Love in Judaism
A religion that commands you to love -- and then asks how that is possible
There is a popular picture, still widespread, in which the “Old Testament God” is a God of law and wrath, and love enters religion only later. The picture does not survive a reading of the Hebrew Bible. The two most famous sentences in Judaism are both about love. The first is recited twice a day by observant Jews and whispered by the dying: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might” (Deuteronomy 6:5). The second was called by Rabbi Akiva “the great principle of the Torah”: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18).
What is distinctive about Judaism is not that it values love. Every tradition does. It is that Judaism commands love – love of God, love of neighbour, love of the stranger – and then spends two and a half thousand years working out what a commanded love could possibly mean. Can a feeling be ordered? If not, what exactly is being asked of us? The answers, from the rabbis of the Talmud through Maimonides and the Hasidic masters to Martin Buber and Emmanuel Levinas, add up to one of the richest bodies of reflection on love in any culture.
The words
Hebrew has several words related to love:
Ahavah (אַהֲבָה) is the general word for love, used equally of God’s love for Israel, a husband’s love for his wife, a parent’s love for a child and a friend’s love for a friend. Its first appearance in the Bible is striking: God tells Abraham to take “your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac” (Genesis 22:2) – to the mountain where he is to sacrifice him. Love enters the Bible together with the possibility of its loss.
Chesed (חֶסֶד) is harder to translate. “Loving-kindness,” the usual English rendering, was invented by a sixteenth-century Bible translator who could find no existing word. Chesed is love that shows itself in loyal action, often between parties bound by covenant, and often going beyond what duty requires. Micah’s famous summary of religion – “to do justice, to love chesed, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8) – makes it the centre of the good life.
Rachamim (רַחֲמִים), compassion or mercy, comes from rechem, “womb.” It is the tender, visceral love of a mother for the child she carried, and it is the word most often used for God’s love in the liturgy.
Finally, the person we are commanded to love is the re’a (רֵעַ) – “neighbour,” “fellow,” “friend” – and, separately and emphatically, the ger (גֵּר), the stranger or foreigner living among us.
Love in the Hebrew Bible
God loves first
The Bible’s logic is that human love is a response. Deuteronomy is explicit that Israel’s relationship with God does not begin with Israel’s merit: “It was not because you were more numerous than other peoples that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you… but because the Lord loved you” (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). The prophets return to the theme constantly. Hosea pictures God as a father who taught Israel to walk: “When Israel was a child, I loved him” (Hosea 11:1). Jeremiah has God say, “I have loved you with an everlasting love” (Jeremiah 31:3). Hosea and Isaiah go further and describe the covenant as a marriage, with God as a wounded but faithful husband who will “betroth you to me forever… in righteousness and justice, in chesed and in compassion” (Hosea 2:21).
This is the context for the command to love God. It is not an order issued to strangers; it is the second half of a relationship already under way.
Love your neighbour – and the stranger
Leviticus 19 is a chapter of practical ethics: leave the corners of your field for the poor, pay your workers on time, do not put a stumbling block before the blind. Into this list comes verse 18: “You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your kinsfolk. You shall love your neighbour as yourself: I am the Lord.” The verse before it is just as important and far less quoted: “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely reprove your neighbour.” Love, in Leviticus, is not sentiment. It sits between a ban on grudges and a duty to speak up when someone is doing wrong.
Sixteen verses later, the chapter extends the command to the person outsiders would least expect: “The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as a citizen; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” (Leviticus 19:34). Deuteronomy repeats it: “You shall love the stranger, for you were strangers in Egypt” (Deuteronomy 10:19). The Talmud observes that the Torah warns about the treatment of the stranger thirty-six times – more than any other commandment. The ground given is not abstract: you know what it feels like, so do not do it.
William Blake, Naomi Entreating Ruth and Orpah to Return to the Land of Moab (1795). The Book of Ruth is the Bible's great story of chesed, loyal love between a Moabite woman and her Israelite mother-in-law. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
Human love: marriage, friendship, the Song of Songs
The Bible is unembarrassed about human love. Jacob works seven years for Rachel, “and they seemed to him but a few days because of his love for her” (Genesis 29:20). The friendship of David and Jonathan, Ruth’s refusal to leave Naomi (“where you go, I will go”), Hannah’s longing for a child: these are told without allegory and without apology.
Then there is the Song of Songs, eight chapters of frankly erotic love poetry between a young woman and her lover in which God is never mentioned. Its inclusion in the canon was debated, and Rabbi Akiva settled the matter with a famous ruling: “All the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the holy of holies.” The rabbis read it as an allegory of the love between God and Israel; later Jewish mystics read it as the love between God and the soul. But it was never only an allegory. Judaism kept the literal poem, with its line that Franz Rosenzweig would later put at the centre of his philosophy: “Love is strong as death” (Song of Songs 8:6).
The rabbis
The Talmud and Midrash take the biblical commands and ask what they require in practice.
Hillel’s summary. Asked by a would-be convert to teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot, Hillel replied: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go and learn it” (Shabbat 31a). The negative form is deliberate – it is something everyone can actually do.
