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How Do You Make Someone Love You?
Can you imagine being deeply in love with someone who does not share your feelings? I think it must be incredibly painful and lonely. If you cannot “move on,” then it becomes something of an obsession.
How could you fix it? How do you make someone love you? And by love, I don’t mean merely inspiring desire or companionship, I mean a deep spiritual and physical hunger, one that is only temporarily ameliorated – never entirely satisfied – even by being together.
Other relationships are more straightforward. If you are superior in some way, then I imagine that occasional reminders are enough to command respect. If you are powerful, it is not hard to inspire fear. Parents can achieve both with their children, but neither is the same thing as love.
I think of fear or awe, especially, as being responses to the visual. In part this is because the Hebrew for fear, “yirah”, shares the same root word as “sight”. When we see things we react to them, even though those things may be superficial – think of a gorgeous person or a terrifying monster. It is a reaction that does not require much (if any) thought. Every child can be afraid; it is an instinctive response.
Consider it this way: you can admire a picture or a vision or a person without any other interaction: just as watching television requires no feedback to the actors or producers of a show, so, too, we can be afraid of drought or an earthquake without any acknowledgement or requirement that the rain or earth are conscious of our fear.
By contrast, love requires a combination of factors, from respect to empathy to understanding. It requires interaction, not merely admiration from afar. Interaction between intellectual and spiritual beings is tied to thought – and we think about the things that we hear. Love is a thoughtful interactive thing, and so it is intrinsically tied to the idea of “hearing.”
The Hebrew for this is “shma” and it has no direct English equivalent. “Shma” in Hebrew really means to listen, to think about, to internalize, to chew over. Shma does not suggest obedience, but the acknowledgement that information has been received and will be considered. When we listen to someone we love, we may not agree, but we are engaged and thinking about what they have to say – and vice-versa.
The problem is that it is easier to scare someone than it is to make them think. In other words, if one is powerful, inspiring fear is easy. But inspiring love is much, much more difficult. All the things that a person does to show love to someone else, the thoughtful gestures, the gentle words, the small acts of consideration… these only reach the object of our desire if they are listening.
I think this is a key problem not only between people, but between G-d and man. The Torah is full of G-d’s desire for us to love Him, and providing the symbols and systems in the commandments through which that love can be nurtured and grown. But when we forget G-d’s presence, whether because of idleness or selfishness or simple risk aversion, then we no longer notice all the ways in which we are blessed and through which G-d is calling out to us for a relationship, and for conversation.
G-d’s problem is that the tools to inspire love in mankind are, as we have said, quite limited. Making someone love you is not trivial. But making someone fear you, if you are G-d, is easy enough. So the Torah is full of threats of consequences and punishments for when the Jewish people forget to fear G-d.
Can you imagine trying to make someone love you by threatening them, and punishing them? By making them suffer? It is, to put it mildly, a terrible way to show that you care.
And yet: what else works? What maintains some tenuous connection between man and our creator?
G-d has tried everything. Death. Suffering. Destruction. He has used people who hate Jews as tools to remind Jews of our connection and relationship (the entire Book of Esther is about this). Anti-semitism across the ages is, to me, nothing more than a divine reminder to the Jewish people of what happens when we are not engaging with G-d, loving him in hearing and thinking and speech, as well as through our deeds. Anti-semites are mere symptoms of the underlying disease: that we are not fully engaged in growing our relationship with G-d in love.
Holocausts are a terrible solution to this problem. But perhaps we gave G-d no other choice?
G-d appears to be stuck on the same question that I ask in the title: How can He make us LOVE him? How can he make us not only see and do, but also listen and think? G-d does not want automatons or servants; He wants mankind to be His partner. And that requires love.
How do you make someone love you?
Published in General
The Torah has no problem with non-Jews having a relationship with G-d. We know Bilaam was a prophet, for example.
Nor do Jews seek to make the world Jewish; Christians have their own religion and relationship, and that is fine. We certainly DO have a preference for non-Jews practising the so-called Noachide Laws, as we think mankind as a whole are charged with these.
Who are those who are or tend to be Anti-Semitic? Are there characteristics by which to identify or classify them? One can see there is something going on that moves whole nations and groups to be anti-Israel. And some nations not having issues specifically about Israel have never made any moves to eradicate long-standing Anti-Semitism in their population, unlike in America. For example, there are frequently reports that certain nations, Saudi Arabia comes to mind, that forbid entry to Jews. Is that Jews, in general, or just those from Israel or those who can be identified as having been in Israel? How much of the animosity from states like Saudi Arabia and Iran, very different in other regards, is solely about the Jewish state of Israel and its alleged displacement of Palestinians, versus their Anti-Semitism being directed at Jews generally and not about Israel?
Saudi Arabia by law does not allow Jewish prayer articles to enter the country.
Most Arab states also forbid anyone with an Israeli passport, or a stamp in their passport that shows they have even visited Israel. For this reason, Israel no longer stamps passports.
None of it is about the Palestinians. That is just a pretext. Israel’s existence is an offense to Islam, both geographically and ideologically.
In a temporal but broad worldly context, I think similarly about America’s former effort to get the rest of humanity to recognize the good that results when individuals are free, markets are free, and government is small. Now, we can’t even convince ourselves.
