Ve’ahavta et Hashem elokekha bekhol levavkha uvekhol nafshekha uvekhol me’odekha. Love Hashem your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might (Deuteronomy 6:5).
Sometimes we wonder what God wants from us, how to orient our lives, what really matters. Here it is – love God. Bekhol. With everything you’ve got. Make that love primary, central, the one thing you put all your energy into. Don’t get confused or distracted. Stay focused and aligned to this one principle.
Offering It All Up
Before we consider what it might mean to love God, I wonder if you can sense how good and right it feels to have this one focus point for all your energies. We are so often confused and diffused, pulled hither and yon by each new challenge, worry and windstorm, full of inner debate and conflict. But here is something that demands all of us, nothing left out, everything clarified and simplified into this one endeavor. It’s as if all the scattered parts of ourselves, all the polarized pushes and pulls, the thousand arms and legs inside us moving in different directions, as if all of that energy, kol, is suddenly whooshed up into one powerful current, kol hanekhalim holkhim layam, all the streams flowing into the sea (Ecclesiastes 1:7). All the energies lifted upward in one motion of offering and surrender, like a candle flame using all its resources to rise upward, all of you rising up, uniting into a single yearning of the heart. Here I am, God. Have all of me. It is all for You. There is nothing else.
Rabbi Akiva’s Martyrdom
Maybe in this way we can understand a little of Rabbi Akiva’s martyrdom. Rabbi Akiva interpreted the term bekhol nafshekha, “all of your soul,” to mean even to the point of death, and so he willingly offered himself up to the Romans for the sake of God. Fortunately, we are not called to such extreme acts. But maybe we can still relate to that impulse and strengthen it in ourselves. To feel such a profound devotion that we are willing to offer ourselves up, as if on an altar, to have something that matters more to us than life itself, the thing that actually gives our lives purpose and meaning, what it is all for, a rising up of our heart, a total relinquishing of normal concerns, a sense of service that relaxes ego strivings, a surge of energetic clarity and drive so powerful that it shakes you to your core. This is what I am here for.
Loving God
We are not called to die, but rather to live with that kind of intentionality and passion. And what is to be our focus, what is the foundational pillar, this thing that matters more than anything else? Loving God.
Where Giving and Receiving Meet
What does it mean to love God? Last week we spoke of receiving love. This week we speak of giving love. Maybe we are called to live in the place where the two meet, where giving and receiving meet. Panim befanim, face to face (Deuteronomy 5:4). Like two lovers gazing into each other’s eyes. Where does one love stop and the other begin? Who owns which piece? Kamayim hapanim, like face reflecting face in water (Proverbs 27:19), this love is a mirrored energetic current that flows between us, not owned by either side, sustained by both partners. It’s like ve’ahavta is an invitation to join in this circle of divine love, to enter and participate in its flow.
The Room of Love
Maybe imagining that you are entering a room that is infused with the substance of love so that you can see it, taste it, smell it, touch it and hear it, taking it in with all your senses. There is a sense here of kindness and care, an embrace, a steadfast loyalty – a “staying with” quality – and a gentle presence that sees and holds it all, all the pain and suffering and shame and fear and sadness, being with it all with tenderness. It’s like finally coming home – you have always known this exists, but never been able to fully experience it. It feels familiar and true and right, like a faint memory from another time.
You and God sit here together, breathing in sync, exchanging this substance back and forth between you. God loves and accepts you in all your imperfections, with grace, and you love and accept God and the life you have been given, even its challenges, with profound trust (see Rashi on bekhol me’odekha, “with every measure that God metes out to you”). Both of you are committed, devoted, not letting go through the storms of doubt and trouble. You are in it together. The receiving and the giving happen at the exact same moment. You are not separate, but a part of the love, a participant, drawing it out. This is what your heart was meant to do. Feel how natural it is for you, like falling off a horse, you slide easily into this loving encounter, as simple as the beating of your heart. Hineni. Here I am. No longer knowing who says what. You are joining and joined in that love, becoming that love, that silent comforting presence, that being with, that container that can hold all the sorrows and joys of history and eternity.
In this room, there is no agenda, no attempt to solve problems or fix anything or get anything done. We don’t ask anything from God here. And God asks nothing of us either. Rachmana liba ba’iy. What the Merciful One most desires is our heart – to be in relationship with us. So here we sit together, communing, connecting, loving. Devekim, attached. Karov, close, intimate, as with a dear friend, just hanging out, spending time together, getting to know each other. The Merciful one desires the heart. We are so busy running around getting things done. Meanwhile, God waits for us to pause and simply be present, to connect. They say that’s what happens in the world to come, people just sit around and enjoy God’s presence, nehenin miziv hashekhinah. We can practice that now, letting everything else drop and resting in connection.
