God hates us. According to Moshe’s recounting of the story of the spies, after the people heard the spies’ report, they became so despondent that they said – besinat Hashem otanu hotzianu me’eretz mitzrayim– It was out of sinah, hatred, that God took us out of Egypt to be destroyed by the Emorites (Deuteronomy 1:27).
Distrust of Love
This is kind of a crazy thought, to imagine that God took us out of Egypt because God hates us. It seems like a lot of investment of miracles and energy to save someone from slavery, all so you can get them killed off later because you hate them. The commentaries scramble to explain what the people could possibly mean here, how they could rationally think that God hates them. But I wonder if what the people are feeling is not really rational, but more of a visceral inability to trust love, one that might be familiar to us.
It’s like if a friend makes you a beautiful gift that they put their whole heart into for many months and you look at it suspiciously and think – It’s actually not my favorite color. They weren’t thinking of me. They just did it because they wanted to entertain themselves, or worse – maybe they did it to make fun of me because they really hate me. Is any of that at all familiar? Maybe not that exact scenario but the sense of distrust around care, an inability to fully receive love. Something in you comes up to protect you from it, to close that door, to say – no, it’s not true; they don’t really care.
God daily gives us the most precious gift, the gift of life and breath and autonomy, and we, like the Israelites, often do not perceive that we are loved. I’m not saying we should be grateful. It’s not about something we owe God. It’s about the suffering we cause ourselves by not being open to receiving love. It’s just incredibly sad.
It’s like there is a lover standing at the door, knocking daily, continuously, with a bouquet of flowers, and meanwhile we, the beloved, are inside moaning and thirsting from a severe lack of love, refusing to open the door because we don’t trust what’s on offer. You don’t really love me. You hate me. Meanwhile we are so in need of precisely this magical substance. It’s tragic. We are ill and constantly refusing the cure at our doorstep.
Self Hatred
It’s not just about God. It’s also about how we treat ourselves. Hating yourself is the same thing as believing that God hates you. Rashi here brings a folk saying that goes like this – “what is in your heart about your friend is what is in your heart about yourself.” {In the context of the Rashi, the interpretation is slightly different, but the saying also has the following implication.) In other words, what you imagine is in your friend’s heart is a reflection of what is in your own heart. You imagine that God hates you because you hate yourself, a projection. On some level, it is all the same; it is all hatred turned towards oneself, a basic distrust of the truth of love, this habit of hearing a voice that says “I hate you” (who is it that we imagine is saying that to us internally?) and believing it.
A Life Lie
This is what we might call a “life lie,” the lie of hatred and no love. One rabbinic commentary says here that the Israelites’ assumption of divine hatred is a pesha gadol, a tremendous transgression, to imagine that God hates us when God is in fact mekor ha’ahavah vehachaninah, the source of love and grace (Beur Yashar on Deuteronomy 1:27). We think we can hate ourselves with impunity. We might even consider it the higher moral ground, to hate ourselves, an ethical obligation to combat being self centered or arrogant. But no. To hate ourselves and the corollary belief that God hates us is a grave transgression, a mistake of tragic proportions, an insult to a loving God and a life lie that tears at the foundation of the universe that God created. It’s not a small thing. Olam hesed yibaneh. The world is built out of hesed, out of love (Psalm 89:3). To lean into hatred, even of oneself, perhaps especially of oneself, is to be a world destroyer instead of a world builder.
I am speaking in such stark terms because I think the other side is so habitual and empowered in many of us, and in a strange way, often feels like the morally superior path, to shrink back from receiving love, to insist on hatred towards oneself. So that to turn consciously towards God’s love – to let that in, to feel it, to cultivate it, to dwell in it, to trust it, to build your life on the ground of being beloved – is not an easy task. It requires practice and intention, a conscious choice, made again and again – despite all odds and rational arguments and social pressure pushing in the other direction – to let God’s love in on a regular basis.
And, because of the power of the opposite side, it also requires a focused awareness of the moments when we do fall back into the life lie – as the Israelites did here – when we start to believe again that we are not beloved.
What Blocks The Love
So maybe, before we practice opening to God’s love, we can explore what blocks us, how this lie works. One of the main blocks, I believe, is a sense of our unworthiness, that we are in constant danger of losing love because of our inadequacies. The commentator Sforno says here that the reason the people felt that God hated them was because avadnu avodah zarah, we worshiped idolatry. We failed. We made mistakes. We didn’t do things right. And therefore we are no longer worthy of God’s love; God must surely hate us.
When We Fail
Pausing here to feel into this pattern in yourself. When you make a mistake, when you fall down or fail in some way, what happens inside? Do you still love yourself? Do you feel that God still loves you? Let’s say it’s a pretty big mistake, something very embarrassing or something that causes harm to others, and you feel bad about it, you regret it, you loop about it, maybe you make amends or maybe you continue to struggle with it – in the midst of all that, do you still feel loved? I know for many of us, as soon as there is even the shred of possibility that we have done something wrong, we immediately abandon ourselves. We lose any grounding in love and are left to drift about in a fog of shame and self hatred. As if we no longer deserve love simply because we have erred.
