sciences, see also Dror Pixler’s article and my response in Tzohar 6, 2001.

[18] At the beginning of the Mishnah Berurah it is cited in the name of Sefer HaChinukh that Jewish law contains six constant commandments. One of them is love of God.

[19] In a similar way one can speak of Platonic gratitude toward God. This is gratitude not conditioned by the good He has done for us, or by any encounter with Him, but by the very fact that we came from Him. See my article, Gratitude: Between Morality and Ontology, Talalei Orot 15, 2009.

[20] See on this the article The Commandment to Hate the Wicked, by David Ben Zion Klein, HaMa’ayan, Tishrei 5738, and also Rabbi Yehudah Levy’s article, ‘Let the wicked gorge himself and die’ versus ‘preventing him from transgressing,’ HaMa’ayan, Tammuz 5771.

[21] In truth, one could have answered that the case here is one whom I hate without permission, and therefore I must subdue my inclination. But the accepted assumption is that the Torah does not address wrongdoers, and therefore the enemy here is a legitimate enemy. However, in the parallel Tosafot in Bava Metzia 32b, it appears that this is in fact how they meant to answer it:

To subdue his inclination—And if you say: since in Pesachim (there) it explains it as referring to a Jew whom one is permitted to hate, for example if he saw in him a matter of sexual immorality, what relevance is there to subduing his inclination? And one can answer that it is not speaking of the ‘enemy’ of the verse.

It seems that they mean to say that in the verse it really refers to a person whom it is forbidden to hate, because he is not a wrongdoer, as we suggested here.

[22] See Maimonides, Laws of Murderer 13:13–14; Shulchan Arukh, Hoshen Mishpat 272:11 and its commentators; Haggahot Maimoniot, Laws of Ethical Dispositions 6:3; Chafetz Chaim 4:4, note 14; Hazon Ish, Yoreh De’ah, end of sec. 2; the book Between Man and His Fellow, vol. 1, pp. 200–272; the book Love Your Fellow as Yourself, commandment of do not hate, chapter 4; the Tanya, chapter 32; Middot Re’iyah, Love 8–9, and also there 5–6, among others.

[23] The plain sense of the verse is of course that the word there means sinners in biblical Hebrew.