Judaism Is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life

emotional health and interpersonal connection. If I am truly going to love others, it helps a lot to feel confident that I, too, am loved; if I am going to affirm the worth of others, it helps to feel sure that I, too, have worth. Judaism understands this and teaches us: we are always already loved and always already “worthful.”

even if we cannot fully achieve it, unconditional love can still serve as an aspirational ideal against which we measure ourselves and toward which we seek to grow. Asymptotic though the ideal may be, we can regard our actual loving as “answerable” to the requirements of unconditional love.

“emotions cannot be turned on like a tap,” they can nevertheless be “cultivated” so that they “become second-nature.”

The ideal, we might say, is to combine the best of what particularism and universalism have to offer (and demand): we care about everyone but we start local and we allow other people to be who they are. This is the dialectic that Jewish ethics at its best seeks to express.

Hard as it can sometimes be, as parents we need to let our children become who they are, not who we have decided they should be.

As I’ve said, our worth is not something that we earn, but something that we strive to live up to.

feeling of love leads us to act lovingly, and loving acts, in turn, elicit (or reinforce) feelings of love, thus creating a virtuous circle.

Covenantal love is above all a commitment and an orientation. It includes passion and emotion but is not limited to them.

The gift of life is grace—the existence of the world is not something that anyone earned. God’s love for us is grace—it is not something we earn but something we strive to live up to. And the revelation of Torah is grace—it is a divine gift given to us through no merit of our own.