The Length of Your Days
Loving God Means Loving Love
“For I am commanding you today to love the Lord your God…” (Deuteronomy 30:17)
אֲשֶׁ֨ר אָנֹכִ֣י מְצַוְּךָ֮ הַיּוֹם֒ לְאַהֲבָ֞ה אֶת־יְהֹוָ֤ה אֱלֹהֶ֙יךָ֙
“Love God and listen to God’s voice for It is your life and the length of your days…” (Deuteronomy 30:20)
לְאַֽהֲבָה֙ אֶת־יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֔יךָ לִשְׁמֹ֥עַ בְּקֹל֖וֹ וּלְדׇבְקָה־ב֑וֹ כִּ֣י ה֤וּא חַיֶּ֙יךָ֙ וְאֹ֣רֶךְ יָמֶ֔יךָ
“It is your life and the length of your days” is as serious as it gets, yet the referent of the Biblical verse, which we read in this week’s parasha, Nitzavim, is ambiguous. Like a link that says “Here’s the key to immortality” and you click on it and it’s broken.
We should probably know what our life and the length of our days refers to, yet it seems like it could be one of a handful of things, such as:
1) “God” or “God’s voice” (the direct object)
2) “Loving God” and “listening to God’s voice” (the subjective activity and experience)
3) “Being in covenant with God” (the relationship)
Reading “It” as God, as subjective activity/experience, or as relationship gives us three different ways of relating not just to the meaning of the verse, but to the existential task of living a meaningful life, and in this particular case, a religious one.
In paradigm 1, the good life is a template we must fit ourselves into. Call this the Platonic model. Absolute truth exists and we can reach it or miss it, depending on some combination of effort and luck, skill or grace. With Rosh Hashana coming this week, the objective model is a familiar one. There is an actual yardstick against which we measure our shortcomings and seek to improve or rectify them. Self-evaluation is unreliable.
In paradigm 2, the subjective one, popularized by modern thinkers from Kant and Fichte to Nietzsche and Kierkegaard, the reality or worthiness of the love object is basically irrelevant; it is an afterthought as compared to the intensity of the choice to love in the first place. Choosing makes it so. Truth is what we create rather than discover. What matters is not God’s lovability, but my commitment to love God, no matter what. Stop waiting for the perfect match and embrace the fact that things become dear only insofar as you value them. The Festival Kiddush offers us an aspect of this sentiment when it says “These are the appointed festival times of the divine that you pronounce at their appointed times.” In short, holidays are human constructs whose holiness would vanish without our attention and declaration.
The third paradigm is a kind of hedge or bridge between the first two. There really is something out there, some objective measure, but what matters is not whether we know it, but how we bear ourselves in relationship to it. Paul Tillich says that faith is the state of “being ultimately concerned.” On its own this sounds like paradigm 2. But he qualifies it when he writes that one can only be ultimately concerned about something which commands ultimate concern, namely God. If we were ultimately concerned about the wrong thing, about a non-ultimate object or endeavor, paradigm 1 would say this is idolatry while paradigm 2 would say “live and let live.” Error is in the mind of the beholder.
On Rosh Hashana, the God of Paradigm 1 says, “Why didn’t you do these good things and why did you do these bad things?” The God of Paradigm 2 says, “Why were you not more yourself, more creative, more individuated, more bold, more ‘authentic?’” The God of Paradigm 3 says, “Why did you turn away from yourself and in so doing turn away from me and my commandments? Why did you relate to my commandments externally, behavioristically, superficially? Why did you think you were exempt from bringing your full self into the study and observance of law, either by renouncing it as irrelevant or by accepting it as merely obligatory?”
Much ink has been spilled and will continue to be spilled on the question of how God, or anyone, for that matter, can command us to love. But the question itself should be broken down into its constituent parts: is the commandment to love a commandment to love the right object (God), to love in the right way or mode (i.e., to be the right kind of self) or to love love itself, affirming relationship as something special that needs us but is not merely a function of us or of the love object alone?
While I take all three approaches to be plausible and meaningful, I believe the third is most compelling and comprehensible. The call to love God—who is the ultimate mystery—is a call to love love, to affirm ourselves as beings who are fundamentally relational. Relationship is the tangible expression of the mysterious, “the between” in which we experience and glimpse God, the God in ourselves and the God in the other person.
To love God is to love the fact that relationships are dynamic and singular. Idolatry is the attempt to reduce all relationships to the same model, to view another person through a set of pre-established rules or norms, or to take another person for granted by defining them exclusively and reductively through your knowledge of their past behavior.
By loving love, and by loving others, we come to love God. The practice of loving another person is, in micro-, a fulfillment of the command to love God.
What does it mean that “loving God” or “loving love” is the “length of our days”? Typically, orech yamecha gets translated as “a long life.” That is, the reward for loving God is longevity.
Viewed existentially, though, orech yamim, “length of days,” might be understood less in terms of “days on earth” and more in terms of Einsteinian relativity or Heideggerian temporality: an elongated day is a day of presence, a day of not worrying when the day will end, a day without FOMO, a day that feels like the day, today, hayom.
The simple meaning of verse 30:20 is that God is commanding the people hayom, on that day, or from that day onwards, to love God. The contract only becomes binding as of that moment. But the existential read of it is that Hayom and ahava are connected. Only by being present can one love, only by loving can one see that this day is the day. Only by affirming the singularity of one’s relationships and the singularity of oneself can one feel a sense of purpose to being here. Nobody else could live this life for me. I can send an agent or substitute (or bot) to do all manner of perfunctory tasks on my behalf. But the most holy (revolutionary?) acts cannot be automated. I can’t appoint someone to love in my place. True love is non-transferable. God makes a covenant with an entire people, yet each person is commanded to experience her own covenant with God as “non-fungible.”
Rosh Hashana is not simply the birthday of the natural world; it is the birthday of the existential world, the world in which consciousness seeks to know itself in and through relationship to another consciousness. It is the birthday of relationship or what Heidegger would call “being-in-the-world.” To love God is to love existence itself. And so whether we think of Rosh Hashana as an anniversary or a birthday it is a time to recognize the divinity disclosed in our earthly relationships and the earthiness of our relationship to the divine.
Judgment, atonement, and forgiveness, which are the themes of the Days of Awe and that culminate in the day of Yom Kippur are secondary to the grounding insight that the divine is committed to us and seeks our commitment to commitment.
God does not promise a pleasant or sweet life to those who love. God promises a fulfilling one, even if one that includes suffering. But on Rosh Hashana, we wish each other a sweet year, for there is nothing sweeter than existence itself, no greater joy than a life of earnest, devoted presence.
Shabbat Shalom and Shana Tova,
Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh
P.S.—I’ll be leading a discussion on Heidegger and the Purpose of Art on September 9. Sign up here.
Etz Hasadeh is a Center for Existential Torah Study.
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