Unconditional love

Distinguishing between the love of God and the love of country

By HAIM O. RECHNITZER
Pro-Israel students on US campus 521 (photo credit: Courtesy JAFI)
Pro-Israel students on US campus 521
(photo credit: Courtesy JAFI)
Israeli students, even those who attend secular public schools, are fortunate to have Bible classes throughout their education as part of their core curriculum. However, young students often find these lessons a challenge to their secular views on such issues as gender equality, vengeance, or science. It can also bewilder their imagination. I still recall my teacher’s attempts to explain the precise vocation of that righteous woman Rahab, the harlot, or what had happened between Amnon and his sister Tamar.
Even more puzzling was our teacher’s attempt to explain to us seventh-graders this verse from the Torah portion Va’etchanan, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). Little did I know that this very verse was such a pivotal idea for our Jewish philosophers from Maimonides to Yeshayahu Leibowitz in making the distinction between the worship of God “for its own sake” (lishma) or “not for its own sake.” That is to fulfill God’s Torah in order to avoid punishments and gain rewards, as against following the commandments as being good in and of itself.
One can, as our Bible teacher did, explain that Israel is commanded to “unconditionally” love God. However, much is lost in translation; the Hebrew idiom for “unconditional love” is more graphic and ambiguous – ahava she’eina teluya bedavar literarily translates as “love that does not hang/depend on things (dvarim).”
As I tried to grasp the idea of an unconditional love of God, one image came back to me again and again, accompanied by an eerie feeling and a slight sense of nausea – the painting “Le chateau des Pyrenees” by René Magritte; a castle built on top of an egg-shaped rock, hanging in midair. My inability to jump from the concrete literal meaning of the words “love that does not hang/depend on things” to the realm of metaphors proved itself rooted in the peculiar character of the Hebrew language and its theological and mystical layers.
The commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart is preceded by the Decalogue and followed by the commandment to “take to heart these instructions [things] with which I charge you this day. Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up.” Both, the Ten Commandments (dibrot) and the commandment “to take to the heart these instructions… (dvarim)” use the root davar to denote “commandments” or “sayings” and “instructions.” However, davar also means a concrete thing, an object. Thus, Hebrew grants us a unique combination of abstract language and the concrete world, between saying something and creating something.
Following the Hebrew word davar, we understand the commandment to Love thy Lord your God as love that is not dependent upon “things” (dvarim), upon the commandments, or upon God’s promises to us or our forefathers.
Preparing the Children of Israel to enter the Promised Land, Moses recalls the story of Sinai and recaps many other commandments, warning them to “do what is right and good in the sight of the Lord, that it may go well with you and that you may be able to possess the good land that the Lord your God promised on oath to your fathers” (Deut. 6:18). Standing before the hills of the Land of Israel, Moses had to study the sacred and hard lesson of unconditional love himself. He pleaded before God and said, “Let me, I pray, cross over and see the good land on the other side of the Jordan, that good hill country, and the Lebanon.”
He wanted to “see” all aspects of devarim; the realization of ‘spoken words’ into objects, thoughts, ideals and practices, only to hear God’s reply (Deut. 3:25), “Enough! Never speak to me of this matter again! (Deut. 3:26). If we are to follow our greatest teacher’s path today, living in times when we are fortunate to have an independent State of Israel and able to come and go freely across its borders, we should not lose sight of the intertwined meanings of “things” (dvarim), “sayings” (dibur), and the sublime beyond.
As we see the Land of Israel in all its beauty and deficiencies, we must not be confused between “things” and the divine. We must not forget that the Land is yet to be fully realized and that our love for the Land must depend on something higher than things or ideologies. It is hanging like Magritte’s “Chateau” on unconditional love − not to the Land, but to Him who spoke, and at whose word the world came into being. 
Rabbi Haim O. Rechnitzer is Associate Professor of Modern Jewish Thought at the Hebrew Union College-JIR. His recent book, “Prophecy and the Perfect Political Order: The Political Theology of Leo Strauss” has been published by The Bialik Institute