This was the point of the movie Bruce Almighty. A very, very silly film where Jim Carrey’s character is temporarily given the power of G-d, but even with that he couldn’t make his girl friend love him.
What is love? I don’t think of it as a feeling. Feelings come and go. I think of it as doing good for/to another person simply for their own good. Love your neighbor as yourself. It’s a choice and an action. Why should anyone make that choice? I suppose I think that the counter is more important: why wouldn’t someone make that choice?
Hmmm, I’m not exactly sure. Perhaps one chooses not to love if the cost of loving is more than can be paid. Perhaps one is too corrupted by vice (greed, envy, lust, pride, gluttony, sloth, wrath, etc). Perhaps one is simply unaware of a person as an individual person; it’s difficult to love in the abstract and easier when it’s a real full person right in front of you.
If you mean romantic love, then physical attraction is probably the most prominent added ingredient. We have some control over how attractive we are to others; we can take steps to make ourselves more lovable (as RushBabe said). If you mean the romantic love of our lives to the point of a commitment to permanent marriage then it’s a combination of many things: attraction, shared values (including a shared understanding of priorities), shared goals, timing, respect, a consistent record of loving, reciprocity.
Who is so perfect and unchanging as to keep all of those balls in the air over decades of life together? No one. That’s why the sacrament of marriage is such a blessing (among the other sacraments which help us imperfect humans make our way back to grace after having inevitably sinned). It allows a loving couple to weather the moments of weakness and vice, of pain and score keeping, of indifference.
You always give us food for thought, iWe.
The way to express love for G-d is the same way a child expresses love for parents, by doing what they want. G-d wants us to follow halacha or Torah law. If we do that meticulously, love for Him will follow.
In our prayers we say “VeAhavta” (Ve = and) (Ahavta = you shall love) “And you shall love the Lord your G-d . . .”
The “And you shall love the Lord your G-d” (Deut. 6:5) comes immediately after we declare “Hear, Israel, the Lord our G-d, the Lord is one”(Deut. 6:4), meaning that love follows allowing him into our lives, into each and every action, in recognizing Him in everything that happens to us, in every waking moment — which means living by his desires with every breath. “Shema” in this context is generally understood as meaning “obey.”
“And you shall love the Lord your G-d” — in the Pentateuch, “and” involves a connection to what came before — is the inevitable consequence of obedience to G-d’s desires which ultimately become our desires, too. In this context fear of G-d is understood since you fear to disobey — you would never dream of disobeying — the one you love!
Otherwise you can’t make someone love you. Love can’t be extracted or coerced – it can only be given.
I won’t pretend to understand God. It’s a confounding mystery to me. However, if God’s proposition for us is to love Him….. or else, then I don’t think that whatever response comes next could ever be love because that’s not a choice of good for the sake of good. It’s a defensive measure at that point the same way a local shopkeeper might pay “respect” to the local mob boss who’s extorting him.
Perhaps God isn’t expecting anything from us. Maybe He simply gives us gifts of sacraments, religion, liturgy, grace, mercy, law in order that our lives might be meaningful. We still have to choose to accept those gifts.
Why wouldn’t we accept them? Because…… I don’t know. And yet I know that we (I) reject these gifts with regularity. Vice, I guess. Consuming all around me, destroying all around me, defiling all around me, instead of building and giving. Turning inward instead of beaming outward. Satan giving his anti-gifts? I don’t know. As I say, it’s all a mystery to me.
I am not so sure. Actions born of fear of heaven do not necessarily translate into love of heaven.
But the question I ask is the other way around: G-d does not want us to fear him – he wants us to love. Fear is a poor second-best.
And it seems to me that thousands of years of human history have demonstrated that if there is a magic way to inspire love in mankind for G-d, then G-d has not invoked it.
I disagree most strenuously. There is no word in Biblical Hebrew for “obey”. Modern Hebrew had to invent one.
Besides, “Obey, Israel, the Lord our G-d, the Lord is one” is entirely nonsensical. The statement of G-d’s “oneness” by itself inspires confusion and questions and argumentation. It is not a command for someone to merely “obey”.
I agree. And I think that G-d rejects relationships based on protection rackets (the way Cain and Korach saw it). That way is fear and respect of power – not love at all.
This is also silly. I love and adore my wife. But we would never characterize our relationship as containing “obedience.”
Jews are unique in the religious pantheon in that we have a tradition of challenging G-d and arguing with Him. THAT is part of love and not fear.
Isn’t that the case with almost every human alive? How hard can that be to imagine?
Deeply in love? I can’t imagine.
I’m with @susanquinn here. Because I would imagine it as a process moving incrementally but jointly so one would not reach ‘deeply’ without some reciprocity.
There are lots of rules and regulations that one can comply to without much feeling or emotion, but a command to love . . . you can’t fake that one. I think that is what separates the Bible from a lot of other religious writings. It requires a relationship.
One thing I know for sure is that I love Beethoven. He grabs you by the scruff of the neck and makes you love him!
as played by an orchestra in Trump’s favorite foreign land:
I finally figured it out. Love is about authenticity. That’s why we love Beethoven. You know that when his music comes on, you are getting the real deal, unadulterated passion. And that’s why we love Trump more every day. His authenticity stands out in stark contrast to the phoniness of just about everything around him.
Lucky you.
But the reciprocity is always subject to change . . .