“You shall love the Lord your God.”
This final chapter gets right to the heart of the issue that has been with us since the beginning of the book: How does a finite creature let an infinite God into its life? According to Deuteronomy 6:5, the simple answer is through love. Given the importance of the question, some, most notably Jesus (Matthew 22:37), argued that Deuteronomy 6:5 is not just a commandment but the first and foremost of all the commandments.1 The Rabbis said that fulfillment of the commandment may require you to give your life for God, if necessary.2 Maimonides’s discussion of it forms the climax of The Guide of the Perplexed.3
Despite its importance, the commandment has always been problematic. What exactly does it ask of you? We have seen that in Hebrew as in English, ahavah (love) can refer to a wide range of emotions, actions, and states of mind. The immediate context is one in which Moses implores the people to observe all the laws that God has given them. From a historical perspective, when kings in the ancient Near East asked for their subjects’ love, they meant that their subjects should remain loyal to the king and renounce any commitments they had to other political powers.4 At a minimal level, then, love of God means faithful adherence to everything God has commanded. Thus Deuteronomy 6:3: “Obey, O Israel, willingly and faithfully.”
Instead of leaving the matter here, though, 6:5 takes another step. We are to love God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our might. Although heart in English normally refers to the source of emotion, in biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew, lev (heart) typically refers to the source of our most cherished convictions. In some cases (e.g., 29:3), it is even used as a synonym for wisdom. So far from introducing a distinction between emotion and reason, the command to love God asks for an undivided, unhesitating commitment to serve God, as indicated by the verse that immediately follows: “Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day.”
The Rabbis of the Talmud extended the idea of an undivided commitment by saying that we should serve God with both the evil and the good inclinations that have been implanted in us. As we saw, even the evil inclination can be directed to constructive ends.5 The Rabbis took “with all your soul” to mean that you should love God even if you have to give up your soul, that is, die for his sake.6 “With all your might” means that you should be willing to sacrifice all your property if God should require it.
Beyond the issue of what we might have to give up is that of what we are expected to do. We are to teach the words that God has commanded to our children and speak of them throughout the day. The obvious implication is that, in addition to loving God ourselves, we should persuade others to do the same. As we saw in connection with holiness, our relation with God is not just one-on-one; to get to God we need to involve ourselves with other people as well, especially the victims of social inequality.
The problem raised by this passage has to do with the word love. There is no question that love involves a disposition to act in a certain way. It would make no sense to say that a person loves God but is indifferent to his commandments. But as we understand it, and as many of the medieval philosophers understood it, love also involves an emotional commitment or state of mind.
According to the medieval philosopher Bachya, God wants more than just outward shows of behavior. One can fast, pray, or rest in a thoughtless or perfunctory fashion.7 While this might count as performance of the commandments in a minimal sense, it is clearly not what is intended by 6:5. It would be equivalent to a husband who did everything his wife asked but showed no great desire to be with her or take care of her. Bachya concludes that, while there are external obligations to God such as fasting, praying, and resting, there are also internal obligations. Hence the title of his book: Duties of the Heart.
We saw that, according to Maimonides, one should approach God with the same intensity that a lover feels for his or her loved one. Citing Psalm 91:14 (“Because he is devoted to Me I will deliver him”), he distinguishes between normal love and intense or deeply passionate love.8 It is the latter that causes a person to forget about everything else in the world except the loved one. Continuing with this point, he cites Song of Songs 1:2 (“Oh, give me of the kisses of your mouth”) and maintains that Moses, Aaron, and Miriam became so enamored of God that they were kissed into heaven when their lives ended.
Again the resolution of one question gives rise to another. There is no question that external obligations can be commanded. One can say “Fast on Yom Kippur” or “Do not work on the Sabbath.” But it is not clear that an internal obligation can be commanded in the same way. Suppose one were to say, “I want you to love Susan” or “I want you to be passionate about John.” The obvious response would be that, unlike fasting or resting, you cannot love another person simply because you are told to do so. Either you already love the person, in which case the commandment is superfluous, or you do not, in which case it is virtually impossible to manufacture feelings that are not already present.