Moving Out of the Room
When you sit here for a while, this love enters you and inhabits you; you become its vessel, its chariot so that you can carry it forward. You plug in for a while, get recharged, and then you move out again; like a river flowing in and out of the sea, you flow in and out of connection to your Source, going forth to deliver these nourishing waters to the far corners of the earth.
Loving “With” God
When you do leave that room, when you do flow out and venture forth, it is together with God. The word et in our verse can have the meaning of “with,” and so, playfully rereading our verse, ve’ahavta et Hashem, we might understand it to mean, not just “love God” but also “love with God,” you and God joining together in the act of loving in the world.
What would it be like to join together with God in loving the people in your life? Sometimes it is hard for us to love each other. People irritate us, we wish they were different, we wish we ourselves were different, everything seems like a mess. Allowing God to join us in the daily task of loving each other, inviting the energy we sat with in that room – the presence and holding and being with in unconditional support and acceptance – inviting that to inform our relationships, to be with us in our very imperfect human loving. Ve’ahavta et Hashem. Living a life of loving together with God.
Loving the Little Beggar Children Inside
And perhaps most of all, we are asked to join with God in loving ourselves, in learning to love the little ones inside who desperately long for such love, the hungry beggars who are always grasping for a scrap of nourishment, the ones who work so hard to try to earn it, the ones who reach out to every passerby, saying – “are you my mother,” or: “please, sir, may I have some more?” We normally reject these little ones and shame them as too “needy,” but instead, the invitation here is to join with God in loving them – remembering what you felt in that room and offering it – the combination of your own love and God’s creating an exponential effect, so that you are overflowing and exploding with this warm, caring energy and the little ones are drenched in it, playing and splashing about in the abundant waters that now rain down on them, laughing and dancing about, tripping over themselves in their newfound joy. Notice that there is a double shift that happens here – they fill up, and you become fuller, too, you become the one who can offer that to them, you grow into your capacity for divine loving.
God As the Inner Child?
In this regard, another reading occurs to me of this text. Ve’ahavta et Hashem Elokekha. Love Hashem your God – your God in the singular, the One who appears to you in particular throughout your life in different forms. Love that God, your God. I ask you – how do you imagine that God appears to you inside? As wisdom? Joy? A sense of knowing? Yes, yes. True. But isn’t it also possible that God appears to you inside as a small child in need of love? Like Elijah disguised as a needy beggar at the door. Might God not be disguised as our own inner beggar children asking for love?
Or perhaps in some strange incomprehensible way, maybe it is not entirely a disguise. Maybe one aspect of God is such a child, innocent and pure and playful and full of light, but also in need of something from us, in need of some tikkun, some repair, in need of the unconditional loving that can turn that little child in us back to its golden core, its divine essence. Maybe, in other words, that ache in you of needing, of grasping, of wanting to be loved so desperately, maybe that ache, that child, is the piece of God that has been placed in you to love and heal and transmute. Through love. Ve’ahavta et Hashem Elokekha. Whom are you asked to love here? Surely it is the one in you who needs love, the one that, through its insistent relentless hunger, will lead you back to your own great capacity for loving, and thereby transform you both, return you both to that room where you sit together and simply enjoy each other’s company.
We often imagine our relationship with God as similar to that of a parent and a child. Normally we think of God as the parent in that dynamic, but perhaps in this ve’ahavta call — a call to be the one who does the loving — there is also hinted here a sense of the opposite, that sometimes, in some way, we are also called to be the parent, the parent to the divine child who has been planted in us, to grow into that role, to grow into our own full potential for loving, because that is what God needs from us, that is the heart — liba — that God requires of us.
A Choice
So much prevents us from doing this, from turning towards each other and especially ourselves in a loving way. Ve’ahavta et Hashem Elokekha is an invitation to join with God in learning to love again and to heal ourselves and the world through that love.
This doesn’t happen automatically. It requires something of us. There is agency called for in ve’ahavta’s directive. It is a choice, a choice we make again and again, the choice to enter and to center God’s love in our lives, with all our hearts, with all our souls and with all our might, not letting go. Veshinantam, we say, repeat it again and again. Fiercely, consistently, repeatedly, we fall and return, fall and return, coming back to our center in love, using everything we have, including the ache of that little one’s hunger and yearning, with all our heart’s yearning and capacity, and with all the power of our passion and drive and focus, giving it all over, offering it all up to this, our life task: to love God and to join God in the healing work of loving.
Photo by Josh Willinks at Pexels
