Introduction
“וְעַתָּה יִשְׂרָאֵל מָה ה’ אֱלֹקֶיךָ שֹׁאֵל מֵעִמָּךְ כִּי אִם לְיִרְאָה אֶת ה’ אֱלֹקֶיךָ… וּלְאַהֲבָה אֹתוֹ… וְלִשְׁמֹר אֶת מִצְוֹת ה’… לְטוֹב לָךְ” “And now, Israel, what does the L-rd your G-d ask of you but to fear the L-rd your G-d… to love Him… and to safeguard His commandments… for your good.” (Deuteronomy 10:12-13)
Moshe hands his people three things in one breath, in the closing address of his life. This booklet takes up the second: love.
There’s an immediate problem worth naming before anything else. Can love be commanded at all? Doesn’t commanding a feeling just dress obedience up in love’s clothing — a performance rather than the real thing?
The tension to sit with: Avraham is the model of boundless love — kindness extended to total strangers, arguing with G-d Himself on behalf of the people of Sodom. And he’s also the one asked to bind the son he loves most on an altar. Is that a contradiction sitting at the heart of our first patriarch’s story — or is it the point?
Six Approaches to Ahavah
Each of these gets something real. None of them, on its own, is the whole picture.
1. Rambam, Laws of Repentance 10:2-3 — Love Through Knowledge The Rambam grounds love of G-d in daas, knowledge: the more clearly a person perceives G-d through the intricacy and grandeur of creation, the more the love intensifies — to the point of becoming, in his words, like a lovesick person who cannot stop thinking of the beloved.
What this gets right: love here isn’t manufactured out of nowhere. It’s a genuine response to something real that’s been perceived clearly — you don’t have to fake it, you have to actually look.
Where it falls short: it stays fairly cerebral. Contemplating G-d’s greatness in nature can just as easily produce awe as love — what specifically tips the scale toward love rather than reverence, and not everyone who studies deeply ends up feeling lovesick.
Discuss: Is love that begins in the mind still love once it reaches the heart? What actually bridges the two?
2. Ramban and Sforno on Deuteronomy 6:5 — Loving with Both Inclinations “With all your heart” is read here as with both inclinations — the good and the evil alike. Even the yetzer hara, the drive toward self-interest and appetite, is meant to be recruited into loving G-d’s service.
What this gets right: love isn’t sanitized here. It doesn’t ask you to amputate half of who you are; it recruits the whole person, appetite included, which means love of G-d doesn’t have to compete with a person’s drive and energy — it can run on it.
Where it falls short: it explains the mechanism — redirect the drive — without ever saying what love, positively, actually consists of once it’s redirected. Redirection is a technique, not a definition.
Discuss: What would it concretely look like to love G-d with your evil inclination, and not just in spite of it?
3. Rav Soloveitchik — Love as Covenantal Community Love here is cast as shared destiny — a bond forged by a common fate and a common mission, the bond of a brit goral, a covenant of shared circumstance and purpose.
What this gets right: love has a communal, historical dimension that private feeling alone can’t capture. You’re not just loving G-d alone in a room; you’re bound into a people with a shared story that predates you and will outlast you.
Where it falls short: it risks making love purely functional — a byproduct of circumstance rather than something personal, closer to solidarity than to intimacy.
Discuss: Can you love someone only because you’re “in it together” with them, or does that cheapen the word?
4. Song of Songs, Read on Passover — Love as Courtship The Exodus itself is read, liturgically, as a courtship — G-d and Israel cast as lover and beloved, in the most sensual poetry in the entire Tanach.
What this gets right: it captures the passion and intensity love ought to have. This isn’t dry loyalty; it’s romance, longing, desire — the tradition refuses to let love of G-d be a merely dutiful thing.
Where it falls short: romantic, erotic imagery risks blurring love with raw appetite if it isn’t anchored to something beyond sensation, and can leave the relationship feeling more like infatuation than commitment.
