It Starts With LOVE

Parshat Eikev

by Rabbi Avi Billet

"If you listen to God, He will keep his covenant with you. He will love you, He will bless you, etc." (7:13)

And what does He want of you? "To walk in His ways, to love Him, and to serve" Him. (10:12)

After all, "God desired to love your forefathers, and He chose their children" (10:15) to be His nation, to whom He gave His Torah and has asked of them filial devotion.

He models this kind of love through "loving the stranger" (10:18), an expectation He commands and demands of you as well (10:19)

In the Shma we are famously instructed to love God (6:5), and that exhortation is repeated in 11:1, as a condition to receiving rain and good tidings in the land (11:13 – in "V'haya Im Shamoa"), and as a condition to inheriting the land from those who no longer deserve to be its inhabitants (11:22).

One can argue that a theme of the parsha is all about love. Sometimes love is natural, as in God's love for our forefathers and for the stranger; sometimes it is commanded, as in our love for God and our love for strangers.

Coinciding with the command to love God is a command to revere God. The Shma is preceded by "Fulfill the commandments so you may revere your God…" (6:2), and is followed by "Revere and serve your God" (6:13); and in our parsha, the instruction quoted above in 10:12 of what God wants of you actually begins with "to revere Hashem your God".

In Vayikra 19:14,32 and Vaikra 25:17,36,43 we see a number of "You must revere your God" instructions as well.

Essentially, these two themes, loving and fearing God, are counted as two separate commandments. The Sefer HaChinukh lists them as commandments 418 and 432 respectively, while Maimonides has them as positive commandments numbers 3 and 4.

Now that we are a little over a week away from the month of Elul, it is an appropriate time to revisit these commandments to understand how we can best go about fulfilling them.

Sefer HaChinukh suggests a person can't fulfill commandments properly without loving God. If our attitude is such that every deed we undertake as part of our religious experience is fulfilled under the premise that we are doing this for love of God, the act is elevated and becomes more real. This is why the Shma reminds us that these words must be on our hearts all day and every day, and we must review them in our heart and soul.

Revering God, on the other hand, manifests itself in a person who guards oneself from sin on account of fear of punishment and retribution.

Maimonides goes about explaining the two commandments slightly differently. He compares loving God to how a person relates to a person one admires greatly. "When you love someone, you pay attention to the person, you praise the person, and you want others to love your friend as well." You introduce your friend to everyone. Wouldn't it be amazing if we were able to communicate this about God?

The greatest example of this was our forefather Avraham whose existence dripped with his love of God. He is credited with bringing people close to  monotheism through simply being an exemplary character, with a stellar reputation, who just modeled his love for his God on a very consistent basis.

Fearing God is not just about being scared, or fearful of punishment. It is about a higher level of respect, including not taking or using God's name in vain.

These commandments are hard to take on in practical terms. How does one apply love or reverence to a being we can not see, to which we cannot relate in our o-so-humanly needy way?

Through example. We know how to love our parents. We know how to love our children. We must view our love of God in such a way.

God's modeling of love of the stranger is helpful as well. Whether the "stranger" is a convert or someone who has chosen to live amongst the Jewish people, the life choice that causes one to give up everything to cling to the Jewish people is so beloved to God, that His love effuses to that person in a way which is humbling to the rest of us. How could we ever mistreat or stigmatize someone who has, by choice, joined our people, who God Himself loves unconditionally?

And finally, as Rabbi Chanina suggests in the Gemara (BRachot 33b), even reverence of God is something which is not as challenging as we thought. When Moshe introduces it in our parsha, Moshe says, "What does God 'ask' of you?" Not what does God demand or command, but what does God ask.

One can suggest that the reverence of God begins as a choice we make – because the command is more frightening and stifling. But if we build up our love of God, through the model of our relatives and the model of the stranger, hopefully we will come to revere God in the way the Torah otherwise instructs.

It starts with love. The rest will naturally flow from that source.