Just as modern and medieval thinkers approached the question of holiness differently, we will see that they approached the question of how to love God differently as well. In rough terms, the issue has to do with whether we interpret 6:5 as talking about the culmination of religious life—something that can be achieved only after a lifetime of study and observance—or whether we interpret it as talking about the beginning. We will get a very different view of Judaism depending on which interpretation we choose.
The first step in understanding the medieval view is to recognize that Deuteronomy 6:5 is not the only commandment that deals with a state of mind. A few lines later (6:13), we are asked to fear God. We have seen that, like love, fear (yirah) is an ambiguous term in both English and biblical Hebrew. On the one hand, it can refer to the anxiety we feel when harm or misfortune seem imminent. There are any number of passages in the Torah where God threatens those who disobey him and inspires this kind of fear.
On the other hand, yirah can refer to the awe, wonder, or admiration one feels in the presence of something whose status or proportions are overwhelming. If it is terrifying to walk on a mountain cliff, it is terrifying in a different sense to contemplate the size and distances of bodies in outer space.
Although it is rare that the philosophic tradition achieves unanimity on issues of this sort, one thing on which all thinkers are agreed is that serving God out of fear of reprisal or expectation of reward is not what the Torah is asking.9 While fear of punishment may keep a person in line, it is more likely to lead to bitterness or resentment than to love or admiration. What parent would want a child to recoil in fear rather than show respect—or, better yet, genuine affection? As we saw in our discussion of Aristotle in chapter 3, genuine affection cannot be based on utilitarian considerations. The question is not “How can this relationship help me?” but “How can I help someone else?”
Even if we understand fear in the sense of awe or admiration, the picture is complicated by the fact that in some passages (e.g., Deuteronomy 10:12), fear and love are used synonymously: “And now, O Israel, what does the Lord demand of you? Only this: to fear the Lord your God, to walk only in His paths, to love Him, to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and soul.”10 The complication is due to the fact that in human relationships, fear and love are often opposites. Suppose I am invited into the office of a high-raking government official. Although it is normal to feel a certain degree of awe, this feeling results from my recognition of the enormous difference between us and my respect and admiration for the person I am seeing.
By most accounts, love is a way of closing that difference. Although Maimonides sometimes uses fear and love synonymously as well, he follows Rabbinic tradition in viewing fear of God and love of God as separate commandments.11 At a basic level, it is disrespectful to remain cool and self-satisfied in the presence of God. This speaks to the issue of fear or awe. As we saw in chapter 4, Maimonides thought the appropriate response is to think of ourselves as a vessel full of shame, dishonor, and reproach.
To the objection that you cannot command such a feeling, Maimonides’s answer is that while that is true, you can command activities that are likely to lead to it. If you faithfully obey all the commandments dealing with praying, eating, fasting, and so on—in other words, commandments that regulate behavior—then, his argument goes, you will naturally come to fear God and feel awe in his presence.
Maimonides bases his argument on Deuteronomy 28:52, where observance of the commandments and fear of God’s great and glorious name are mentioned side by side. This is analogous to saying that if you observe the civil law and trust in the process by which it is adjudicated, you are likely to feel a sense of awe upon entering the Supreme Court—not because you have been commanded to feel it but because it is a normal reaction.
Love is a different matter. If fear emphasizes the difference between God and us, love is a way of establishing a bond. How do you get someone not just to obey God but to be passionate in doing so? Again, a simple commandment like “Be passionate!” gets us nowhere. As with fear, if one cannot command a state of mind directly, one can command activities that normally lead to it.
Maimonides’s approach to this problem is to say that fear or awe has to come first. Without fear, love cannot get a foothold. But once fear of God has been established, a person is ready to take the next step, which builds on obedience to the commandments by enjoining the pursuit of knowledge.
