“You shall love Hashem your G‑D with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.”

Not the agreeable portion of the heart available after a decent night’s sleep. Not the soul on days when faith is behaving itself. Not whatever might remain after life has finished invoicing you.

All your heart. All your soul. All your might.

I have been trying to understand what that degree of love would feel like and have concluded that the question itself may be wrong. The Torah is perhaps not attempting to measure emotion. Love is not a liquid to be poured into three labelled containers until each reaches the devotional fill line.

The Hebrew describes something more difficult than intense feeling. It describes an undivided self.

B’chol levavcha—with all your heart—is traditionally understood to mean with both inclinations: the noble and the unruly; the part of us that reaches instinctively towards holiness and the part that has to be dragged there while making representations on its own behalf.

B’chol nafshecha—with all your soul—means even when devotion costs you your life.

B’chol me’odecha—with all your “muchness”—means with everything at your disposal: your strength, your circumstances and your possessions. The Sages include money, having observed human nature with their customary absence of sentimentality.

This is not necessarily a command to exist in a state of uninterrupted spiritual passion. Nobody could survive that, and very little laundry would get done. It is a command not to divide yourself—to reserve one part for Hashem while declaring the remaining territory independently governed.

I have wondered whether we can love anything else with comparable depth.

Children, certainly. Animals, inexplicably and often ruinously. Another human being, perhaps.

But no created being can rightfully demand the whole self. Children must eventually separate from us. Partners can fail us. Animals leave us indecently early. To give any of them ownership of our conscience, identity and ultimate meaning would not be the highest form of love. It would be the disappearance........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)