Rabbi Janet Marder

Octoer 23, 2009

For the Love of God

On August 5, 2003 Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the controversial talk-show host, dropped a bombshell on her 12 million listeners. Raised without religion, the child of a non-practicing Jewish father and a non-practicing Italian Catholic mother, Dr. Laura had engaged in an intense spiritual search for years. Prompted by a question from her young son while watching a Holocaust documentary, she began exploring her Jewish roots in the mid-1990s – a search that culminated in a very public conversion to Judaism, first under Conservative auspices and then a second time under Orthodox auspices.

Now, five years after her conversion, Dr. Laura began her broadcast by announcing that she would no longer practice Judaism. While she still considers herself a Jew, she said, "my identifying with this entity and my fulfilling the rituals, etc., of the entity -- that has ended."

She suggested two reasons for her decision to renounce Judaism. First, she seems to have felt a lack of support from the Jewish community. One gets the sense that she expected more Jews to express gratitude and enthusiasm after her conversion. Each day, she said, she spends an hour or so reading faxes and other communications from her listeners. She commented:

"By and large the faxes from Christians have been very loving, very supportive. From my own religion, I have either gotten nothing, which is 99% of it, or two of the nastiest letters I have gotten in a long time. I guess that's my point - - I don't get much back. Not much warmth coming back."

It’s true: Dr. Laura has never been a very popular figure in the Jewish community. A strong – some would say harsh – advocate of conservative moral values, she has often found herself out of step with mainstream Jewish views. Her comments equating homosexuality with pedophilia, and opposing the right of gay people to marry or adopt children made her especially distasteful to many Jews, and she felt the brunt of their criticism.

The second factor in Dr. Laura’s decision was a deficiency she found in Judaism itself.  She said: “I have envied all my Christian friends who really, universally, deeply feel loved by God. They use the name Jesus when they refer to God... that was a mystery, being connected to God.” Many times over the years, she said, she was moved by listeners who told her they had "joined a church, felt loved by God, and that was [their] anchor."

Dr. Laura’s public announcement, as you might imagine, sparked some lively responses from Jews. Some simply said, “Good riddance,” or words to that effect, arguing that we don’t need another intolerant fundamentalist within our ranks. Others excoriated her for abandoning Judaism on trivial grounds.

Orthodox rabbi and author Shmuley Boteach called her act one of “the shallowest renunciations of personal faith in all human history.” Recalling how Elie Wiesel had struggled with faith when he saw children murdered in the Holocaust, Rabbi Boteach wrote: “Had Dr. Laura witnessed such horrors, I could be sympathetic to her abandonment of the God of Israel. Had she been Oriah Pass , whose baby daughter, Shalhevet, was shot dead by a Palestinian sniper in Hebron ….I could understand her feeling alienated from the Hebrew God. But to give Judaism up for the shameful reason of not feeling sufficiently appreciated by the Jewish community?” And he added tartly, speaking, one might imagine, from personal experience: “Lord knows, if failing to be embraced by the Jewish community is a criterion for abandoning Judaism, Moses should never have come down from Mount Sinai …”

No question about it: we Jews can be an unappreciative bunch. We never hesitate to express our opinions, and some Jews have been known to write a nasty letter now and then.

But the more serious issue Dr. Laura raised was the spiritual one. Can one find, within Judaism, the comforting idea that we are loved and cherished by God? Do Jews  “really, universally, deeply feel loved by God” in the way that Christians do? And if not, does that indicate that our religion fails to address a powerful human need? After all, few would dispute the idea that throughout our lives, we are profoundly in need of love. Babies who are not loved and held fail to thrive – they simply waste away and die. Adults, too, cannot live long without believing that they are loved, or were loved, deeply by someone.

The first part of this question is easy to answer. Judaism does indeed teach that we are loved by God. Look, for instance, at a prayer we chanted this evening – Ahavat Olam, on p.20 in your siddur. The name of this prayer, Ahavat Olam, comes from its first two words: Ahava, meaning “love” and “olam,” which sometimes means “world,” as in the phrase “tikkun olam – repairing the world.” But here and elsewhere, “olam” means “eternity” – so the two words together, ahavat olam, mean “eternal love, endless love, bottomless love.”