Discuss: Why does the tradition reach for the most sensual poetry in Scripture to describe the most spiritual relationship? What’s the risk in that choice, and what’s the payoff?
5. Ramchal, Mesillas Yesharim (Path of the Just) — Love Beyond the Letter of the Law Here love shows up as joyful exertion — doing more than what’s strictly required, not out of obligation but because love naturally overflows the minimum.
What this gets right: it gives love a visible, behavioral signature. You can actually see it in what a person does, which means love stops being a private, unverifiable claim and becomes something demonstrated.
Where it falls short: it tells you what love produces, not what love actually is — a person could go through the motions of exceeding the letter of the law for reasons that have nothing to do with love at all.
Discuss: Can you practice the outward behavior of love long enough that it becomes the real thing?
6. Tanya — Love as Self-Negation Love here is described as bittul, self-negation before the Divine light — a total dissolving of the separate self in the presence of G-d’s radiance.
What this gets right: it captures love’s totality. Nothing is held back, no corner of the self is left untouched — this is love with no ceiling on it.
Where it falls short: pushed to its extreme, self-negation threatens to erase the very self that was supposed to be doing the loving. Can a relationship exist with only one party left standing, and is that still love or something else entirely?
Discuss: Is total self-negation the actual goal of love, or is it love’s danger?
A More Holistic Approach: Rav Hirsch
Seventh — Hirsch (Horeb, ch. 9, para 49)
“To love means to feel one’s own being only through and in the being of another… to love G-d and to love His Torah is the same thing.”
Hirsch doesn’t overturn the six approaches above so much as gather what’s true in each of them into one coherent, resonant picture. Love isn’t pure intellect, as the Rambam’s contemplative approach risks becoming on its own. It isn’t total self-erasure, as an unchecked reading of the Tanya risks becoming. It isn’t just visible behavior, as the Ramchal’s formulation, taken alone, might suggest. It’s a felt reorientation of one’s own existence — anchored concretely in Torah and mitzvos rather than left to float as an unmoored sentiment. The self isn’t erased in this account. It’s re-centered: still fully present, but no longer located in itself alone.
This also connects backward to the booklet on Yirah (Awe), where Hirsch’s fuller path is laid out. His own reading of the accentuation on our opening verse suggests that fear, walking in G-d’s ways, and love aren’t three parallel, independent demands — they’re a sequence. Fear is where the relationship begins: G-d encountered as Judge and Master, His Word learned and obeyed whether or not it happens to feel good that day. But lived honestly, that discipline stops feeling foreign. A person living inside the Torah’s structure starts to notice how precisely it matches something already true underneath — the neshama, the deepest layer of the self — and that recognition brings an elation the discipline alone never promised. That’s the hinge: yirah, followed faithfully, opens into ahavah. G-d is no longer related to only as Judge and Master but as covenantal partner, friend, groom — language the tradition reaches for again and again, most explicitly in Shir HaShirim itself. Love, on this account, was never meant to stand alone, and it was never meant to be reached by skipping the discipline that precedes it.
Closing
Avraham: this is where the tension from our opening question resolves — or at least comes into sharper focus. The booklet on Yirah (Awe) reads the Akeidah from Yitzchak’s side: total submission, the self bound and negated under G-d’s authority, no room left for his own will. That’s a real reading, and it’s yirah through and through. But the same event looks different from Avraham’s side, and the difference matters. G-d did not command Avraham the way a Master commands a subject, demanding the neutralizing of his will. G-d requested — Chazal’s own language leans this way, and the distinction isn’t small — that Avraham give his son, his most precious possession, as the ultimate expression of love: placing what you treasure most directly into the hands of the one you love, so that the beloved might have it. Read this way, the Akeidah isn’t Avraham submitting to authority at all. It’s Avraham experiencing his own love most fully by making G-d’s desire, whatever it was, more real to him than his own. That’s love as active, risk-taking, other-directed kindness carried to its furthest point — the same tent open on all four sides, the same argument mounted for strangers he’d never see again, now extended to the one person he could least afford to give away. Not a contradiction inside Avraham’s story after all, but its clearest expression — though there’s still real room to sit with how far that reading can be pushed.