Rabbi Akiva and Ben Azzai. Rabbi Akiva called “love your neighbour as yourself” the great principle of the Torah. His colleague Ben Azzai disagreed and proposed a greater one: “This is the book of the generations of Adam” (Genesis 5:1), the verse that says every human being descends from one ancestor made in God’s image. The argument is subtle. “As yourself” risks making your own feelings the measure of your duty; Ben Azzai wanted love grounded in the other person’s dignity, whether or not you feel anything.
Love that depends on something. The ethical tractate Pirkei Avot (5:16) offers a distinction that is still worth memorising: “Any love that depends on a thing – when the thing passes, the love passes. Love that does not depend on a thing never passes.” The example of the first is Amnon’s lust for Tamar; of the second, the friendship of David and Jonathan.
Chesed as the frame of the Torah. Rabbi Simlai taught that the Torah begins and ends with acts of loving-kindness: at the start God clothes the naked Adam and Eve; at the end God buries Moses (Sotah 14a). To “walk in God’s ways,” the same passage says, means to do what God does – clothe the naked, visit the sick, comfort mourners, bury the dead. Love of God becomes imitation of God.
Love of God unto death. Rabbi Akiva, tortured to death by the Romans, is said to have recited the Shema as he died. His students asked how he could bear it. He answered that all his life he had been troubled by the words “with all your soul” – meaning, the rabbis said, “even if He takes your soul” – and had wondered whether he would ever fulfil them (Berakhot 61b).
The philosophers
Can love be commanded?
Kant would later argue that love as a feeling cannot be commanded, only love as a practice. Jewish thinkers had faced the question long before, and gave three kinds of answer.
The first is that the commandment is primarily about action. Maimonides, codifying the law, writes that since we are commanded to love every fellow as ourselves, we must therefore speak well of others, care for their property and honour as we care for our own (Mishneh Torah, Laws of Character 6:3). Nahmanides, commenting on Leviticus, admitted that the heart cannot literally love another person as much as itself; the command, he said, is to want for the other every good that we want for ourselves, without a trace of envy.
The second answer is that love can be cultivated. Maimonides again: when a person contemplates the vastness and wisdom of creation, “he immediately loves, praises and glorifies” its maker (Laws of the Foundations of the Torah 2:2). Love of God grows in proportion to knowledge of God. At the end of his Laws of Repentance (chapter 10) he describes the ideal: to serve God not from fear of punishment or hope of reward, but out of a love so consuming that one is “like a lovesick man whose mind is never free of his beloved” – and he cites the Song of Songs as his proof-text.
Statue of Maimonides (1138-1204) in Córdoba, Spain. Image: David Baron / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0.
The third answer, developed in the twentieth century by Franz Rosenzweig, is that the puzzle dissolves once we notice who is speaking. “Love me!” is a contradiction if a stranger or a legislator says it. From the mouth of a lover it is the most natural sentence in the world. The command to love God, Rosenzweig argued in The Star of Redemption (1921), is intelligible only as the words of someone who has loved first – which is exactly what Deuteronomy says.
Medieval heart and mind
Not everyone agreed with Maimonides that love follows knowledge. Bahya ibn Paquda, in his eleventh-century Duties of the Heart, made love of God the tenth and final “gate” of an inner spiritual path, reached through gratitude and humility rather than metaphysics. Two centuries after Maimonides, Hasdai Crescas argued directly against him: the purpose of human life is not intellectual union with God but love, and love is something the heart does, not the mind.
Kabbalah and Hasidism
The Jewish mystical tradition placed chesed among the ten sefirot, the aspects through which God’s light flows into the world, and spoke of devekut, “cleaving” to God, as the goal of the religious life. The Sabbath hymn Lekhah Dodi – “Come, my beloved, to meet the bride” – written in sixteenth-century Safed, still welcomes the Sabbath every Friday evening in the language of the Song of Songs.
Hasidism, the popular mystical revival of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, turned this into a programme of ahavat Yisrael, love of fellow Jews, especially the poor and unlearned. Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi devoted a famous chapter of his Tanya (chapter 32 – the numerical value of the Hebrew word for “heart”) to arguing that love of neighbour follows from the recognition that all souls share one root. Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev became legendary for arguing with God on behalf of sinners. And Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of pre-state Palestine, coined a phrase that has entered Hebrew speech: if the Temple was destroyed by sinat chinam, baseless hatred, it will be rebuilt by ahavat chinam, baseless love.
Modern Jewish philosophy
Three twentieth-century thinkers made love central to their philosophy, and all three were Jewish.
Martin Buber, in I and Thou (1923), distinguished two attitudes to the world: “I-It,” which experiences and uses, and “I-You,” which meets. Love, for Buber, is not a feeling one has but a relationship one stands in: “Feelings dwell in man; but man dwells in his love.” It is “the responsibility of an I for a You.” Franz Rosenzweig, his friend and collaborator, made revelation itself an act of love, with the Song of Songs as its text. Emmanuel Levinas made the encounter with the face of the other person – who commands me, before any choice of mine, “you shall not kill” – the foundation of ethics, and described the ethical relation as “love without concupiscence”: love that wants nothing for itself.
