Love: Ahavah (אַהֲבָה)
I Give, Therefore I LoveBy Mendel Kalmenson and Zalman Abraham
There are few experiences in life as powerful and transformative as love. And yet, there are few words as hard to define.
Contemporary Western culture is obsessed with love, particularly romantic love. Movies, books, songs, advice columns, talk shows, tabloids—our collective consciousness and media marketplace is saturated with images and stories of such love lost, won, renewed, and unrequited.
And yet, when one compares the idealized version of love glorified in popular culture with the facts on the ground—the sharply increasing divorce rate, the broken families, the millions of chronically lonely people—it seems that there is a profound disconnect between our idyllic expectations and actual reality.
The Jewish tradition has a lot to say about love. Love of G‑d, love of one’s neighbor, love of the stranger and the dispossessed, love of oneself, and of course, romantic love.
As different as these loves may be, they are all called by the same name, alerting us to the fact that love is multifaceted and complex, not just the stuff of fairy tales or happy endings of Hollywood.
The Hebrew word for love is ahavah, which is rooted in the more molecular word hav,1 which means to give, revealing that, according to Judaism, giving is at the root of love.
What does this etymological insight teach us both about the function of love and about how love functions?
First, love is not all about you, the lover, but about the other, the beloved. Love calls us out of the confines of ourselves and into the wilderness of relationship. It is a transformative experience that dethrones the ego and puts it to work in the fulfillment of the needs and desires of another.
This is beautifully expressed in a teaching of R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, who said that he learned the meaning of love from a drunk.
He once passed two drunks drinking in the gutter and witnessed one saying to the other, “I love you,” to which the other drunk replied, “No, you don’t.” “Yes, I do,” the first protested, “I love you with all my heart.” “If you love me,” the second insisted, “why don’t you know what hurts me?”
Perhaps, what the second drunk was telling his drinking partner was that if he really loved him, he would know that the reason he drank was that he was hurting inside and simply wanted to escape his inner pain and turmoil. The second drunk was rebuking the first for his self-centered approach to their friendship, asserting that: “You don’t really love me at all; you just love how you feel when we’re drinking together…”
True love, then, is not about how you feel in someone else’s presence; it’s about how you make them feel in yours.
A well-known Chasidic parable relates the story of a fisherman who once caught a pike and exclaimed, “This will be for the baron; the baron loves pike!” The pike was extremely relieved to hear this, because he had been afraid his life was about to end. The fisherman then brought the pike to the baron’s head chef, who looked at the pike and exclaimed: “The baron will be so excited; he loves pike!” This brought even greater relief to the fish, along with a surge of anticipation to meet his apparent admirer. However, as soon as the chef brought him into the kitchen and lifted a giant knife to chop the fish into pieces, the pike finally realized, “The baron doesn’t love pike at all; he only loves himself and how I make him feel.”
True love is other-centric and enduring—the opposite of infatuation, which tends to fade quickly. Infatuation is transactional, based primarily on what a person gets out of it, and thus most often leads to relationships of convenience, where every encounter is narrowly focused on what one can take or receive rather than on what they can offer or provide.
Love, on the other hand, is strengthened and prolonged with every act of thoughtfulness and selfless giving.
This leads us to a second major premise of Jewish love: Love is not primarily about how you feel but about what you do.
Famously, the Torah2 commands us to Love your neighbor as yourself. In relation to this verse, many ask: How can we be commanded to feel something for those we don’t have feelings for? One answer is that the command is not focused on internal feelings at all, but on external actions.
In the words of Maimonides:3 “It is a commandment to love one’s fellow as oneself, as stated in the Torah. Therefore, one must speak in praise of his fellow and be concerned for his property, as one is concerned about one’s own property and honor.”
It is worth noting that nowhere in this teaching does Maimonides mention how one is supposed to feel about their neighbor emotionally. Instead, he interprets the commandment behaviorally, as a call to action: speak well of your neighbor, be concerned for their property, and so on.
In framing the commandment this way, Maimonides echoes the famous teaching of Hillel, who interpreted the same commandment to mean: “That which is hateful to you, do not do unto others.”4
According to both Hillel and Maimonides, when it comes to loving our neighbors and fellow citizens, our feelings are secondary. What matters most is our actions and how we treat and relate to others in our midst. What is true for the so-called stranger or neighbor is especially true for those closest to us, including family, friends, and even G‑d: In love, feelings keep us focused on the self; actions are what connect us to others.
Accordingly, the ketubah, the Jewish marriage document, does not contain a single declaration of love. Rather than a compilation of love poems, it is in fact a legal contract that clearly spells out the material marital obligations between a husband and a wife. It is written in Aramaic, which is the legal language of the Talmud, rather than in Biblical Hebrew, the holy tongue.
Though not “poetry,” per se, this ancient document, which frames love and marriage as a binding commitment with concrete behavioral implications and responsibilities, expresses ethically relational poetics of its own.
It is less of a promise to always only feel a certain way and more a promise to always uphold a higher standard of presence and action in relation to one’s beloved. The “poetry” of the ketubah is ultimately expressed through the couple’s life itself, lived as an expression of love beyond the four corners of the ketubah and the four poles of the chuppah.5
Beyond merely conveying the importance of prioritizing actions over feelings, the word ahavah (based on the root “to give”) also communicates a subtle but profound psychological insight into how feelings actually work.
From the romantic perspective, we tend to think of love as a necessary prerequisite to giving—the more we love someone, the more we are capable and willing to give of ourselves to them. In this paradigm, our actions flow unidirectionally from our passion and feelings. From the Jewish perspective, however, the opposite is true—the more we give, the more we love. The act of giving itself is what opens the channels for the feelings to flow and even to grow. In the words of the Sages,6 “One’s heart is drawn after their deeds.”
All that is not to say that one must never base their actions on their feelings, or that feelings are irrelevant. According to the Torah, love—whether of G‑d, one’s fellow, oneself, or one’s partner and family—is so important that we are encouraged, instructed, and even commanded to act in ways that will ensure that this most paramount of emotions is consciously cultivated.
In the final analysis, the emotional sensation we commonly call love is, in fact, a collaborative creation generated by our thoughts, words, and deeds in concert with each other. In this light, love is measured not simply by how much feeling you get from thinking about or being in the company of your beloved, but by how much of yourself (care, consideration, desire, pleasure, and support) you are willing to offer them on the altar of your actions.
