I am a long-time fan of Paul Simon, but every time I try to impose some ethnic pride on his decades-long musical accomplishments by reminding myself or others that he is Jewish, my older daughter Sarah begins to list for me all the Christian imagery that appears in his music. Early on he set part of the Sermon on the Mount to music. His works have included imagery like crosses in ballparks and Jews traveling through the Blood of Christ Mountains of New Mexico. And of course, he famously assured Mrs. Robinson that Jesus loved her more than she will know; which, oddly enough, is sort of the subject of this sermon.
But I raise Paul Simon here not to discuss his personal theology but to relate an observation I once heard him make about the difficulties of song writing. Write a song too much from one direction, he said, and you risk making it sentimental. Write it too much from a different direction and it risks being what he calls too “thinky.” If you have to make a mistake in one direction or another, he advises, better to make the song sentimental than thinky.
Well, I can tell you from personal experience that what is true of song writing is also true of sermon writing. But my own temptation is to err on the side of thinky. In fact, I gave a sermon on this day last year about what I considered the dangers of sermons that appeal to – and perhaps manipulate – congregants' emotions.
All of which serves as a warning to you that you are about to listen to a thinky sermon. I know that after three hours of praying, a lot of you are tired and low-blood sugared and in no mood to think. Consider it then a part of the affliction of the soul you are supposed to suffer on this day of atonement. And in my own feeble defense for what I am about to inflict upon you, the subject I am going to ask you to think about is itself a sentiment. I am going to ask you to think about love.
Our Torah, of course, is the source of two of religion's most profound statements about love. They come in the form of commandments. Leviticus 19 commands us וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ - And you will love your neighbor as yourself. And then later in Deuteronomy 6, perhaps even more famously, וְאָהַבְתָּ אֵת יְי אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּכָל־לְבָבְךָ וּבְכָל־נַפְשְׁךָ וּבְכָל־מְאֹדֶךָ - And you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all you soul and with all your might. Nevertheless, it is Christianity, not Judaism, that has come down to modern culture as the religion of love. Indeed, for many Christians, it is their notion of God’s love - as opposed to His strict justice - that forms the great divide between their faith and the one from which it sprang. My goal in this sermon is not to, in any way, challenge Christianity’s understanding of its doctrines or its teachings. It is, rather, to place before you some of the differences between how Judaism and Christianity understand the meaning of the word love, and how Judaism’s meaning informs its teachings. My exploration of this subject has proved a revelation to me - an experience that has deepened my faith. For this reason, I am going to risk preaching a thinky sermon to try and share some of that experience with you.
The Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI began his reign by publishing a scholarly Encyclical Letter entitled Deus Caritas Est - God is Love. The title, I have learned, comes from the First Letter of John: “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God abides in him.” Christian scholars have, down through the ages, created a rich and lively debate about the meaning, the significance and the limits of love, both human and divine. I have not the expertise nor, frankly, the desire to plunge into this debate. But the idea that God is love is very powerful and very pervasive and therefore it has real implications both for Jews as Jews and especially for Jews in dialogue with Christians. I therefore want to take just a few minutes to ferret out its meaning.
Interestingly, Pope Benedict traces the idea that God is love not to the New Testament, but to what he calls the Old Testament, that is to say, the Jewish Bible, theתנך . He traces it, in fact, to a verse from the Prophet הושע. The scene finds Israel once again refusing to repent of its sins and follow God’s ways. Yet God does not destroy Israel or leave it to its deserved fate. “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel! . . . My heart recoils within Me, My compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst.” The idea that Pope Benedict finds in these verses is that God’s love for His people is so great that it overwhelms His identity as God. As he puts it, “it turns God against himself, his love against his justice.”
To Pope Benedict, this idea of God’s identity as God being overwhelmed by His love for His people finds the ultimate expression in Jesus Christ. In Jesus, God makes Himself flesh and blood - He gives himself up, in other words, to suffering and death - so that He can save the people He loves so much. He writes, Christ’s “death on the Cross is the culmination of that turning of God against himself in which he gives himself in order to raise man up and save him… By contemplating the pierced side of Christ, we can understand the starting-point of this Encyclical Letter: 'God is love'”
As Jews, we need to pause here for a moment just to admire the power of this idea. The God who is the creator of heaven and earth and who exists outside His creation is fundamentally distant and beyond our experience. But we all need love. We all need to give love and to receive love. To say, therefore, that God is love is to say that God is within the realm of human experience. Indeed the work of many a Christian theologian is to show how humans, through divine grace and through the cultivation of their own powers to love, can approach the Divine. To say, as the Christians do, that God is love is to provide humans with a potential for intimacy with God that in Judaism is largely reserved for mystics and saints.
Before, though, we get to the Jewish understanding of love, we need to spend a moment and consider another notion of love; one that is perhaps even more powerful and more pervasive in our modern world than the idea that God is love. It is the idea that love is god.
Professor Simon May of King’s College, London, has written a book entitled Love: A History. In it he argues that, as religion has retreated in our world, love has taken its place as the only real god. He lists some of the key beliefs that many of us share about love:
Love is unconditional …
Love is fundamentally selfless…
Love is benevolent and harmonious …
Love is eternal …
Love redeems life's losses and sufferings …
As a further nudge to his contention that love has become god to us, Professor May offers the humorous observation that “There is hardly a humanist funeral that, having begun with a defiant statement that it is a godless celebration, doesn't seek comfort in the love that ‘survives’ the deceased person and thus gives him a measure of immortality.”