In the Mishneh Torah, he expresses himself this way: “One only loves God with the knowledge with which one knows him. As is the knowledge, so will be the love. If the former is little or great, the latter will be little or great. A person therefore should devote himself to the understanding and comprehension of those sciences and studies that will inform him about his master, as far as human faculties to comprehend and understand allow.”12 Maimonides is not saying that knowledge is identical to love but rather that knowledge is proportional to love. The idea is that one can command someone to pursue knowledge, and if that command is satisfied, love will follow in its wake.
Even that is controversial. In our day and age, people think of knowledge as requiring a detached or dispassionate frame of mind. A person who studies abnormal behavior is not supposed to express the way she feels about it but to explain it in objective, empirically verifiable terms. Personally, she may be appalled by what she finds, but this has no bearing on the accuracy of her research. A person who studies Buddhism may have no intention of becoming a practicing member of that religion. The same could be said of any number of subjects taught in modern universities. As soon as the investigator has a personal stake in the matter, we become skeptical of her objectivity.
The ancients and medievals looked at knowledge differently. As Plato expressed it, knowledge cannot take root in an alien nature; to understand something, a person must live with it and develop an affinity for it.13 Without such affinity, a person might demonstrate a sharp mind or quick wit, but in the end, there would be no chance of obtaining genuine knowledge. This means a person whose behavior is reckless and disorderly cannot understand justice, any more than a person who is crass and unfeeling can understand beauty.14
According to the ancient and medieval view, the pursuit of knowledge involves more than just the gathering of isolated bits of information; it involves the transformation of a person’s whole outlook on life. By studying mathematics, Plato thought, a person will gradually lose interest in temporal things and focus on eternal ones. By studying natural science, Maimonides thought, a person will gradually lose interest in forces that affect him personally and focus on forces that affect the cosmos as a whole.
That is why knowledge is supposed to culminate in love. As the soul develops an ever deeper affinity for what it studies, its relationship with what it studies becomes ever more intimate. Along these lines, Maimonides went so far as to say that when the Bible mentions touching or closeness, it is speaking metaphorically about intellectual apprehension.15 To understand something in his sense of the term is to draw so close to it that the mind establishes so much intimacy with its object that it becomes united with or touches it.
We should not forget that full intimacy with God is impossible for finite minds like ours. But intimate attachment to the world God has created and the laws he has commanded is not only possible but, in Maimonides’s eyes, obligatory. So when the Torah asks us to love God, Maimonides takes it to mean that we should devote ourselves to the study of everything God has made or done. “Love,” he insists, “becomes valid only through the apprehension of the whole of being.”16
It bears repeating that this view of knowledge is not one with which most modern thinkers are comfortable. Its implications are elitist, because they require us to say that a person who for whatever reason cannot achieve knowledge of the whole of being cannot love God. If the knowledge is small, so will be the love.
Objectionable as this implication may be, there is still much in Maimonides’s view that is worth preserving. First and foremost is the claim that love of God is not easy to achieve. One cannot just say some prayers or feel a degree of emotion and think nothing else has to be done. If he is right, fulfillment of the commandment to love God requires a lifetime commitment to worship and study. Nor can one engage in study to the exclusion of everything else. Recall that love of God builds on and presupposes fear of God, which involves obedience to the commandments that regulate behavior. As anyone familiar with Jewish law well knows, “behavior” covers everything from dietary habits, to sexual mores, to observance of festivals, to treatment of the poor.
The second thing worth preserving is Maimonides’s view that the acquisition of knowledge is sacred. We may draw a sharp distinction between the secular and the sacred, but he saw them as connected. To Maimonides, when a child looks through a telescope or learns how to balance an equation, something sacred, namely, education, is happening. It is not that these activities can take the place of prayer or festival observance but that together they will lead the child to the deep and abiding love that Deuteronomy 6:5 is talking about.