The Shaky Ground of Conditional Love
This is part of the lie we live in, the false belief system that structures our lives and causes us immense suffering, this belief that God’s love and our own is fundamentally conditional, that it depends on something, that it depends on us in some way, on us being a certain way, that it is not guaranteed. I invite you to really get a sense of that conditionality inside because I don’t think we are usually conscious of it, the sense that ahavah teluyah badavar, that love is dependent on something (Pirke Avot 5:16), a tit for tat exchange, that if you don’t keep your end of the deal, the deal is off, the love is gone. This is such a shaky ground to have under our feet, making it hard to walk steadily and courageously into this life with all its challenges (no wonder the people felt they couldn’t handle entering the land of Israel with this mentality; they were right). There is nothing to hold on to. It puts immense pressure on everything we do because so much rides on us doing it all exactly right. If I am in danger of losing the love I need, I have to be ever vigilant. It’s so hard to live that way.
Before and After, God is the Same
But all of that is a lie. That’s what God reveals to Moshe after the Golden Calf, when God shares who God truly is through the 13 divine attributes of mercy. Hashem, Hashem, it begins, those two words repeated twice to say – I am the same loving merciful God before and after a sin (Rashi on Exodus 34:6). Before and after, exactly the same. There is no change in Me or My love.
God doesn’t love us because we are good, but because God is good.
There can be no change because this is My essence, says God. That’s who I am. It does not depend on you and how you act. God doesn’t love us because we are good, but because God is good. Hodu lashem ki tov ki le’olam hasdo. “Give thanks to God for God is good – God’s love is forever” (Psalm 136:1). Part of God’s goodness is the capacity to stay true to God’s own loving nature l’e’olam, eternally, continuously, without fail. Or, as the Christian mystic Meister Eckhart puts it, “We should not thank You because You love us but thank You that You are so good that You cannot do anything else (Meister Eckhart’s Book of the Heart, p. 24).” You are so good that You cannot do anything else but love us. To begin to understand and come to know God is to appreciate this truth – inherent in God is the profoundly good capacity to love unconditionally. Nothing we do could possibly alter that. It is like a mountain or a deeply rooted tree, unmovable through the storm, ever steady in its core, ever steady in this essential quality of loving.
Practice Letting It In
I invite you to pause here and let in some of this magical substance. Maybe imagining that God is gazing at you with great tenderness and fondness, taking you in in all your quirks and idiosyncrasies, your strengths and limitations, knowing you in a deep complete way like no one else can, and smiling – maybe even chuckling – with a warmth that accepts and embraces all of it, all of you beloved, just because you are you.
Sensing how unshakable this love is. As Yeshayahu says, “For the mountains may move and the hills be shaken, but my love shall never move from you, nor my covenant of friendship be shaken (Isaiah 54:10).” Hasdi me’itakh lo yamush. My love shall never move from you. Here we finally have a firm ground to walk on, something to steady us in our shakiness; it is indeed like a mountain, only even more firm than that, even more steady than we can imagine.
Dissolving the Hatred
Taking in the love of that gaze and that smile, letting its warmth seep into your bones and nourish and heal you, all the places that have so longed for this love, even the voices that resisted it, that said – God hates us, we hate ourselves – even those voices were themselves so hungry for it, were in fact asking for it. Sharing the warmth with them, too, letting it dissolve their harshness and resistance like water dissolved the wicked witch. Watch them turn into sweet innocent children who just want to be loved. In their insistence on hatred, they were actually pointing the way to love in the only way they knew how. See how even in this essay, the Israelites’ statement about hatred led us to a clearer understanding of God’s love, a trailhead to a deeper place underneath, to the Source.
Relax
Soaking it in now. Sitting still and not doing a thing other than letting yourself be loved. Let yourself be loved. For no reason. Feel how that love relaxes you, how it relieves all the strivers and performers who have worked so hard your whole life to earn love for you, how it softens all the tension of hypervigilance, all the pressure around doing it perfectly, not making a mistake. It’s ok. You can rest now in the assurance of God’s unconditional love.
Not Just In God, But In Us
This capacity for unconditional love is not just in God but also in us as creatures made in the divine image. We carry that capacity, a buried potential that is awakened and rekindled by our experience of God’s love, like face mirroring face in water. Oh, yes, we remember, we have that, too. We fill up and overflow outward, so much love to offer. We become in moments, in glimpses, like God, more steady than a mountain in our loving, unshakable. Whatever comes, I remain in that, not abandoning my loving center. And when we do leave, because we will, again and again, err and turn backwards, like the Israelites, confused and doubting, when we do stray, that’s ok, it’s an opportunity to learn to love ourselves through our erring and to gently return.
I know I’ve spoken of this unconditional love many times before, but I feel we need to hear it a thousand times, that it is the foundation, the solid ground we desperately need for our healing, our growth and our blossoming, that it has the power to redeem us, one loving heart at a time. The Temple – a more perfect, God-centered world – was destroyed, we are taught, by sinat hinam, baseless hatred (Yoma 9b; this connection is thanks to Rachelle Lackman). The new world we reach for and work to build, that is ever unfolding through us, will surely be built through ahavat hinam, love for no reason.
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