What shocked me about Professor May’s observations was the realization that I too have made love into a god. I too, have thought of and spoken of love as unconditional and eternal. I too, who prays to the Lord as גאל ישראל - the Redeemer of Israel - have spoken of love’s redeeming powers. Until I read Professor May’s critique, I had no idea of how much I had invested love with powers more properly belonging to the sphere of the divine. And yet when you think about it, it all makes sense. We, who have a harder and harder time of bringing faith or belief into our conversation, nevertheless need some place to put our hopes and fears and desires for something more than what we can see. Why not place that transcendent power in something we all crave so intently? Why not make love a god?
So what is a Jew to make of all this? On the one hand, our Christian neighbors want us to know that God is love. On the other hand, our larger society wants us to know that love is god. As the people who declare יי אלוהינו יי אחד there is surely no way for us to affirm this latter sentiment. But what about the idea that God is love? Can a Jew make such an assertion? As soon as I asked myself the question, I knew immediately that the answer was no. And I knew also just how a Jew would complete the sentence “God is (blank).”
At the beginning of the Book of Exodus, Moses meets God at the burning bush. Charged with delivering God’s people from Egyptian bondage, Moses seeks some way in which he can identify the Lord to the Israelites. “Look,” he says “I will come to the Israelites and I will say to them ‘the god of your fathers sent me to you,’ and they will say to me, ‘what’s His name?’ What will I say to them?” To which God responds, “I will Be that I will Be.” “Thus you will say to the Israelites “I will Be sent me to you.’”
To the challenge “God is (blank)” I believe the only response is that “God is God.” To say more is to place limitations on God. If we wish to be perhaps a little less cryptic, we might say “God is the Creator of Heaven and Earth and all that is contained therein.” All of which is to say that God is real. God is, in fact, the ultimate reality in that God, through His creative power, has given rise to everything.
And you will love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all you soul and with all your might. If God is the ultimate reality, then we are commanded to relate to this reality through love. But to understand what this means, we have to understand what love is.
This will strike a lot of you as funny. Love is one of those words we use all the time. Every one of us believes he or she knows what it means. But my guess is if I really pressed you, you would have a hard time defining it. You would have even a harder time if I asked you to define it and avoid using terms like eternal and unconditional and benevolent and redemptive.
Professor May offers us a definition of love. Its a definition, he believes, that comes straight out of the Torah and its commandments to love. Compared to the claims that make love a god, his definition is quite modest. But when you really think about it, what it says about love is startlingly profound. Love, he says, is what gives us a home in the world.
Take a few moments to think about that. It is through love - it is through the things and the people that we love - that we find for ourselves a home in the world; a place where we can be who we are as we want ourselves to be. Such a definition means that love is neither unconditional nor eternal; we love someone only so long they help secure our place in this world. It means too that love does not have to be either redemptive or selfless. Indeed, our beloved does not have to return our feelings to the same extent or even at all.
The more I have thought about this for myself, the more I know it to be true. Much as I want to ascribe mystical power to my attachment to my wife, my children, my family, I have come to understand that it is really through loving them that I have created a place for myself in the world. Ask me what is dear to me and I will tell you that it is being a devoted and thoughtful husband, a wise and patient father, a concerned and present brother and son and, yes, a caring and thoughtful rabbi. If you ask me who I am, I will now tell you that I am who and how I love.
Now here comes the really hard thinky part. Take these three ideas - the idea that God is the ultimate reality, the idea that love is what gives us our place in the world, and the idea that we are commanded to relate to God through love - and put them all together. What you come up with is this: that our place in the world comes from our attachment to the ultimate reality. Our place in the world comes from our love of God.
For me, this is a truly profound thought. My own religious struggle is not a fear that I won’t be redeemed in the world to come. It is the fear that nothing in this life matters. It is the fear, scarily summed up by the physicist Steven Weinberg who said that the more the universe becomes explicable, the more it also seems to be pointless. This, to me, is the most despairing notion there can be.
What a miracle, then, to discover that Judaism’s first and foremost teaching has been - since its very beginning - a bold contradiction of that despair. There in the command to love God with all one’s heart, soul and might is really a command to find your place in the world through attachment to the one true reality - through God. Of course just the fact that the Torah commands such behavior doesn’t make it true. But I find it truly miraculous that this most ancient religion exists to combat this most modern fear. And that is enough to give me hope and faith.
I admire my Christian friends who have taken this notion of God’s love and transformed it into a way for people to come close to the divine. Judaism, of course, developed its own version of this theology in the notion of עולם הבאה - the world to come. I hope and pray that all this is true. But, for now at least, I am content with this more modest idea about love: that love is the thing that makes us feel at home in the world; that love for our families gives us our identity, our sense of purpose, and our feeling of peace and contentment in this vast universe of ours; and that ultimately, that it is our love of God that gives us the confidence that we are attached to something greater than ourselves, thus filling our lives with meaning.
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