Passover: the Exodus as the paradigm love story underneath everything that follows — the courtship that Sinai and the giving of the Torah later formalize into covenant.
The Elemental Epilogue: One Root, Three Branches
“Jealousy, desire, and honor-seeking remove a person from the world” (Rabbi Elazar HaKappar, Ethics of the Fathers 4:21). Three drives, three founding stories in Genesis, each rooted in a different craving, corresponding to the “BIG 3” cardinal sins, described by an “element” – – – >
The following represents foundational Torah concepts that are worth discussion and contemplation:
| Drive | Craving | Element | Root Story | Cardinal Sin | Direct Antidote | Patriarch | Festival |
| Desire (Taavah) | to experience | Water | Adam & Eve, Tree of Knowledge | Immorality | Love | Abraham | Passover |
| Jealousy (Kinah) | to have/control | Fire | Cain & Abel | Idolatry, enacted through murder* | Awe | Isaac | Shavuot |
| Honor-seeking (Kavod) | to be | Air | Tower of Babel | Murder, through devalued worth* | Neshama (sustained by Trust) | Jacob | Sukkot |
*Worth leaving open rather than resolving — put it to the room. Here, Cain’s root sin reads as idolatry: certain his own offering deserved acceptance, he refuses G-d’s verdict and installs his own vision of how worship, how reality itself, ought to run. Hevel isn’t killed for being lesser; he’s killed because he stands in the way of Cain’s order prevailing. Murder is the instrument, not the essence. Babel’s root sin reads as murder itself: a hierarchy built around a monument, a name, a collective ideal, where a person’s worth is measured against that ideal and found replaceable. At the Tower, a worker’s death drew no reaction; a fallen brick was mourned (Pirkei D’Rabbi Eliezer, ch. 24). The Torah’s answer to both: human worth is not measured against any ideal, private or collective — it is near-infinite on its own terms, because of the Divine spark, the neshama, inherent in every person. Feedback on this classification, or a better one, is welcome: balpert@partnersdetroit.org.
Love and awe are direct inversions of their drives — the same capacity for feeling or for control, simply redirected toward G-d instead of the self. Kavod works differently, and its arrogant, prideful form is really a wound rather than just a vice to suppress: it’s the soul’s own drive to be real, chasing proof of its own existence from the outside — accolades, status, admiration — because it doesn’t yet know that its existence was never actually in question. The healing here isn’t a behavior to adopt, it’s a fact to recognize: a person’s worth is not built, earned, or granted by anyone. It is intrinsic and effectively infinite, already fully present, because the neshama is a literal piece of G-d (Tanya, ch. 2). That recognition — intrinsic worth in place of accolade-chasing — is Kavod’s true antidote.
Here is why that matters for the whole series, not just for Kavod on its own. Ahavah and Yirah are real, but as felt experiences they aren’t always available: G-d doesn’t always feel close, and reverence doesn’t always come with a felt sense of presence to sustain it. Emunah is what lets a person keep loving and keep revering precisely inside those gaps — it is Ahavah and Yirah’s own essence, carried forward as commitment even when the feeling itself has gone quiet. And that kind of endurance is only possible for a self that isn’t relying on the relationship to prove its own worth in real time, which is exactly what a neshama-secured sense of Kavod provides. Trust holds specifically because the person trusting already knows, independent of any given moment’s evidence, that they are real. Suffering is the most extreme test of this, and on one classical reading, also its deepest confirmation: when suffering strips away the entire machinery of the status-seeking self, what’s exposed underneath is the neshama itself, closer to its Source than an ordinary day allows. Emunah, in short, is love and awe endured on the strength of a neshama that doesn’t need G-d’s closeness to confirm its own being — which is also what finally makes trust durable rather than provisional.
A fuller treatment of what suffering reveals about the soul — and its limits — appears in the appendix to the booklet on Emunah (Trust).
