Unbelievable Love
During these days when all Jews are preparing for the Sukkot festival, and also during the days of the festival, this is the time to take into our hearts the tremendous light of Hashem’s love. May we be completely joyful during Sukkot, which is the time of our joy, and during the entire year as well.
Translated from Rabbi Arush’s feature article in the weekly Chut shel Chessed newsletter. The articles focus on his main message: “Loving others as yourself” and emuna.
The World is Changing
Once upon a time, couples would get married and live together for many years, have children, and get along with each other until 120 and have no need to go to marriage counselors or marriage workshops or go on a vacation, just the two of them. Today things are very different.
Today, even couples that love each other very much must invest endlessly in their marriage. The Jewish home is a ship in stormy waters, and even the greatest love experiences ups and downs, difficulties, challenges and tumult.
No couple can manage without investing in the marriage: studying, reading, listening to lectures, sometimes going for treatment or counseling, setting times for a daily one-on-one meeting – quality time – and once a week going on an outing without the children.
And even couples that do everything and indeed invest in their marriage and cultivate it and have an excellent relationship – all the counselors, with no exceptions, will recommend that they break their daily routine and go off at least once a year on a vacation – just the two of them, without the children, and renew their connection to each other and their love for each other!
I’ve heard of couples in which one of the spouses is begging to go on a vacation, but the other spouse says: “Don’t be ridiculous. My parents have been together for fifty years and they never did any such a thing”; “My mother would never dream of leaving the children alone…” and other similar claims.
But clearly, these claims are nonsense. Times have changed, the emotional needs have changed, and the way to serve Hashem when building a Jewish home must be more in keeping with the generation and its needs as well.
Going on Vacation with Father
And if this is true in a worldly connection in which the two spouses can see each other and feel every change and any false note in the connection between them – how much more so when it comes to the connection between us and our Father in Heaven.
Even a Jew who prays three times a day and observes the mitzvahs and listens to classes in Torah and chassidut, and says, morning and night, “An eternal love You have loved us”1, and even manages to perform hitbodedut and speaks to Hashem and thanks Him at length and sings to Him and has a weekly appointment – Shabbat – for enjoying the love of Hashem, still, even he needs a private vacation, a vacation that is one hundred percent love.
And that is precisely what the coming festival of Sukkot is!
“A Sukkah is like a right-handed hug,”2 says Rabbeinu Hakadosh in Likutei Moharan, Tora 48. When we are in the Sukkah, we are abandoning our routine existence, leaving the house and all the ordinary frameworks of life; for seven days we must live in Hashem’s love. Hashem enwraps us completely and we eat and drink and sleep within this great hug of our Father in Heaven!
And if all year round we must remind ourselves repeatedly how much Hashem loves us and all our joy stems from that immense love – how much more so should we experience this love during the holiday known as Zman Simchateinu (the time of our joy), a holiday that is all endless love, and of course, this is precisely the time to strengthen our love of Hashem.
Within My Flesh I Will See G-d
The way to strengthen our love of Hashem is through hitbonenut (examining and thinking). What should we focus on?
Unlike the example we started with – the love in a Jewish home that is a challenge and lifelong task involving work and prayers to build and develop and renew the love – the love of parents for their children is a deep and natural love, imprinted deep within one’s personality. This is not something that one needs to work on.
True, one must learn how to educate children, and know how to behave correctly at home and show good middot (character traits); but the actual love, and the actual limitless wish to do good things for the child and to see the child achieve the heights of success – that is built into our personality, and it does not come from their deeds or talents, rather from the very fact that they are our children.
So too, the connection between father and son is one that can never be broken. It is a reality. And the father’s feelings are always there, no matter what.
Why did Hashem arrange that things should be that way?
So that we will have a good understanding that when Hashem yitbarach calls us in the Torah “You are children to Hashem, your G-d”3, He wants to make it very clear to us that “My connection with you and your connection with me is an unbreakable connection and it is imprinted in the very nature of creation.