The beginning of this prayer comes from the book of Jeremiah, where the prophet describes the exodus from Egypt : “Thus says Adonai: The people escaped from the sword, found favor in the wilderness….Eternal love I conceived for you then…” [Jer.31:2].

Ahavat olam ahavtich, says God. “Eternal love I conceived for you then.” As Jeremiah understands it, God brought our people out of Egypt into the wilderness of Sinai, and there fell helplessly and permanently in love with us.

The Ahavat Olam prayer may date back as far as 2000 years ago, to the time when the Temple stood in Jerusalem . It’s mentioned in the Talmud, Tractate Berachot [11b] along with a similar prayer called “Ahava Rabba,” meaning “great love.” There’s some discussion about when each prayer should be said, and our Sages decided that Ahava Rabba should be said in the morning, and Ahavat Olam should be said in the evening. Each prayer comes just before we recite the Sh’ma.

If we look more closely at the prayer, we can see why. Right after the first clause – “Ahavat olam beit yisrael amcha ahavta – with endless love You have loved Your people, the House of Israel,” comes the proof of that love. “Torah u-mitzvot, chukim umishpatim…Torah and mitzot, laws and statutes You have taught us.”

How do we know that God loves us? How can we feel the love of God? This prayer says that God has shown us love by giving us Torah – wisdom and guidance in how to live. The prayer is a direct response – some might call it a polemical response – to the teaching of the early Christians, beginning with Paul, who said that the law is a burden and a curse. They contrasted the stern, legalistic God of the Jews with the loving God of Christianity.

The Sages who composed Ahavat Olam made no such distinction between law and love, and they had a radically different sense of what Torah meant in their lives. To them, its study was endlessly fascinating, uplifting and nourishing, delightful and pleasurable. They wrote in our prayer: “nismach b’divrei toratecha uvemitzvotecha – we will have simcha, we will rejoice in Your Torah, Your teaching; your mitzvot make us happy.“ And even stronger: “Ki hem chayyeinu v’orech yameinu…these mitzvot are our lives; they structure our days.” Our very existence would be impossible without them.

How can Torah and mitzvot be a gift of love, essential to life itself? When your spouse leaves you a list of chores to do, does that make you feel well-loved? Our Sages understood this idea by imagining what a good and loving parent does for a child, providing education, counsel, the tools for self-discipline, responsibility and growth. As Rabbi Elliot Dorff writes: “Children who grow up in a home without rules experience apathy [and indifference], not love.”

So we Jews believe that God gives us wisdom and law because God cares, and wants us to live better, richer, more meaningful lives. Our time on this earth is infinitely more rewarding because we do not have to blunder about, figuring things out on our own – we have the treasure of Torah in our midst, and we can learn from it.

It’s appropriate that we give thanks for Torah just before we recite the Shema, which is, after all, a passage from the Torah. And we say in the Ahavat Olam prayer “b’shochbeinu uvekumeinu nasiach b’chukecha… when we lie down and when we rise up we will speak about Your laws,” which prepares us for the similar wording of the first paragraph of the Shema. There, we are told how to respond to God’s deep love for us: “V’ahavta et Adonai Elohecha…you shall love Adonai with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.”

Ahavat Olam ends as it began, calling God “ohev amo Yisrael – the One who loves the people Israel .” Make no mistake: our Sages felt these words with all their hearts and souls. Rabbi Zadok of Lublin , who died at the beginning of the 20^th century, said that Ahava Rabba, “great love” – the name of the prayer we say in the morning – refers to the kind of passionate attraction that blazes up instantly between two lovers and quickly dies away.  But Ahavat Olam – eternal love – refers to the kind of love that is like a banked fire, burning steadily and quietly, enduring forever – like the love of parents for their children, or faithful spouses who stay with one another through good times and bad times.

Ahavat Olam is a prayer attuned to the mood of evening. As we approach the darkness, symbol of danger and fear, we remind ourselves of the constant and steadfast love of God, which has sustained the Jewish people with light and warmth through the long dark nights of our history. 

