The Beatles got it right. Love is a crucial component of our ability to be in the world. “Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time — It’s easy.” When we are loved, we learn to be ourselves. Lately, though, it seems that we need more love than before to be able to get what we need to be able to be.
I am not talking about the romantic love celebrated on Valentine’s Day. I am also not talking about the love family members normally extend to each other and are now thwarted by the pandemic. I am talking about God’s love, or for those less theologically inclined, the kind of love the world might show you just because. We need that love.
The Hebrew word for love is ahava. It appears throughout the Hebrew Scriptures. As best I can translate it, ahava means loyal, devoted, and solicitous. We are commanded to “love Adonai our God with all our heart, all our soul, and all our worth” (Deuteronomy 6:5). We are commanded to “love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). Repeatedly in the Prophets, we are told that God’s love is an “everlasting love.” In each case, the Hebrew is the same, ahava.
There is an uncomfortable Jewish joke about how a good Jewish parent demonstrates love for a child. The child brings home a test from school. Perhaps the child is beaming with pride, it depends on who is telling the story. The parent looks at the test and notices the grade. It’s an A, 96 percent. What do the Jewish parents do? They turn to the child and, instead of offering words of praise, ask, “What happened to the other four points?” The “love” here is the belief in the child that perfection is totally within reach, in fact, it is expected.
More recently, this belief separated from reality. “Helicopter parents” believed in their child’s abilities so much that the parent would contact teachers and professors to demand that grades be adjusted to reflect the child’s ability, not their work. While the temptation may be to say that the parents loved themselves a bit too much to admit their child might have underachieved, the reality is the parent believed loyally, devotedly, and solicitously in their child.
What changed? When did it become so important for a parent to take on this role? Our world has become a more and more competitive meritocracy. We are supposed to be able to succeed on our own effort despite limited opportunities and more people vying for them. What’s more, that competition has some deep theological underpinnings.
Michael Sandel, in his book “The Tyranny of Merit,” analyses the Protestant work ethic in its religious and secular forms. He states, “the meritocracy of our day bears the mark of the theological contest from which it emerged. The Protestant work ethic began as a tense dialectic of grace and merit, helplessness and self-help. In the end, merit drove out grace.” We prove our status as graced through our success, or at least our hard work. We are meant to show our love for God by seeking election with no way to know our status in God’s eyes. The more we focus on the work and less on God, the more we feel our success or failure is proof of our worth. We are wrong!
Life is not a zero-sum game. I do not succeed because you fail, and I do not need to fail for you to succeed. Like my namesake, Jeremiah prophesied, “With an everlasting love, I love you, therefore I extend you grace” (31:3). Grace and love are there for us without limit. The challenge is to see ourselves and each other as equally able to attain our unique perfections. That’s the love we need. May that love help us learn to be not against each other, but for each other; not for limited access, but for equal opportunity; and not for status and accolades, but for grace and humility. All we need is love.
About Rabbi Jeremy Winaker
Rabbi Jeremy Winaker is the executive director of the Greater Philadelphia Hillel Network, responsible for West Chester University, Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and other area colleges. He is the former head of school at the Albert Einstein Academy in Wilmington and was the senior Jewish educator at the Kristol Hillel Center at the University of Delaware for four years. Rabbi Winaker lives in Delaware with his wife and three children.
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