There is one more implication we need to consider before moving to the modern view. Maimonides did not think of love along the lines of correlation in Cohen’s sense of the term. If we come to love God with the intensity that he talks about, there is no obvious way our love is reciprocated. For Maimonides, there is nothing that God does to establish a special relationship with us. Though he says that a person who loves God will be shielded from evil, all he means is that once love is achieved, a person will come to see, as Job did, that loss of property, health, influence, or anything else is not important.17 For Maimonides, true happiness is simply knowledge of God; once it is achieved, nothing else in life matters.18
Maimonides’s point is that throughout the process of gaining knowledge and feeling the corresponding degree of passion, God remains the same. No reward is offered, no place in a personal afterlife, no special insight into the inner nature of God. All one gets is the satisfaction of knowing that one has directed one’s emotional and intellectual energy to the most perfect thing there is and reduced one’s ties with everything else. In Maimonides’s view, this is what constitutes true worship, what the Rabbis call worship of the heart.19
I now turn from Maimonides and the medieval view to Franz Rosenzweig and the modern one. In many ways, Rosenzweig attempts to turn the tables on what we have just read. The point of Deuteronomy 6:5 is not that we are commanded to obey laws, which, if pursued in the proper fashion, will lead to a cognitive relationship with a perfect and unchanging God, but exactly the opposite: it describes the primordial moment in which God reaches out to us and says, “I want you to love me!”
Seen in this light, love is not an eternal attribute of God comparable to goodness or power but an event, in this case an event that shows God to be vulnerable to the degree that he is asking for a response from us.20 It is not that God lacks something that we can offer him but that God’s perfection is not fixed and immutable.21 God is not something to be contemplated like a statue or a poem but an agent who comes alive only when he puts aside the mystery of his nature and, to use one of Rosenzweig’s favorite expressions, “bursts forth” in the act of asking for our love.22
Taken by itself, “Love me!” contains nothing in the way of theory or doctrine. Rather than a statement about God, it is for Rosenzweig an act of love undertaken by God: “For love is—speech, wholly active, wholly personal, wholly living, wholly—speaking. All true statements about love must be words from its own mouth, borne by the I.”23 In other words, God’s love is manifest in the act of saying “Love me!” It is not a declaration of love (e.g., “I love you”) but the act of love itself.24
A declaration, argues Rosenzweig, is always a step removed from the thing itself, always too late. By contrast, an imperative is always in the moment “wholly pure,” “ever young,” and “unpremeditated.” Because it is in the moment, a simple declaration makes no claim about past or future. As we would say, “Love me!” has the sense of “Love me right now!”
To the objection that love cannot be commanded, Rosenzweig answers that indeed it cannot—if by “commanded” one means commanded by a third party. That is why the orders to “love John” or “love Susan” make no sense. But, he continues, there is one person who can command love: the lover himself, in this case, God. The lover can command it because the command is what initiates the whole relationship in the first place. Again, to use Rosenzweig’s expression, it is the lover’s command that awakens the soul of the beloved. Rather than a timeless and universal law like “Do not lie” or “Honor your father and mother,” it is a request that puts God directly before us—as if the infinite distance that separates God and humans has been closed in a single instant.
As with Levinas, the relation Rosenzweig has in mind is asymmetrical. If the proper way for the lover to express himself is with an imperative, the proper way for the beloved to express herself is with an admission of love. If the imperative is always in the moment, the admission is future oriented and seeks endurance. The beloved wants to remain in the same state forever: to be loved.25 To be loved is the best thing that can happen to someone because it means that you can never be totally alone: there is always someone who wants you. By contrast, to be unloved is to wander through life in a perpetual state of darkness.
While being loved may be sweet, it is not complete without a certain amount of soul-searching. As Rosenzweig claims, I do not love nearly as much as I know myself to be loved.26 In this way, the admission of love brings with it a recognition of our own inadequacy. Before the moment when God bursts into our lives, we were guilty of spiritual sleepwalking. Thus the most truthful response to “You shall love” is “I have sinned.” It is with the admission of sin that the soul surrenders itself to God, aware that, despite its sin, its human frailty, God still wants its love.
