I remember a bedtime ritual I tried to adopt when our son Jacob was very young.
It was a short-lived bedtime ritual.
I would list all the people who loved him, in ever widening circles --
Mommy loves you, and Daddy loves you, and Grandma and Grandpa love you, and your friends love you…
-- on and on, everyone I could think of…
and then, when he seemed just about to drift off to sleep, I would whisper -- “and God loves you.”
It was a short-lived bedtime ritual because I felt a vague uneasiness that if Jacob had opened his eyes and asked me, I wouldn’t honestly have been able say what I meant by “God loves you.”
So I stopped saying it.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve always avoided the whole “God loves you” thing.
It always sounded so... Christian.
No one ever mentioned it in my Hebrew School.
Certainly it was not something my parents ever whispered to me as I fell asleep.
It was just not a part of my experience, and I know I am not the only Jewish post-World War II baby boomer who would say this.
But how odd and ironic that is -- because God’s love is actually right at the heart of our tradition. Twice daily, the recitation of the shema is bracketed by a prayer invoking God’s love for us and an instruction that we should love God. Love is supposedly at the heart of our covenantal relationship with the Mystery that we call Adonai.
Is it possible that we experience this love without even knowing it?
Is it possible that we can understand this love without getting hung up on the God language?
It’s not something we usually talk about… which is why I want to talk about it!
There are two versions of the blessing before the shema, depending on what time of day prayers are being recited, but the essence is the same: In the blessing before the shema, we attribute to God the traits of compassion and lovingkindness, and express wonder and gratitude for God’s abundant, everlasting love.
One version of the blessing begins: ahava raba ahavtanu Adonai Eloheinu -- “a great love you loved us Adonai our God.”
It’s an oddly constructed phrase, not easily translated into English. A great love you loved us. (The other version begins with ahavat olam -- infinite, or forever love.)
Some of you may recall that sometimes -- instead of reciting this blessing before the shema -- I have suggested that we close our eyes and “feel or know or visualize or imagine” that there is so much love surrounding us, coming at us from all directions. I’d like to tell you the story behind that suggestion.
About sixteen years ago, on a Friday morning, I had a pain in my lower abdomen that seemed suspiciously like appendicitis. Scans in the emergency room showed not appendicitis, but a mass on one ovary. I then spent one very long weekend in the hospital waiting for surgery on Monday morning.
I remember two things in particular about that weekend. One was that I talked to my mother on the phone a lot, every day, and there was no tension or conflict. Somehow the urgency of the moment just blew us out of our habitual pattern of relating, which was a great gift.
The other thing I remember was that I had a dream very early that Monday morning before surgery. I wrote it down soon afterwards. Here is the dream:
Class is starting, a class in which I am a stranger, unprepared.
Students noisily arranging tables and chairs.
There is no room for me.
The teacher is impatient.
Someone pushes my books to the floor, vaguely threatening.
I am alone. Friendless. Panicked.
I woke up in the hospital room sobbing. But then, rising up through the misery and fear, I heard myself talking back to the dream: NO! That is NOT my experience. That is NOT my reality. I am NOT alone.
And suddenly I felt waves of love rolling in -- I have no other way to describe it -- waves of love from far away, from all directions, washing over me and rippling back out in all directions. I laughed out loud with joy, and fell asleep again.
The mass on my ovary, although enormous, was found to be benign, and I gradually settled back into my life. But that early-morning experience of ahava raba -- a great love -- stayed with me.
All of our prayers are expressions of wow, thanks, or please. This ahava raba prayer seems to be primarily thanks and please. So what is the “please”? What is the yearning that is being expressed?
After attributing abounding love and compassion to God, you might imagine that we would then pray for safety for our loved ones, or for worldly success and comfort. But no. After attributing abounding love and compassion to God, we pray for knowledge and understanding.
How Jewish is that? This prayer assumes that God’s love manifests as our capacity to understand, to discern, to listen, to learn, and to teach our tradition.
So we express gratitude and longing for God’s love -- to power our search for truth and understanding. And then we recite the shema, proclaiming the ultimate Oneness of the mystery we call Adonai. And then we recite the v’ahavta.
Many of you are familiar with the famous words of the v’ahavta. The text is from Torah. The words are an instruction, not a prayer.
It begins: V’ahavta et Adonai elohecha, b-chol l’vavcha, uv’chol nafshecha, uv’chol me’odecha. Love Adonai your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with everything you’ve got.
Of course the question that has been asked since ancient times is:
What does it mean to be commanded to love God? Is this a prescription of what we are supposed to do, or a description of a state of consciousness towards which we are aiming? Do we choose to translate v’ahavta as “you shall love” as in “you must do this”? Or do we translate it as “you will love” as in “this is what you are aiming for”?
Either way, it’s the challenge of a lifetime.
And it may be that both are true.
Let’s first hear it as a command, which leads immediately to the question:
How are we to fulfill this command? How are we to love God?
The traditional answer: We are to love God by actively loving all people, because all people are created in the image of God / b’tselem Elohim. We are each manifestations of God, and so by loving people we are fulfilling the mitzvah of loving God.
Now let’s try hearing it as a description of a level of consciousness to be attained through spiritual practice. Listen to this medieval teaching:
We can love the holy blessed One only through knowledge....
Therefore we should focus on comprehending and seeing clearly the One who created us….
[How do we do this?] When we contemplate the great things, and recognize all of creation -- from angels to planets, from humans to other creatures --
when we see the wisdom of the holy blessed One in all that has been formed and created, we grow in our love for God, and our soul thirsts and our body yearns to love God. And we are awed and afraid in our insignificance in comparison with any one of the great holy things created by the holy blessed One….
According to this teaching, contemplation of the incredible wonders and marvels of existence will lead to an awareness of the mysterious power behind it all, and a deep yearning to serve that Mystery with all our heart and with all our soul and with everything we’ve got.
This, say our mystics, is what v’ahavta is pointing us towards.
So whatever we do to fulfill the mitzvah of v’ahavta circles us back around to ahava raba, to a great love.
Lately I’ve been playing with visualizing this love at the heart of our tradition as a sort of continuous flow or loop (infinity sign). The love we receive (the ahava raba) emerges from and returns to the Unity that is all of existence, that which some of us call Adonai or God or haShem. Love comes to us out of that ultimate source of all existence, and we are called to return that love back to Adonai through contemplating and actively loving all of creation.
And none of this necessitates belief in a God “up there.” We can “feel or know or visualize or imagine” that there is so much love surrounding us, coming at us from all directions, flowing through that mysterious divine spark that is our essence, flowing back out into the world around us.
I have an easier time saying “God loves you” than I did 25 years ago. I don’t care so much now that I don’t really know what it means.
May we all be blessed to experience God’s love in our lives in the coming year.