Mitzvah 3; To Love HaShem

The third mitzvah that we discussed is the mitzvah To Love HaShem. Just the name itself stamps this mitzvah with a sense of great significance. And this is an accurate assessment. Before discussing the mitzvah of loving HaShem I believe that I would be remiss if I did not dedicate more attention to the nature of these first three mitzvos as well as a few others.

We can classify all the mitzvos into two categories. One category is the means mitzvos and the other category is the direct mitzvos. I will explain the distinction as follows.

Ramchal, a great teacher of Jewish mysticism and author of many classical Jewish works, teaches us “Our Sages have instructed us that Man was created for the sole purpose of reveling in the Eternal (HaShem) and delighting in the splendor of the Divine Presence as this is the ultimate joy and greatest of all pleasures….. the path that helps us reach our desired objective is this world … The means that lead Man to this goal are the mitzvos that the Eternal commanded us to observe, and the place for doing the mitzvos is in this world alone… If you delve further into this matter you will realize that attaching to the Eternal alone is absolute perfection … For a person to be entitled to this good, it is only appropriate that he first labor and make the effort to acquire it. This means that he must try to attach to HaShem through deeds that will lead to this goal. These deeds are the mitzvos.”

Behold, Ramchal is teaching us that the mitzvos are actually a means by which we can attach ourselves to HaShem. (This is not to imply that there is no intrinsic value in the mitzvah itself but rather that the intrinsic value of the mitzvah is what attaches us to HaShem.) These mitzvos serve as the means to attach us to HaShem. This understanding works for all the mitzvos in the first category, the means mitzvos. However, the direct mitzvos are quite different.

The direct mitzvos are those mitzvos that directly attach us to HaShem; these mitzvos are the actual attachment. Let us take for example the first mitzvah To Know HaShem. Knowing HaShem is in itself a level of attachment to HaShem. The same is true with recognizing the Oneness of HaShem. The greater Man accomplishes this mitzvah the greater he becomes one with HaShem – clearly attachment itself. Our third mitzvah, To Love HaShem is also a direct mitzvah. The single most articulate manner of expressing attachment is love.

Having placed our third mitzvah in its context let us examine it.

As a child growing up I was always troubled with this mitzvah. How can HaShem expect me to love Him? I do not see Him. I do not touch Him. How can I relate to Him with an emotion of love when my entire exposure to Him is only on the intellectual level? Even a passionate physicist will not love gravity or any other law of nature. You might argue that our physicist friend does love physics, so you see that one could love on an intellectual level. If you would make that argument, I would respond that the physicist does not love physics like a mother loves her child or like a man loves his wife, he loves physics like he loves fish. When one loves fish, this means that he loves to eat fish; he has no special attachment to the fish. The physicist loves to study physics, he is not attached to physics; it is only a fascination in which he indulges. So can we come to love HaShem?

The answer is simple but requires much thought and much contemplation. In fact, the only reason this question bothered me as a teenager was because I never contemplated something that I already knew. HaShem is not an idea. HaShem is not some theory by which we can explain creation. HaShem is a very real Being that Exists. HaShem interacts with me, He does for me, He cares for me, He protects me, He maintains my physical and emotional well-being (to the extent that I do not mess things up myself). How can I not love Him? The only way for me not to love HaShem is to either deny His existence or to be thoughtless. Both explanations are an indictment which point to a lack of thoughtfulness and contemplation.

Does a blind child love her mother any less due to her disability? How about if the child would be blind and deaf? Of course the child would be limited in her ability to communicate with her mother but to the extent that she recognizes her mother and recognizes the incredible love that her mother has for her, she loves her mother. As the child grows older and becomes more sophisticated her love for mother will grow exponentially. This happens because as she realizes how helpless she is without her mother she realizes how much she needs her mother.

The path that leads us to loving HaShem requires us to devote our attention of the first two mitzvos. As our knowledge of HaShem increases and as our awareness of His Unity increases the natural result will be heart full of love that all the water in the world cannot extinguish.