One might expect Rosenzweig to stop at the point where a bond is established between God and the individual soul, but this is not the case. Important as it is for the soul to open itself to God’s love, it is not enough. “Loved only by God,” he writes, “man is closed off to all the world and closes himself off.”27 Following Cohen, he insists that love of God has to be followed by a relationship with other people. The mystic who lives as a hermit and experiences the bliss of divine love every morning has missed the point. Just as God discloses himself to others in an act of love, so must we. It is at this juncture that we come to realize that to love God, you must also love your neighbor.
Where Maimonides saw love of God coming after obedience to the commandments, study of the Torah, and years of intellectual exertion, Rosenzweig sees it as coming before. For Rosenzweig, love is the way that God reveals himself to us, and it is from this revelation that every other commandment derives its legitimacy. Without the assurance of God’s love, everything else would seem mechanical. In this way, the soul reaches spiritual fulfillment not through the acquisition of knowledge but in the experience of being summoned by God.28
Like Maimonides, Rosenzweig buttresses his understanding of love by citing Song of Songs, in particular the claim that love is as strong as death (8:6–7).29 This is important, because for him the fear of death brings us face to face with the limits of our existence. In the last analysis, we are both mortal and fallible. But if love is as strong as death, then love is what allows us to overcome death.
Love, in other words, opens the door to redemption. As Rosenzweig expresses it, “The living soul, loved by God, triumphs over all that is mortal.”30 That is why God’s revelation to us is first and foremost an expression of love—as if God were to say, “Here is how you can overcome your deepest anxiety and achieve ‘eternal victory over death.’”31
This is a long way from the intellectual elitism of Maimonides. For Maimonides, God is not so much the originator of love as the final object of it. One way to understand the difference between the two viewpoints is to see that they emphasize different dimensions of religious experience. For Rosenzweig, as for Levinas, religious experience begins with the shock of recognition—something “other,” which is to say, something beyond us that bursts into our lives and calls everything we are into question. At one point, Levinas compares such an experience to a shot fired at point-blank range.32 Along these lines, one thinks of Moses’s encounter with God at the burning bush or Paul’s encounter with Jesus on the road to Damascus.
Impressive as it is, Rosenzweig’s account of love is more an extrapolation from Deuteronomy 6:5 than an interpretation. Unlike Moses’s encounter at the burning bush, “You shall love the Lord your God” is embedded in a speech that is mainly a recapitulation of things that have been said before. This again raises the question of whether love can be commanded. Or, to put the question in Rosenzweig’s terms: Can love be commanded in a sudden burst of revelation?
There is no question that one can be swept away suddenly and without warning. Think of Cupid’s arrows. For this kind of experience, innocence, surrender, and always being in the moment are appropriate descriptions. The question is whether they capture the full meaning of love—even romantic love.
Suppose that God enters my life and commands me to love him. Who is this God, and what values does he uphold? Is he the warrior God who told the Israelites to show no pity to the people whose cities they were conquering, the God whose loving kindness is extended to everyone, the God who told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, or the God who told him not to lay a hand on the boy? In the immediacy of the moment, there is no way to know. Kierkegaard took this to mean that surrendering to the voice of God is not just risky but the ultimate risk—something that only a Knight of Faith has the courage to do.
Like Kierkegaard, Rosenzweig wants to bring God down from the cloud of abstraction in which the medieval philosophers put him and trust in the authenticity of lived experience. The only way he can do this is if his understanding of God is such that rape, child sacrifice, and mass murder have been eliminated. For Kierkegaard and the Knight of Faith, nothing has been eliminated. God can ask for anything he wants.
Rosenzweig’s God is much less terrifying than Kierkegaard’s because Rosenzweig is relying on centuries of commentary that have in effect sanitized God. Even putting Kierkegaard aside, the God who asked for Rosenzweig’s love is quite different from the God who asked for Joshua’s or King David’s love. Once commentary begins to color our conception of God, it is not quite true that “Love me!” is innocent and always in the moment. If anything, it is the product of a long, slow process involving hundreds of interpretative judgments.
