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For the Love of God – By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
RECENTLY A RELATIVE told me about a story I had heard before, though I could not recall where. It is about a man in the camps who had been taken out by a Nazi to be hanged. He was asked if there were anything he wanted before he was killed. He requested his tefillin, which he was given.
As he put on his tefillin, he noticed that Jews who had been collected to watch the killing were crying, and he told them. “Don’t be sad. I am happy to be doing this,” as he sanctified the Name of God one last time.
When the German soldier saw that the Jew was enjoying himself, he pulled him down from the platform and gave him a bunch of rocks to hold. He said, “If you drop any of these rocks, I will shoot you,” and then proceeded to beat the Jew 29 times. By some miracle, the Jew didn’t drop a single rock and, what is even more miraculous, he survived the war.
As I listened to the story, a little voice inside me said, “Hashem! This man was risking his last moments of life to sanctify Your Name, and he even derived enjoyment from the sacrifice. He CLEARLY loved YOU, and this is how YOU responded? By having the enemy take away his tefillin and mercilessly beat him?”
True, his life was saved, but was there no other more peaceful way to do that? Couldn’t there have been a fire, or an air raid…or something else to interrupt the Nazi brutality? Why did this prisoner have to go through what he did? We saw his love. Where was God’s?
The truth is that it did not start or end there. We can go back to Rebi Akiva, who suffered humiliation when he became a ba’al teshuvah at the age of 40 and devoted the rest of his life to Torah. The angels themselves questioned the manner of his death, Rebi Akiva should have passed from this world peacefully, rather than being tortured by the vicious Romans until his dying moment!
Where was God’s love then?
My experience, on the other hand, has been different. I think I have always loved God, but even more so as I get older. And I love to do things to show that I love Him. But I have to admit, when something backfires or doesn’t bring the kind of positive results I expected, I am disappointed, confused, even frustrated. To use the language of the Talmud, I sort of kick the succah on the way out. Love is a two-way street, right?
Wrong, at least not when it comes to God. True, the Mishnah does advocate unconditional love between people, but not to the point that you withstand abuse. When humans don’t reciprocate love, it can be an indication of something wrong. You may love someone with no expectations, but you certainly shouldn’t turn a blind eye to an abusive and unappreciative partner, who certainly means you harm even if he can’t help himself.
When it comes to God, however, we say, “All that God does He does for the good.”
But what if it was for the bad?
That’s what it says: All that GOD does, He does for the GOOD. It means that whatever may seem like the worst thing possible to us is still, ultimately and by definition, for the good. That is why He is called “God,” like the word “good,” to remind us that God, by His very nature, does only good.
This would not have been so hard to see had the first man not messed things up by eating from the Aitz HaDa’as Tov v’Ra, the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Man at the beginning was straightforward, and therefore God could be straightforward with him. Good was good and bad was bad, and never the twain could meet.
When Adam sinned, however, and ate from the forbidden fruit, he changed EVERYTHING. He especially changed the way God worked with us because kabbalistically Adam caused good and evil to mix, with the result that good was in evil and vice-versa. This made history and Hashgochah Pratis–Divine Providence murky.
Accepting Torah at Mt. Sinai 2,448 years later, we had the opportunity to reverse the sin of Adam HaRishon and set things right once again. But that too was short-lived, when the Erev Rav—the Mixed Multitude whose very name implies the mixture of good and evil—built the golden calf. That undid just about all the rectification of Kabbalas HaTorah, making history and Divine Providence murky once again.
Accepting on faith that God only does good is the way we survive the deceptions of history. It means a ONE-WAY outpouring of love for God, from us to Him. He does not need to perform acts that WE can perceive as GOOD, so they can therefore be interpreted by us as acts of love. He loves us. He always has. He always will. He may hate evil, but He loves us, and that is the greatest given of life there is.
The variable in our relationship with God is not HIS love, but OUR love. How far are we prepared to go to love Him? How unconditional can we make our love of God? How strong does our love need to be so that it won’t bend under the pressure of what seems to us to be divine abandonment? These are the only questions that should concern us.
Loving God does not entitle us to anything, at least not in this world. It will entitle us to EVERYTHING in the NEXT WORLD. In this world it is a tremendous merit to be able to love God, and to find ways to express that love. Fortunate and blessed is the one who truly feels love of God in his heart. Happy will be the one who can experience that without looking for signs of God’s love in return.
Make no mistake about it. If you truly love God, then God will truly love you—and the truth is that He will love you even if you don’t return the love. And also make no mistake about the fact that He loves to show you His love in this world too, when the situation allows. But the one mistake you should NEVER EVER make is that if YOUR love of God does not result in what you think should be an act of HIS love, that it means HIS love isn’t there.
It IS there, more than we can ever know, for now at least. Later, when history comes to a close and the yetzer hara is no more, with all evil gone from the world, we’ll see the truth. And we’ll be overwhelmed by just how much God has ALWAYS loved us.
