Lessons In Love
The Maggid of Kozienicz[1] was
a great Hasidic leader. But he wouldn't give the sermon on the holiest of days in
his home town. You see in those days sermons would be long, technical and full
and rebukes and reprimands. But one Yom Kippur the people crowded around him,
and insisted. Eventually they succeeded in persuading him. The Maggid went up
to the bimah, stood there for some time, and appeared to be ready to start
several times, before .... nothing.
And then finally this,
My
friends! I wanted to find sins in the Jews – but I have come to see that you
are all holy, because your source is holy and your intentions are good. It is
really only the exile of this world that has defiled us. So, may the redemption
come and bring us out of exile, and let us say, Amen.[2]
And then he sat down.
I like that story. It's a story about a particular attitude
towards Jewish leadership. You have to love Jews to be a Rabbi. Fortunately I
do, and even if not every one of us keeps every jot and tittle of every legal
command, I think you are all lovely.
It's good to love, it's actually an obligation, a Mitzvah no
less to love; you have to love your fellow - that's the one Akiva considered
the central organising principle of the entire Torah. Then there is the
obligation to love God - that's the first line of the Shema, and the
obligation, the most frequently repeated in the Torah, to love the stranger. A
whole lot of loving.
It's not that I see myself as any particular expert, but I
want to share three lessons in love, three challenges, if you will, to
determine if we are doing it right, in the hope that we'll do it better, and do
it more in the year to come.
Lesson One
Antigonus Ish Socho, on of the most
ancient of Rabbinic teaches said this;
אל תהיו כעבדים המשמשין את הרב, על מנת לקבל פרס, אלא הוו כעבדים המשמשין את
הרב, על מנת שלא לקבל פרס[3].
Don't be like a
servant who serves their master in the expectation of receiving a reward,
rather be like a servant who serves their master with no expectation of reward.
Antigonus is talking about serving God, but it's a great question
to ask regarding all our interactions.
When we are being nice to other people - and we are all nice
to other people at least some of the time - are we doing it in the expectation
of reward? Doing nice in the hope of getting a reward is OK. It's certainly
better than not doing nice things for other people. But the expectation of
reward removes the quality of love from an interaction. If you are putting
something into a relationship calculating the scale of your investment against
the prospect of a dividend you are not behaving like a lover, you're behaving
like a financial analyst. Relationships based on mutual reciprocity, calculated
on the basis of getting out at least what you put in are what Martin Buber
called I-It relationships; not bad, as such, just quotidian, mechanical, dull -
the Hebrew word would be Chol - profane.
But when you catch yourself putting more into a relationship
than you could ever hope to get out - that's love, that's Buber's I-Thou
interaction, that's the fullness of what it means to be a human being, that's
holy.
A first test in love - Are you putting in more than you are
planning on getting out?
And a second.
You do know, don't you, that love isn't an emotion. It's not
something you do, it's something that is revealed by action.
A story.
A colleague, a very successful Rabbi in New York, receives a
call from his long-since retired father, who had gone to live in Israel.
Avi, he said, I’m phoning to tell you my plane's been
delayed and I'm now coming in to New York on Friday.’
‘Oh Abba,’ responds Avi, ‘That’s terrific, you know how much
I love to see you.
I’ll arrange a cab to pick you up at the airport and bring
you home and I’ll see you when I get back from the…
‘Avi’ the father interrupts, ‘I said I’m arriving at the
airport on Friday.’
‘I heard Abba, and you know how much I’d love to come and
pick you up from the airport, but, you see …
‘Avi,’ the voice gets serious, ‘do me a favour, love me a
little less, and pick me up from the airport.’
I've told that story before, I love it a great deal. But partly
I'm telling it this year because Avi's father passed away in Israel several
months ago and at one point, on my Facebook feed, up popped a video of 30 of
his congregants who went to the airport to pick up their teacher as returned to
New York from the Shiva. They obviously knew that story too - a story in which
love is revealed by our willingness to schlep out to the airport; love is
revealed by action.
It's a very Jewish approach. The Shema calls us to God, in
the Shema, it doesn't mean we are commanded to feel all warm and cosy inside.
