חדש באתר: NotebookLM עם כל תכני הרב מיכאל אברהם

Q&A: Love of God

Back to list  |  🌐 עברית  |  ℹ About
Originally published:
This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

Love of God

Question

Hello Rabbi!
 
We say every day, “And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul,” and they already expounded: even if He takes your life.
So I am supposed to love God to that extent.
And my question is: why?
Let me elaborate: why do I love people?
A few answers: 1. I love people who give to me.
. 2. I love people who awaken admiration in me, because I appreciate or am drawn to them or to their qualities in my eyes: effort, ideologies, sincerity, humor, beauty, etc.
3. I love people to whom I have given, because I invested in them, because they drew me to want to invest in them. (Giving generates love.)
And now, as for God: I don’t know Him. I don’t know any of His qualities.
He does not exert Himself, does not give things up, does not struggle, does not suffer, is not happy.
If I sin, it doesn’t affect Him. And if I perform commandments, that doesn’t give Him anything either, because He is perfect, etc.
So He does not struggle and work, and therefore is not worthy of appreciation—perhaps only of admiration, because of His greatness.
What do I know about Him? That He is an amazing intelligence that is running an “operation,” and that when I do such-and-such He will pay me. (I also have no idea why He does this.)
So even if I do His commandments because it is the truth,
why should I love Him?
Fine—if He were overcoming and fighting with other gods in order to benefit me, that would awaken admiration and love in me.
I will give up my life because that is the truth, and because in my view it is more worthwhile.
But an entity about whom I do not have the faintest clue, and who does not care in a way I can recognize, and who does not exert Himself, but only benefits me for some reason (?).
 
To me this sounds like business, not like a romance.
I do not find the concept of love here.
I hope I made myself understood. Thank you very much.
 
 

Answer

Maimonides, at the beginning of Chapter 10 of the Laws of Repentance, answers exactly this: he identifies love with doing the truth because it is true. He then explains that the description of love for the Holy One, blessed be He, as love for a woman is only a metaphor, whose purpose is to say that the matter must be constantly present within a person. I believe I already explained this on the site (see, for example, Column 22, and there are others as well).

Leave a Reply

Back to top button