Parshah Commentary
This week’s parshah, Vaetchanan, continues Moses’s farewell speech to the Israelites. In the Book of Devarim’s characteristic style—emotive, exhortative, lyrical—the parshah concludes with a description of God’s love for the divinely “treasured people.” Moses explains, “It is not because you are the most numerous of peoples that God desired you and chose you; indeed you are the smallest of peoples. But it was because God loved you.” As the medieval Spanish commentator Rabbeinu Bachya writes, citing the verse in Proverbs “a numerous people is the glory of a king,” we might have expected God to choose a mighty and multitudinous nation, one able to extol God’s name more widely. But God’s choice of the Israelites is not about God’s honor. It is simply about love—and a particular idea of love. God does not love the Jewish people because of their valor or strength or wit; they have no attribute that explains God’s love for them and have done nothing to merit it. This view of love is echoed in the work of American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, who writes in his book The Reasons of Love that “what we love and what we fail to love is not up to us.” For Frankfurt, “what we love necessarily acquires value for us because we love it.”
There’s something very romantic about such a notion of love. It expresses how, as Frankfurt writes, “there are no necessities of logic or of rationality that dictate what we are to love.” Indeed, I could tell you all the many wonderful traits I love about my spouse, but those traits are insufficient to explain my love. If you were to provide me with another person who also had that exact same list of characteristics, they would still not be dear to me in the way my spouse is. This quality of love gives it a kind of numinous aura, helping it transcend the strictures of earthly rationalism. By applying this sense of unaccountable relationality and inexplicable passion to God’s love for the Jewish people, we can better understand the magical, mysterious irrationality of the feeling of being in relationship with the Divine.
But I’m not sure we can read the verses about God’s fervent love for the Jewish people without considering them in the context of the lines that introduce them: “When the Lord your God brings you to the land that you are about to enter and possess, and casts out many nations before you—the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites, seven nations much larger than you—and the Lord your God delivers them to you and you defeat them, you must doom them to destruction; grant them no covenant and extend them no mercy.” The verses are chilling and disturbing enough in their own right, to say nothing of how they have been interpreted: for instance, the halachically and morally misguided ruling that understands this as a prohibition on renting or selling homes to Arabs. In light of this preface, we ought to wonder: Is the particularism of the Book of Devarim’s love part and parcel of its genocidal injunctions? Love as unexplainable preference may have low stakes when talking about our own intimate circles, but this changes dramatically when it comes to peoples and nations.
Again and again throughout his book, Frankfurt asserts that it is “a necessary feature of love that it is not under our direct and immediate voluntary control”—in short, that we cannot choose what we love. But there are hints within the text that trouble this claim, and ultimately complicate his account of love. Frankfurt admits that we have some choice in what we care about; I think the crucial element missing in his account is the ways that care can slide into love. If what or who we love is the outgrowth of what or who we know and choose to learn about and put ourselves in proximity to—and thus what we care about—then even if we may not have full choice in what we love, we have more agency than Frankfurt allows for.
Indeed, in his Laws of Teshuva, the Rambam explains that the greater knowledge we have of something, the more we are able to love it. Commenting on a verse from our parshah—the famous first verse of the V’ahavta prayer, ”you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your might”—the Rambam writes, “One can only love God [as an outgrowth] of the knowledge with which one knows God. One’s love is dependent upon one’s knowledge. A small [amount of knowledge means] a lesser love. A greater [amount of knowledge means] a greater love.” This observation entails a responsibility to seek knowledge: to learn about others, to put ourselves in their proximity. Even in the domain of love, there is a politics to what we choose to care about, and thus to what we love.
Maya Rosen is an associate editor at Jewish Currents.
