Parashat Chayai Sarah

I was looking for love in all the wrong places,
Looking for love in too many faces,
Searching your eyes, looking for traces
Of what.. I’m dreaming of… Johnny Lee

Of all the commandments in the Torah, the love of our creator is arguably the most abstract.
“V’ahavta et Ad-nai Elokecha, …. And you shall Love Ad-nai, your G-d……” (Deut. 6:5).
These words, recited daily as part of the Shma, are certainly familiar to most of us. Unfortunately, the words are often glossed over, without much thought to their connotation.
How can we be commanded to love, to have a certain emotion? And, further more, how can we love something that we cannot see, hear, or touch? These questions have been explored for millennia, and still deserve our intellectual attention.
Tradition teaches us that human loving relationships are the paradigm for learning to conceive of Divine love. As we will soon see, it is possible that this attribute takes some time to develop.

The Torah, in its first chapter, tells us that human life was created with male and female joined as one:
“And thus El-him created man in His form. In the form of El-him, He created him, male and female, He created them.” (Gen. 1:27)
Adam and Eve did not need the emotion of love, as they had been formed together.

The Zohar explains:
When G-d creates the human soul, He creates the male and female as one. But as the soul descends into this world, it divides into two – male and female. The complete soul is the combination of male and female. This is why the masculine and feminine are so attracted to one another. Zohar Lech Lecha 204
The very act of conception was one of realizing their intrinsic connection, “And Adam knew Chava, his wife…”
The Torah mentions love for the first time in G-d’s instruction to Avraham, which we read in last week’s sidra (see my previous post, This is Only A Test):
“Please take your son, your only one, who you love—Yitzchak— and go to the land of Moriah…..” (Gen. 22:2)

Avraham’s love for his son was the result of anguish from the childless decades he and Sarah had spent, and wanting to experience fulfillment of G-d’s promise of descendants to inherit their legacy. This love was for something, for someone, that was literally a part of them.
In our parasha, Chayai Sarah, Avraham wishes to find a wife for his beloved son and he sends his emissary far away, to their ancestral homeland, to bring back a suitable mate, the young Rivka.

The Torah describes their first meeting as attraction ( Rivka’s reaction, when seeing Yitzchak , Vatipol mayal hagamal, can be translated , “She fell off of her camel……”!), but love did not come until later. In fact, Rivka, upon finding out she had just laid eyes on Yitzchak, responding by veiling herself, making sure she presented herself modestly.
“He married Rivka, and she became his wife, and he loved her…” (Gen. 24:67).

Rav Hirsch wrote that many people look for love in the wrong places:
” Most…marriages are made on the basis of  what they call ‘love’. But we need only glance at novelistic depictions taken from life, and we immediately see the vast gulf….between the ‘love’ of the partners before marriage, and what happens afterward; how dull and empty everything seems after marriage, how different from what the two partners had imagined beforehand. This sort of love is blind, each step into the future brings new disillusionment.
Not so is Jewish marriage, of which it says, ‘He married Rivka, and she became his wife, and he loved her…’. Here the wedding is not the culmination, but the beginning of true love.

It was only after their marriage that the love of Rivka and Itzchak was able to really take hold, and develop, and mature, as they truly knew each other. At that point their souls, separated after formation, could reunite.

So too with our relationship with our creator. Our love of G-d must come from a deliberate, modest relationship. We can get to ‘know” G-d by studying the world G-d created, and by studying our sacred texts.
Maimonides in his Sefer Hamitzvot writes,“Behold, we have made clear to you that through study and contemplation you will attain knowledge, and you will then attain the delight and enjoyment and the love will necessarily follow.”

Like Adam and Eve, we were once joined together with our creator. The cold exile has frosted over our relationship, and set us adrift. Through this slow, deliberate process of acquiring sacred knowledge, we can get to “know” G-d, and a powerful, true, love is bound to follow…

…if we can only look in the right places.

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Greg

“But the highest of all loves is the love of G-d, which is love in its fullest maturing. This love is not intended for derivative ends; when it fills the human heart, this itself spells man’s greatest happiness.”
Rav Kook, Midot Harayah (The Moral Principles)