So we now know that Dr. Laura was wrong when she said that Judaism lacks the idea of a loving God. Images of a loving God are found throughout the Hebrew Bible and frequently in our liturgy. The psalmist who wrote “The Lord is my Shepherd” clearly imagined a God who knows him personally and cares for him tenderly. The Sages who created the liturgy for Rosh Hashana believed that God pays loving attention to each individual soul on the Days of Awe.

But just because the idea is there in our sacred texts doesn’t mean that Jews today feel  loved by God. And that’s what Dr. Laura said she’s missing: that intense consciousness that you are personally cherished and treasured and held precious by the Lord – the powerful experience of love that can give you strength when the rest of your world falls apart.

I have no doubt that the rabbis who composed the Ahavat Olam prayer felt deeply loved by God – and they believed that this feeling was accessible to all who immersed themselves in the study of Torah. I do believe that devoted students of Torah, even now, can come to feel some of the love and joy that our Sages felt.

But the truth is that all of this talk about love makes many Jews uncomfortable, and it made some of our Sages uncomfortable, too. Maimonides, for instance, writing in the 12^th century, warned that whenever you use the words “God” and “love” in the same sentence, you have entered the realm of poetry and metaphor. Christians, of course, can picture a God who has long, flowing hair, a soft beard and kind blue eyes. They can imagine the touch of his hand, bringing healing and comfort, and the soft and gentle sound of his voice.

Maimonides insisted that Jews simply do not conceive of God as a person. To do so is a form of idol worship. So we cannot expect to experience God’s love for us the way we experience the love of people in our life. God is not going to kiss us on the forehead or give us a hug or hold our hand when we’re walking through the valley of death.

For Maimonides, we experience God’s love for us by coming to understand and appreciate the amazing world God has given to us. The more we study the universe, the more we apprehend the elegant and beautiful laws of nature, the more we perceive Divine love. This need not only be an intellectual activity. If you marvel at trees and sunshine and flowers and stars, you can come to perceive these as exquisite gifts of love, and feel how greatly blessed you are by that love. Of course, this is not a personal love. We can feel intensely grateful, intensely conscious that we exist in the presence of a loving God…but only a megalomaniac believes that the universe was created specifically as a gift of love for him.

I don’t know if it would satisfy Dr. Laura to be told that she could feel God’s love through Torah study or by paying close attention to the beauty of the world. She is yearning for something warmer and more tangible. So I would tell her instead about Abraham Joshua Heschel, a great teacher of the 20^th century, who said that God’s love is manifest in human beings. Here is what he wrote:

“We live by the conviction that acts of goodness reflect the hidden light of [God’s] holiness…..It is within our power to mirror [God’s] unending love in deeds of kindness, like brooks that hold the sky” [A. Heschel, Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism from the Writings of Abraham Joshua Heschel, ed. Fritz Rothschild, p.86].

            For Heschel, God is an inexhaustible reservoir of love. Our purpose in this world is to reflect that great love in our individual lives, in our own small acts of kindness, as a small brook reflects the immense sky above. Each of us is a container for God’s love and a vehicle for transferring that love from place to place. As goodness passes from person to person, God’s love courses through the human system continuously, like the flow of a river.

So we experience God’s love for us in the most direct and concrete ways: in the touch of our mothers’ hand on our forehead when we have a fever; in our father’s patient help with our homework. God’s love comes to us in the ecstasy of lovemaking with our soulmate; when we’re held tenderly in the arms of someone who cares; when we’re caressed and comforted during a time of grief; when we receive attentive listening and support in our troubles.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro taught this lesson when he wrote the words that appear in our Beth Am Shabbat morning prayerbook:

“We are loved

by an unending love.

We are embraced

by arms that find us

even when

we are hidden from ourselves.

We are touched

by fingers that soothe us

even when

we are too proud for soothing.

We are counseled

by voices that guide us

even when

we are too embittered to hear.

We are loved

by an unending love.

We are supported

by hands that uplift us

even in

the midst of a fall.

We are urged on

by eyes that meet us

even when

we are too weak for meeting.

We are loved

by an unending love.

Embraced, touched, soothed, and counseled . . .

ours are the arms,

the fingers, the voices;

ours are the hands,

the eyes, the smiles;

We are loved

by an unending love.”

 In the end, then, Judaism doesn’t only teach us that we are loved by God. It shows us how to feel that love, and how to make that love real for others every day of our lives.