Recently, Anat Hoffman and I shared our divergent views about Women of the Wall in these pages. The dispute was respectful and transparent. However, Anat’s column had the headline, “Norma, I love you but…” The statement bothered me and got me thinking. What is love, what does it mean when we declare love and how do we know?

It seems to me, after almost 50 years of marriage with the love of my life, that love is not simply an emotional state. It is not merely a suffusing of chemicals in the brain. Love must derive from a relationship and implicate a very real commitment. Without those elements, true love cannot exist. 

We can be enamoured of someone, we can “love” a food or a place or some work of art. But without a human connection that entails what Martin Buber called an “I Thou” exchange, there is no love. It is perhaps possible to have such an interface with a work of art, but the fullest sense of love is only experienced in human terms, with actions and interactions.  We are, of course, human beings with bodies and thoughts and emotions. All our parts need involvement.

In biblical terms, the most desirable human relationship of love is that experienced between a woman and a man, intent on each other, made for each other like Eve and Adam. The purpose of human existence would seem to be to find the right person with whom one can share the totality of one’s being: “bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh.”

According to Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the story unfolds in order to teach us the absolute human need for companionship and love. Those essential elements are only found with another human being with whom one can share everything, physical and spiritual, hopes, dreams and expectations.

This very human love is then the prototype for the most exalted and desirable theological stance: the love for God.  What a glorious idea. To learn to love God based on our own finite and imperfect experience of loving another human being. Given this proposition, the Bible commands us to “Love God!” We can find that love, reach for it and express it. But how? 

In the well-known prayer, Shema, we commit to loving God. We state that we shall love God with all our might, with all our being, with total dedication and allegiance. As a result of this commitment, or in consequence of the love, we pledge to pay attention to God’s words and to keep them with us. So love necessitates an act of some sort – because the act itself either constitutes the love or celebrates it. 

We state this in the plural form, as a community, not simply individually. We bind our descendants and ourselves to both the love and the ritual action. How can we?

In the classical prayer book, there is a significant prayer that precedes the Shema. In it, we wisely and prudently remind God to love us. This relationship then is a two-way street. We ask and even demand that God love us in preparation for our love of God. We ask in the name or merit of our ancestors, we ask for our past and our future. We need to learn and to teach the ways of God so that this love will be a standard for our family and community. This love is a result of action and interaction of relationships with the living and the dead. It entails many activities of learning, doing, committing and uniting. And it leads to joy and gladness, to redemption and intimacy. It is both existential – crucial in shaping our destiny –and actual – necessary for life now.  

I have known such human love and glimpsed the attendant divine love. It requires real-time acts and relationships, of that I am convinced.

No, Anat, sorry, but you don’t love me. You don’t even know me.