By Rabbi Leonard Rosenthal
SAN DIEGO — Parashat Va-etchannan contains the first paragraph of the Shema: “Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.”
Since the Torah is never redundant, the Rabbis suggested the differences between loving God with your heart, your soul, and your might.
Rashi says that loving God with all your heart means that one should be wholehearted, completely at one with God. Loving God with all your soul means to love God even when God takes your soul from you at the moment of death. Loving God with all your might means loving God with all of your material possessions.
The third way of loving God, with all of your material possessions, is oddly different from the first two. Loving God wholeheartedly, even at the moment of death, has to do with one’s emotions and inner spiritual life. Loving God with money and property seems crass…at least until one has a better sense of what the rabbis were driving at.
The collection of midrashim known as Sifrei explains: “There are some people whose property is dearer to them than their lives and it is on this account that there is added ‘with all your property.'”
(This reminds me of the old Jack Benny sketch in which he is held up at gunpoint and the robber says, “Your money or your life,” to which Benny replies, “I’m thinking!”)
The Chofetz Chaim wrote: “The Torah emphasizes that we should love God with that which we value the most. Since some people value money more than anything else, the Torah instructs them to love God with all of their wealth. But the intent is for people to love God more than anything else. Therefore if a person loves to perform mitzvot more than anything else, that person should even defer a mitzvah in order to love God.”
This is an astounding statement! Normally we think of performing mitzvot as a way of loving God. What could the Chofetz Chaim possibly have had in mind?
I am not sure what he meant, but I will propose my own theory: There are some Jews who are so fixated on performing the minutiae of Jewish ritual that they lose sight of the forest for the trees. That is, they are so concerned about which blessing to say when and whose kashrut to trust, that they forget that the purpose of mitzvot is to bring one to love of God and love of God’s creatures. Their punctilious observance may lead them to think that they are better than other Jews and forget one of the Torah’s most important mitzvot: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
The Torah reminds us to love God with our heart, soul, and might. Nothing should come before love of God, not money and not ritual behaviorism. We should use both to honor God and not to diminish God.
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Rabbi Rosenthal is spiritual leader of Tifereth Israel Synagogue. He may be contacted via leonard.rosenthal@sdjewishworld.com