Nor is it true that shifting from the third person to the first solves the problem involved in commanding something as complicated as love. Though “Help me!” “Hug me!” or “Sit with me!” can be fulfilled in easily identifiable ways, it is far from clear that the same is true for “Love me!” In defense of Rosenzweig, there is something profoundly flattering about having someone ask for your love. At the same time, there is something narcissistic in thinking that you can simply order another person to give it to you. Even if Rosenzweig is right in saying that the declaration “I love you” is a step removed from the act, in the end, it may convey more tenderness than any imperative could.
As a popular song recorded in the 1960s put it, “You Can’t Hurry Love.” Although obviously an oversimplification, the song makes a legitimate point. It took pain, frustration, and a number of agonizing discussions with friends before Job could prove his love of God. In a similar way, Moses proved his love at least in part by imploring God not to go through with his threat to destroy the whole Israelite nation. Neither experience could be described as innocent or in the moment. If anything, they involved the loss of innocence in the sense that the characters were engaged in a struggle with God that went on for a considerable time. Absent such a struggle, one might well ask whether their relationship was deep enough to count as love at all.
It would be comforting if we could meet Maimonides and Rosenzweig halfway and come up with a resolution that does justice to both of their positions. But to follow up on Soloveitchik’s suggestion in chapter 4, it is wrong to think of religion as a refuge for comfort. Whether we are talking about love of God or love of another person, there is no time-tested set of steps that will guarantee a successful outcome.
We saw that Deuteronomy 6:5 leaves a number of questions unanswered. Maimonides tried to fill in the missing details with his claim that love is proportional to knowledge; Cohen did it by writing about the need to establish fellowship with the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; and Rosenzweig did it by making the connection between God and humans deeply personal. Looking at the contributions of all three thinkers, one would have to say that, while each gives us valuable insights and raises important questions, no one has an airtight case.
In one respect, this should not surprise us. Putting love of God aside for the moment, if we were to ask Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Kierkegaard, or Freud what is involved in loving another person, we would get a similar outcome: valuable insights and important questions but nothing approaching unanimity. Do opposites attract, or do we naturally seek our alter ego? Must love be unconditional to be genuine, and if so, what exactly does that mean? Should lovers retain their separate identities or try to achieve emotional union? Is love at first sight possible? Can you love someone you know to be evil? Only someone with an impoverished view of love would approach these questions secure in the knowledge that he had all the answers.
We saw in our discussion of creation in chapter 2 that many of the issues that religion takes up do not lend themselves to certainty. For some people, this is deeply disturbing, because for them the purpose of religion is to provide a beacon of security in an insecure world. Security is fine if you have made a thorough study of the alternatives and have a compelling body of evidence to back you up. If you do not, then security runs the risk of lapsing into dogmatism. The dogmatist knows exactly what God wants and what people should do to serve God. For such a person, religion is analogous to geometry. Anyone who disagrees is either stupid or obstinate.
To see what is wrong with dogmatism, suppose that on Judgment Day we are asked how well we have satisfied the commandment to love God. One person offers an account of love that allows him to say that he has done everything correctly down to the smallest detail. He holds his head high and expects God to grant some kind of reward. Another admits to doubts about what love is and what it means to fulfill the commandment. Though she has tried to live a responsible life, she cannot say for sure that she has done everything right. Rather than holding her head high, she asks questions and seeks guidance.
In my view, it is the second person who should serve as a model, the one who keeps an open mind and continues to think. She is intelligent enough to realize that you cannot approach love in the way you approach squares and triangles. If you could, there would be no reason to read Romeo and Juliet or hear a performance of Tosca. Nor would there be much point in reading biblical passages that treat love in all its many dimensions. Everything worth knowing could be deduced from a few simple rules.