Behind them stood Hermann Cohen, who argued in Religion of Reason out of the Sources of Judaism (1919) that the biblical command to love the stranger was the moment the “person next to me” was discovered as a fellow human being. And alongside them, more popularly, Erich Fromm, raised in an Orthodox home and trained in Talmud, insisted in The Art of Loving (1956) that love is a skill and a practice, not a feeling that befalls us – a thoroughly rabbinic idea in secular dress.
Love in marriage
Judaism has no monastic ideal; marriage is the expected state, and the Hebrew word for betrothal, kiddushin, means “sanctification.” The Talmud says that a man without a wife lives “without joy, without blessing, without goodness” (Yevamot 62b), and in the same passage instructs a husband to “love his wife as himself and honour her more than himself.” The command to love one’s neighbour is applied directly to marriage: a man may not betroth a woman he has not seen, lest he come to dislike her and violate “love your neighbour as yourself” (Kiddushin 41a).
Biblical marriages often put love after the wedding rather than before – Isaac “took Rebekah, and she became his wife, and he loved her” (Genesis 24:67). This is not an endorsement of loveless marriage but a different theory of how love works: that it can be built by commitment and daily chesed, not only found. Rembrandt’s Jewish Bride, whatever its true subject, has long been read as the perfect picture of this – a love that is tender, physical and settled all at once.
Rembrandt, The Jewish Bride (c. 1665-69), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. Often identified as Isaac and Rebekah. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
What Judaism does not say
It helps to see the shape of Jewish love by noting its edges.
Judaism has no command to love your enemies. It does forbid hating them in your heart, forbids rejoicing at their downfall (Proverbs 24:17), requires you to feed them when they are hungry (Proverbs 25:21) and to help them lift a fallen donkey (Exodus 23:5). But it does not ask for a feeling it regards as unrealistic. The duty is decency, not affection.
Judaism also resists the sharp separation, found in some Christian theology, between a selfless spiritual agape and a selfish bodily eros. The same word, ahavah, covers both; the Song of Songs is scripture; the sexual love of husband and wife is a duty and a joy, not a concession. Love of God and love of a person are different in object, not in kind.
And Judaism does not make love a substitute for justice. Leviticus 19 surrounds its command with wages, weights and courts. Love that does not issue in fair dealing is, in the rabbinic view, not yet love.
Relevance to life
Love is something you do. The deepest Jewish instinct about love, from Leviticus to Fromm, is that it is a practice before it is a feeling. If you wait to feel love before acting lovingly, you may wait a long time; if you act – visit, feed, listen, forgive – the feeling often follows. This is good news for anyone whose feelings are unreliable, which is everyone.
Love that depends on something will not last. Pirkei Avot’s test is a useful one to apply to our own attachments. What is this love for? If it is for what the other person gives me – status, pleasure, comfort – it will end when the giving ends. Love that has become independent of its original cause is the only kind that survives.
Start with the stranger. The Torah’s repeated insistence on loving the outsider, “for you were strangers,” turns our own worst memories into moral resources. The experiences of being excluded, new, foreign or afraid are not just injuries; they are the raw material of empathy. Judaism asks us to use them.
Love includes honesty. “You shall not hate your brother in your heart; you shall surely reprove him” sits right beside “love your neighbour.” A love that never risks a hard conversation is, in the rabbinic view, closer to indifference. The Midrash puts it bluntly: love without reproof is not love.
Build it, don’t just find it. The biblical picture of love growing after commitment challenges the modern assumption that love is something that happens to us and then either lasts or doesn’t. Judaism suggests that daily acts of chesed – small, loyal, unglamorous – are not the aftermath of love but its substance.
You were loved first. Finally, Judaism’s whole structure of love rests on the claim that we did not start it. Whether or not one shares the theology, the psychological point stands: people who know they have been loved find it easier to love. Gratitude is the soil in which the commanded love actually grows.
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Where to start reading
Primary texts (all free online at Sefaria, with English translation)
- Deuteronomy 6: the Shema and the command to love God
- Leviticus 19: love of neighbour and of the stranger
- Song of Songs
- Pirkei Avot 5: love that depends on something
- Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Laws of Repentance, chapter 10: serving God out of love
Overviews
- Love – Jewish Virtual Library (Encyclopaedia Judaica) – a scholarly survey of the concept across Jewish history.
- Love and the Jewish tradition – My Jewish Learning – an accessible introduction to the key commandment.
- Jonathan Sacks, To Heal a Fractured World (2005) – the former British Chief Rabbi on chesed and the ethics of responsibility.
The philosophers
- Martin Buber – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Franz Rosenzweig – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Emmanuel Levinas – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Maimonides – Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Martin Buber, I and Thou (1923), translated by Walter Kaufmann – short and readable.
- Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (1956) – the most popular modern statement of love as a practice.
- Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (1993) and David Biale, Eros and the Jews (1992) – scholarly studies of sexuality and love in Jewish tradition.
