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True Love

HaYesod is a great resource for teaching and learning about Christianity's Jewish foundation. But how important is that Jewish foundation? One might think that learning about the Jewish worldview fills in some details, but the basics are already well understood. But instead, you will find that the even the most central concepts of the Gospel are grasped better from a Jewish perspective.

Jesus said that the greatest commandment is to love God. The second is to love others.

But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together. And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him "Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." (Mathew 22:34-40)

If these are the greatest commandments, our supreme obligation before our Maker, we had better make sure we understand and carry it out properly! Jesus quotes these foundational commandments from the Torah, specifically Deuteronomy 6:4-5 and Leviticus 19:18.

What did these instructions and the concept of love mean to Jesus and his first followers? Our modern society seems to have a very different idea of what love means. We need to get back to the Jewish foundation of our faith in order to understand and live out this commandment correctly.

For many people, love is a feeling of affection. The Scriptures tell us to love God with all of our heart, soul, and strength.

Certainly affectionate feelings play into our relationship with God. How can one not feel a sense of affection toward the God that created us and continues to give us life? But we have not met our obligation simply by generating an emotion.

In our English Bibles, we read that Abraham was called a "friend of God" (2 Chronicles 20:7, Isaiah 41:8, James 2:23). The Hebrew word for "friend" is ohev, which literally means "one who loves." It comes from the same root as the word used in the command, "You shall love the LORD your God." The Hebrew word ohev, "one who loves" is a way to speak of a covenant partner. Abraham entered into covenant relationship with God. Whatever God asked of him, he did. His devotion to the covenant with God was intense and unwavering.

The commandment says that we must love God with all of our heart. But "heart" has a different symbolic meaning in the Jewish mind than it has in our Western minds. The book Boundary Stones explains,

Although in Western thought the heart is the source of emotion, the Bible speaks of the heart as the locus of our decision-making process, akin to the mind. It is our will, where we process judgments. (p.30)

That means that loving God with our heart is not merely emotional, but it expresses itself through the way that we make decisions.

In Jewish thought, the heart (i.e., the will) is divided into two parts. On the one hand, we as spiritual beings in the image of God have an innate desire to connect with him and do what pleases him. On the other hand, as flesh-and-blood creatures, we have animalistic urges of survival and selfishness. In the New Testament, these concepts are called the "spirit" and the "flesh." Loving God with the whole heart, would thus mean subjugating the flesh and employing our entire being in devoted service to him.

Some people conclude that Jesus replaced the observance of all of the commandments in the Torah with these two instructions to love. But again, it is critical to understand the Jewish foundation of our faith. From a Jewish perspective, it is very clear what Jesus means.

Jesus calls it the "great and first commandment" and he says that "on these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." That is to say, we cannot keep the commandments without love, and that is exactly why love of God and others is so important.

It is actually common for Jewish rabbis to ponder which is the most important principle in the Torah. When they do so, they do not by any means intend that this one principle replaces the need for all others.

In fact Rabbi Akiva, who came about a century after Yeshua, said that "Love your neighbor" is the greatest principle in the Torah (Genesis Rabbah 24:7). We find the Jewish sages in the Talmud reducing the Torah down to the verse--Habakkuk 2:4, "the righteous shall live by his faith" (b.Makkot 24a). The sage Hillel, who came one generation before Yeshua, told a potential convert, "That which is despicable to you, do not do to your fellow, this is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary, go and learn it" (b.Shabbat 31a).

Surely none of these Jewish sages intended to replace the commandments in the Torah with those single statements, nor did Paul when he wrote, "For the whole law is fulfilled in one word: 'You shall love your neighbor as yourself' (Galatians 5:14).

So you can see how understanding the Christianity's Jewish foundation is so important. Even the most basic commandments about love can be misunderstood when one is missing the worldview of Jesus and his earliest followers.

Boundary Stones
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About the Author: Boaz Michael is the President and Founder of First Fruits of Zion.