It is not surprising that in our day Rosenzweig’s personal view of love attracts more followers than Maimonides’s conceptual one. If Maimonides saw people as rational creatures thirsting for knowledge, Rosenzweig saw them as vulnerable creatures seeking to overcome the fear of death. For Maimonides, if God loves anything at all, it is the whole created order that he has brought into being, not the individual people who inhabit it. Like us, Rosenzweig was heir to centuries of literature and art that emphasized the hopes and aspirations of the individual over and against those of society or tradition.33 Private space, self-fulfillment, and personal enrichment have become necessary features of modern life.
For most of us, a God who does not respond to these things is no God at all. According to Buber, “God loves as a personality . . . and wishes to be loved like a personality.”34 Far be it from me to overthrow a tradition that has been in place for so long and included so many thinkers of genius. What I can do is raise the question of whether the move to a God who loves as a personality and wishes to be loved like a personality has gone too far. Has the modern conception of God given us a deity who is so ready to minister to human needs and assist in the fulfillment of human aspirations that he becomes our servant rather than our becoming his?
The move toward this conception of God began with Cohen and the idea of a divine-human relationship. That led Cohen to speak of a “community” existing between God and us.35 The community is defined by the fact that we cannot understand one side of the relationship without referring to the other. The highest point of the relationship is achieved when we come to God in a spirit of repentance and ask to be forgiven.
All this allowed Cohen to take the next step: “God is for the sake of the holiness of man.”36 The significance of this step was not lost on Rosenzweig, who argued that God comes alive not simply by virtue of having the nature he does but by having that nature augmented by the ability to reach out to us.37 This is part and parcel of the idea that unless we witness to God, then in a sense he will not be God at all.
With the reassurance that God stands ready to help us comes the nagging suspicion that it is almost as if we have written a job description for God. Forgive us when we sin. Relieve us of our guilt. Promise us that someone loves us. Free us from the fear of death. This is all very neat; the question is whether it is too neat. The Torah asks us to love God and to fear or stand in awe of him. While it may be possible to accomplish the former by establishing what Levinas sarcastically calls “a spiritual friendship” with God, what happens to the latter?38 Can we stand in awe of a God whose chief goal is to do our bidding?
Recall that Maimonides believed that fear of God should precede love of God. Although he does not say so explicitly, one suspects that his rationale was to prevent such a spiritual friendship from getting started. The reason for studying subjects like physics, mathematics, and astronomy was to wean us away from a human-centered universe and the conceit of thinking that everything exists for our sake. He believed that we are only a small part of a universe that contains bodies and forces far greater than anything we can imagine. If modern science has taught us anything, it is that the universe Maimonides imagined is minuscule compared to the one that we actually inhabit.
If Maimonides is right, all this must be taken into account before love of God becomes legitimate. As we saw, love becomes valid only through the apprehension of the whole of being. Love must be proportional to knowledge, because without knowledge, we run the risk that our love will be directed to a figment of our imagination, the prime example of which is a God whose goal is to do our bidding.
Putting everything together, we are left with a dilemma. If we emphasize love to the degree that God becomes a personality, then we compromise our fear or awe. Alternatively, if we emphasize fear or awe to the degree that we are nothing but a tiny speck in a vast universe, then it becomes difficult to see how we can have love. We saw that Maimonides invoked the erotic imagery of Song of Songs, but we must ask whether erotic attachment is a suitable metaphor for the rarefied contemplation he has in mind.
Our final question is this: Where do we run the greater risk—in putting God too close to us or in putting him too far away? For Maimonides, it is the former; for Rosenzweig, it is the latter. Which side you pick will determine how you understand the commandment to love God and to give God a place in your life.
Although most readers are likely to disagree, I think the greater risk is bringing God too close. By suggesting that God thinks the way we think, approves of what we approve, and stands ready to forgive us if only we ask in the right way, we are describing God in the same terms we use to describe ourselves. While this approach may be reassuring, it compromises God’s status as an infinite being. As far as I am concerned, that is too high a price to pay.