The Day of Love

Written by Rabbi Elliott Karstadt — 14 February 2025

This Erev Shabbat, as every Erev Shabbat, we recited the words of Ahavat Olam – our blessing before the Shema that speaks of ‘everlasting love’, in which we praise God for having loved Beit Yisrael – the ‘House of Israel’. And in the morning service, tomorrow, we will say a slightly amended version of that blessing, beginning Ahavah Rabbah – ‘with deep love You have loved us’.

This emphasis on love is not just in our liturgy. In Pirkei Avot, the Sayings of our Sages, Rabbi Akiva says: ‘Beloved is the human being, for they were made in the image [of God]. Even more beloved are they, that they know that they are made in the image [of God].’

There is a need, perhaps, and perhaps now more than ever, to recapture the emphasis that our Jewish tradition places on love. A new book came out last year by orthodox Rabbi Shai Held, called: Judaism is About Love: Recovering the Heart of Jewish Life. He begins his book by saying: ‘Judaism is not what you think it is.’ Held argues that Jewish tradition has been and is a tradition with love at its centre, but that we have been suspicious of love as a religious ideal because of its centrality to Christianity, particularly on days like today: St. Valentine’s Day, the day in the Christian calendar commemorating the bishop of Tirni (Italy) who was martyred on this date in the year 269 CE.

We find love – and particularly the idea that we are loved by God – as icky. It’s Christian and as a consequence, it is not Jewish. But we do not have to accept that we as a people are not allowed to own it as well.

Held points out that so often it has been the Christian portrayal of Judaism as a religion with an angry, vengeful God that we have internalised and that makes us so suspicious of love as a divine quality.

One response to this argument is that, yes, we Jews do have a conception of love, but that that love is reliant on a contract. We will receive God’s love if (and only if) we keep our side of a bargain: the covenants that were made with Abraham and Moses. Often we speak about the love of the Jewish God as transactional. And yet, surely we have broken that covenant so many times – and God has broken that covenant so many times – that we might wonder whether the love that sits behind, beyond that covenant, is actually the more powerful form of love that we can point to and say: it is unconditional. It is, to put a Christian term on it, grace. The Hebrew is Chein.

Held’s argument is that being loved by God in this unconditional way has two consequences. The first is that we are endowed with worth. We are worthy ourselves of being loved. God loves each individual, and therefore every individual is of infinite value. No matter how we are treated by the world or by others. We are each imbued with sanctity and importance.

The second consequence is that we are being invited to become lovers – not romantic lovers, but people who affirm the worth and infinite value of others. As we are made in the image of God, so we are being invited to love others as God loves us.

We are told to love the stranger – and again this does not mean being lovey-dovey. It doesn’t even mean being best friends and enjoying being in someone’s presence. It means recognising the worth of every human life and acknowledging their individual sanctity, because they too were made b’tzelem Elohim.

But there is a need here to make a distinction – loving does not necessarily mean admiring or liking someone. It does not mean sharing an interest or enjoying being in their presence. In fact, we might find those things incredibly uncomfortable and still love someone. Love means recognising the sanctity of all life. As my mum used to say when I wasn’t behaving well as a child, ‘I don’t like you very much right now, but I do love you.’ There was a security in that – it allowed me always to come back. It enabled what our tradition calls teshuvah – repentance, return. We are able to come back, to be better human beings, to reciprocate the love that has been shown to us.

So, as we walk past all those heart-shaped chocolate boxes, or when we take our partner for a romantic meal this weekend, let’s remember that the love we think about on St Valentine’s Day is just one facet of love.

There is also a love that is a key part of what it means to be Jewish – that we speak about when we rise up and when lie down, that is not just about us but which stretches far beyond us. I invite us to love each other, even if we do not like each other, and with that recognise the innate worth and importance of each and every human being.

It sounds like a lofty ideal – but lofty ideals are really hard to bring into reality. They take work – and maybe it is that need to work at it and to be vulnerable and to face the prospect of conflict and failure – that makes some people dismiss them, or say that really those ideals are the fantasies of other peoples.

And when we do, let us remember and re-affirm that there is always a way back, that the love of God means that there really isn’t anything we could do that would cause us to be abandoned and for our lives not to be worth anything.

We need that kind of love in the world we find ourselves in today.