I welcome
feedback on my drashes, whether you heard them in person, read them here, or
heard them on my podcast site. Even if
you disagreed with something I said.
Perhaps especially if you disagreed with something I said! If you disagreed, that means that I provoked
you to think about the subject. If you
took that disagreement and used it as the basis of a respectful dispute, then
you took the opportunity to think more deeply about it.
Last Shabbat, I gave a drash about
unconditional love. I said the Torah
teaches that God’s love for Israel is not unconditional. But we already knew this, If you follow the narrative flow of the Torah,
you know that Israel’s behaviour often provokes God’s anger. On at least one occasion, to the point where
He suggests to Moses that the two find a new people to bless with the covenant.
If God does not love us
unconditionally – assuming that you accept the premise – how can we expect
unconditional love from one another? A
child expects unconditional love from her mother, and it is really the calling
of a mother – or of a father for that matter – to love their child
unconditionally. But when we grow up, we
must not expect unconditional love. Not
from our spouse or partner. Not from our
friends. Not from our extended
families. We cannot expect to take
advantage of, abuse, or neglect those close to us over time, and still expect
their love. Oh, we should be forgiving towards
one another. We should be willing to
tolerate one another’s imperfections, one another’s foibles. But to say that one should love another endlessly,
without regard for how that someone treats you in return, is quite
unreasonable. And in last week’s Torah
portion, there was a strong message that we should consider love to be
conditional. That’s how an adult
approaches love.
A correspondent, a friend back in
Colorado, challenged me by asking if perhaps God’s love is not
conditional, but His favour is.
This friend, who is a very close and treasured friend, is a follower of
Jesus of Nazareth. And of course, in my
drash I juxtaposed the very common – some would say essential – Christian view
of God’s love as being unconditional, with the Torah’s teaching – at least as I
saw in last week’s parashah – that perhaps God’s love is not quite so
unconditional. And perhaps in my
presentation last week, I made it sound like something of a polemic against Christian
teaching. So my friend’s reaction made
me go back over my words and realize that they did sound something like
a polemic.
But to respond to my friend’s
feedback. We all know that the English
word ‘love’ has many different meanings.
Likewise the Hebrew אהב, (ahav)
the word most often translated ‘love.’
In the first two verses of Ekev, two different words are
used. In the first case, in Deuteronomy
7.12, the noun translated ‘love’ is חסד, (chesed) which more often translates ‘compassion’ or ‘unbridled
mercy.’ In the next verse, 7,13, the
verb translated ‘love’ is from the root אהב. But I think both are
talking About the same thing, if in a different part of speech. Neither is talking about the ‘love’ that is
an emotional response to another person.
Both are talking about something that might perhaps better be translated,
as my friend suggested, ‘favour.’ When
we favour someone, then we desire to be in a deep relationship with them. We want to bless them in any way that we can
reasonably do so. But we can have love,
meaning regard or concern, ro someone even when they have done nother to
deserve it…or perhaps have even behaved in a way that would make it difficult
to love them in this way. In that sense,
there is not real disagreement between my friend and me. We both understand that there are different
kinds of ‘love,’ and that not all of them are necessarily conditional. Thanks, Chad!
The second piece of feedback
came from someone who was present at Friday evening minyan at the Southport
Community Centre where we celebrated Shabbat together. He pointed out that a dog’s love for its human
companion is unconditional. And that’s
why so many people put up with the hassle of having a dog: to get that
unconditional love.
And he was absolutely
correct. Surely, this unconditional love
and loyalty that a dog gives, is the main appeal of having a dog. There’s got to be some reward after walking the
thing and picking up its poo!
Although I have not owned a
dog in a long time, I am a confirmed dog lover. If you’ve ever had me over to your home and
saw how I reacted to your dog, you know this. And I agree that a dog’s love for its human
companion is one of the truest, purest, and unconditional-ist loves around. But to compare a dog’s love to, say, that of a
spouse, is a bad comparison. A love
between two human beings, especially two adult human beings, is far more
complex than the love of a dog for its human. To think that a human companion should love us
as unreservedly as a dog is unreasonable. And to forsake a human companion in favour of
a canine companion because of the difference in the way a human loves, is
ludicrous. And I might add, that the
friend who pointed out to me the un-conditionality of a dog’s love made it
clear that he was not suggesting a dog’s love as a substitute for a human’s
love. Rather, he was pointing out the
appeal of dog ownership. That it comes
with the ‘fringe benefit’ of that unconditional love. Which is something that, even though we should
not expect it of one another, still tugs at the heartstrings.
So no matter how strong the
appeal of unconditional love might be, we should not expect it of one another. What we should expect of those whom we
love and who love us, is a degree of forbearance. We can and should expect to be cut some slack
at times by those who know our good and not-so-good moments. That’s something far different from
unconditional love.
As always, thank you so much
for your feedback and for caring enough to dialogue with me! Shabbat shalom!
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