It means we are commanded to repeat these words night and day, to our children,
to put on Tefilin and affix Mezzuzot.
When we are commanded to love the stranger, in Deuteronomy, we
are commanded to leave parts of our harvest for them, we are commanded to
ensure they have enough to eat and clothes to wear. It's our actions that reveal
the nature of love.
Golde was definitely on to something in Fiddler on the Roof;
Do I love you?
For twenty-five years I've washed your clothes
Cooked your meals, cleaned your house
Given you children, milked the cow
If that's not love
what is?
Aside
from the gender critique - and there is certainly a gender critique - Golde has
a great point - this, all this activity,
reveals love.
Officiating at weddings is great, having the best seat at a
Chuppah is the a wonderful perk of the
job, and I am touched by the articulations of love that come from the newly
engaged. But I would be much more interested in peeking into their future, and
seeing how they are behaving in the moments of normalcy and challenge. How are
their actions in those moments revealing the true nature of their relationship?
Do you ever find yourself using the words of love to free
yourself from actually having to do something loving? I'll admit it, I
do. At least sometimes. It's not really good enough, is it.
Maybe the true test of love is the Martian's test - if a Martian
dropped into our homes and watched our behaviour would they consider us loving.
Or let me do that in more theological language, with our every action revealed
and laid bare before the One who knows all, how loving do we appear before our
creator?
Test one - do we put in more than we expect to get out.
Test two - what do our actions reveal about our ability to
love.
And one more.
It's a little complex. Love, real love, isn't about the
object of love.
The point of love isn't to select with whom we share our
love. The point is to be loving not discriminating in our love.
There's a clue in the array of objects of love commanded in
the Torah; God and then two categories of human; your fellow (it's often translated
as 'your brother') and the stranger. In other words you have to love two types
of person, the one like you and the one different from you; the humans you
naturally are drawn towards and the humans you naturally draw away from.
Admittedly the Christians have made more of play of loving
one's enemies than the Jews, but it's the Hebrew Book of Exodus which instructs,
'if you see the donkey of one who hates you lying down, rescue it with them.'[4]
And it's the Hebrew Book of Proverbs which instructs, 'If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat.'[5]
We've plenty to say about the importance of loving those we don't in fact like
very much.
I'm quite sure that Akiva, in
suggesting that loving your fellow is the central principle of the Torah, must
have meant we have an obligation to love those we dislike. What, after all,
would be the point of a Biblical injunction to love only those we like already?
How can that provide a central principle for anything?
True love isn't to be funnelled
only in limited directions.
A love that is too busy
selecting what, or whom, to love isn't really love at all. At best it's an
exercise in self-gratification, we love that which makes us feel better and we
turn our hearts away from anything or anyone who doesn't. At worst a fenced-in
love could be the cover for a much nastier emotion - hate.
I've long been amused by a provocative insight into the
relationship between a Jew and an antisemite. The antisemite, the saying goes,
hates all Jews, but has nothing against Shumli, who lives next door. On the
other the Jew loves all Jews, but Shmuli...!
Neither Jew nor protagonist emerges from the tale free of taint.
The case I am making is that there is a link between the
pejorative notion of being discriminating - that is to say being an out and out
racist, and the supposedly non-pejorative notion of being discriminating - that
is to say being picky about who or what we love.
We should be working on becoming less discriminating in both
senses of the term.
We should loving a lot more and excluding from the bracket of
those with whom we share our love a lot less.
Be more loving, be less picky.
That's my third test of love.
We need to focus our ability to
love on being loving, not discriminating.
So this is my Neilah call, it's both simple and complicated.
Be a lover, love more, love better.
Put more into your relationships than you expect to get out
from them.
Check and check again that your actions reveal you to be a
lover.
And watch out when you find yourself becoming discriminating
in choices around love.
Goodness, what a wonderful world we could create together.
What a lovely world.
May we all work to create it in this year ahead,
Let us take these last few moments, before the gates close
to commit ourselves to building this version of a new year for us.
And may we all have the merit to enjoy it,
Chatimah Tovah
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