“When I created the world, I created it so that Yisrael will be My children forever: ‘My firstborn son, Yisrael.’ And even through all the travails and exiles, through the most difficult troubles – this connection will always exist, and the love will never be terminated.”
Don’t you love your son and want him to have everything good? Give Hashem yitbarach the credit that He is just as good a father as you are…
Other-worldly Love
But still, the tremendous love of parents for their children is only a pale likeness of Hashem’s love for us; because while parents’ love can be grasped and felt in this world, the true love that Hashem loves us cannot be grasped at all – it is completely beyond our conceptions, and yet, the light of this love allows us to feel Hashem’s love for us in this world too, from within our worldly concepts and feelings.
And that precisely is the matter of the lulav. As Rabbi Nachman says, there is a love that we can feel and contain and grasp, and it too is a very great love, for “Love is as powerful as death4 — The love that a father loves his son can be reached by any person”5. But there are levels of love that the world cannot contain, and certainly not understand them, and that is called “Ahava shebeda’at” (love based on understanding) – love that is beyond time and middot and above all grasping: “The connection and love that is between the son and the father when the son is in the father’s mind before the son’s conception – that connection and love we cannot understand now. Because now we can only understand [things] that are within time and middot, and the love that is in one’s da’at and mind is above time and middot and is not clothed in any [spiritual] clothing.”5
The goal of the lulav is to draw out the light of that love that cannot be grasped. And while the Sukkah envelopes us from the outside, the lulav inserts in us love and the knowledge that Hashem loves us – inserts it deeply into the heart.
The light of the ahava shebeda’at, says Rabbi Nachman, is a light that will be fully revealed only in the Next World. We would so like to feel Hashem’s love fully as a love that we can grasp and understand like the love of a father to his son – even more so when we are far away from the ahava shebeda’at, and here we have a once-a-year opportunity: a full week when we can dive into the ocean of Hashem’s love and draw in to us light from the Next World. The more we feel Hashem’s love during Sukkot, so we will be able to live all year round in something of a Next World.
Practically speaking, that means that when we are taking the lulav and shaking it we have the intention to feel a bit more and another bit more of that eternal love that Hashem yitbarach loves us, which is the deep connection between father and son, a connection that nothing in the world can eliminate or break, and that is how we can taste in this world a taste which is something like the Next World.
You Shall Go Out with Love
If we wish to re-enliven our hitbonenut and our emotional connection to loving Hashem, let’s look at the extreme situations in which the love is revealed in full force. An example is brought in Sefer HaTanya: “like the joy of the king when his only son comes back to him after being released from captivity and imprisonment…”6
And this is so relevant to our reality – in the past two years we have seen and heard the unbelievable joy of parents whose son returns from captivity. May Hashem help, and by the time you read this text all the hostages will be in their own homes. One can see the love and the unlimited concern of the flesh-and-blood parents for their children. They truly have no day and no night and they do everything possible, even turning the world upside down for their children.
From this we can learn a molto fortiori (in Hebrew: קל וחומר, בן בנו של קל וחומר) that so is the Creator’s immense love for us, and all this is the love of this world, which is the lowest love, a love that we are able to grasp and understand. What would we say about the ahava shebeda’at that is way beyond days and middot, that belongs to the Next World?
If we could feel even the slightest sense of this love we would be happy all our days, and we would never give up, and we would move forward in all realms of life and experience all salvations.
And now, during these days, when all Jews are clean of their sins and are preparing for the Sukkot festival, and also during the days of the festival, this is the time to take into our hearts the tremendous light of Hashem’s love, and in this merit we will be able to be completely joyful during Sukkot, which is the time of our joy, and during the entire year as well, Amen.
Editor’s Notes:
1 Shacharit, prayers before Kriyat Shema
2 Zohar III, 214b
3 Devarim (Deuteronomy) 14:1
4 Shir HaShirim (Song of Songs) 8:4
5 Likutei Moharan 33:5
6 Sefer HaTanya, Section 1, Chapter 41
Tell us what you think!
Thank you for your comment!
It will be published after approval by the Editor.