To love others and God, one must first love oneself

Shabbat Nachamu

Va'etchanan

Deuteronomy 3:23-7:11

Isaiah 40:1-26

I recently had the good fortune of spending a week on silent retreat at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, practicing lovingkindness meditation. The practice involves asking (we might say, praying) for one's own well-being, then for the well-being of loved ones, then for people in our lives whom it is more difficult to love, then to all beings. Imagine: 80 people living for a week together in silence, knowing that all of us were spending virtually every waking moment cultivating our own ability to wish the best for every living being.

At the heart of this practice is the assumption that the human heart is naturally loving. Only when the mind is disturbed by pain does the heart turn unkind, angry or even hateful. Clearly, as every child knows, the best antidote to pain is love. This meditation gives us a way to practice responding with love to the large and small pains inside that disturb our fundamentally loving nature. As a result, we will naturally return to feeling a more whole-hearted desire for the well-being of every person we meet, indeed, every person in the world.

I had heard my teacher Sylvia Boorstein talk about this before. I would find myself skeptical. Do I really believe that the human heart is fundamentally loving? Is this a Jewish teaching? After all, we know that Genesis tells us that "the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth" (8:21), and Jewish texts have much to say about the yetzer hara, "the evil inclination." Most of all, I look at my own experience of life, and I am not sure that I believe that the heart is naturally kind.

This week I was thrilled to find this teaching in a Chassidic commentary. The Sefat Emet raises the classic question on the commandment: "You shall love your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might" (Gen. 6:5), in this week's parashah. He asks, as have many before him and since, what sense it makes to command a human emotion. "How is it possible to command love? And what should a person do if s/he lacks the loving feeling? Rather, it becomes clear from this that a feeling of love for God is rooted in the core of every human being. It is necessary to arouse this feeling, and to draw it out from the potential to the actual. This is the mitzvah, 'You shall love': that you should do all those actions that will awaken the dormant potential for love of God"(Itturei Torah, Vol. 6, Page. 48).

I was very excited to find in Chassidic idiom the teaching that the heart is fundamentally loving. But there is more.

Ben Ya'ir Hakohen comments on the oft-noted fact that the commandment "You shall love" appears only three times in the Torah. First, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:18), then, "You shall love the stranger as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt" (Lev. 19:34), and finally, "You shall love the Lord your God" (Deuteronomy 6:5).

There is a rabbinic teaching that "there is no early and late in the Torah," that whether a particular verse appears earlier or later is not significant. In this case, however, he suggests that the order is profoundly meaningful. The commandment to love one's neighbor is prior to the command to love God, because one can only reach love of the Divine through love of other people (ibid.).

What an extraordinary teaching about the dynamics of love. We can only love another to the extent that we love ourselves, basing our desire to wish others well on our own most primal instincts for our own well-being. Then, once we have cared about a loved one (and been loved in return), we can be free to love others, even those outside our own intimate circle. And once we have learned to love everyone, we can come to love the One, the All, the Infinite.

This, says Ben Ya'ir Hakohen, is the meaning of the prayer of the Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria) at the start of every morning service, declaring that one accepts upon oneself the positive mitzvah of loving one's neighbor as oneself, seeking to love everyone as one's own soul.

In a world riddled with violence, hate and fear, there can be no higher mitzvah than wishing for the well-being of all. I, for one, intend to incorporate this prayer into my own morning prayers. Perhaps you will do the same.