Love God With All Your Heart

Good morning everyone. Welcome back to Learn to Daven - Day 137.

The very first word after the Shema's declaration is a problem. V'ahavta - "and you shall love."

It's a command. Future tense, imperative force: you shall love. And everything we know about love says that's not how love works. You can command an action - stand here, pay this, don't touch that. Can you command a feeling? Imagine ordering someone: be moved by this sunset. Find this funny. Love me. The harder you push, the less it happens. So the Torah's single most repeated demand - said twice a day, every day - seems to ask for the one thing that can't be demanded.

Rabbi Sacks loved to sharpen this before answering it. He pointed out that people call Judaism a religion of law - dry, legal, all rules. And yet this book of law is the one that dares to legislate love: love God, love your neighbor, love the stranger. The lawyers' religion talks about love more insistently than the poets do. So the question isn't a bug. The Torah clearly believes love is somehow within reach of a command - and the question is what it knows about love that we've forgotten.

Here's the first answer, from the Rambam, and it's a quiet masterpiece. In Hilchos Yesodei HaTorah he asks: what is the path to loving God? And his answer contains no exercises in feeling. He says: when a person contemplates His wondrous works and creatures, and sees in them His wisdom - without measure and without end - immediately he loves.

Read that carefully. The Rambam has moved the command one step back. You can't order the feeling - but you can order the attention, and the feeling follows attention on its own. Love, in the Rambam's model, is not a decision. It's a result. Look long enough, closely enough, honestly enough at what's actually there, and love arrives without being summoned. The Sefer HaChinuch says it in one line: fix your thought on the things that cause love, and love follows.

Which, if you think about it, is exactly how human love works too. Nobody ever fell in love by deciding to. They fell in love by paying attention - noticing this about her, that about him, one detail after another, until the feeling showed up uninvited. And - this is the part every married person knows - it's also how love is lost: not by decision, but by the slow withdrawal of attention. The opposite of love isn't hate. It's not looking anymore.

So "you shall love" turns out to mean: you shall attend. The command is aimed at the one lever you actually control.

Now the second answer, from the Alter Rebbe, and it changes the picture again. Tanya teaches that every Jew already carries an ahavah mesuteres - a hidden love for God, an inheritance from Avraham and the Avos, sitting in the soul whether you feel it or not. It's why, throughout history, Jews with no visible religious life at all found there were lines they would not cross, a bond they would not renounce, at any price. That doesn't come from contemplation. It was already there.

On this reading, v'ahavta isn't a command to manufacture something missing. It's a command to uncover something present. Not "build a fire" - "uncover the coals."

And notice: the two answers agree on the method. Whether love needs to be grown (Rambam) or revealed (Tanya), the tool is the same - sustained, deliberate attention. Which is exactly what the siddur institutionalizes. Twice a day, Judaism puts "I love You" in your mouth on a schedule, not because the feeling is guaranteed to be there at 7 a.m., but because saying it is the attending. Anyone in a long marriage knows this protocol: you don't say "I love you" only when a wave of emotion forces it out of you. You say it daily, and the saying keeps the channel open, and through the open channel the feeling keeps arriving.

One more thing. This command sits immediately after echad. First know what He is - One, ours, everywhere, holding everything in existence right now. Then love. The order matters: the Rambam's contemplation has to have something to contemplate. Days 133 and 134 were the looking. Today is what the looking produces.

Tomorrow we start climbing through the famous ladder - heart, soul, might - and the first rung has a spelling mystery in it: why does the Torah say l'vavcha, with a doubled letter, when Hebrew has a shorter word for heart?