Real Love Has Legs
Passover 5783
Rabbi Russ Resnik
The account of our exodus from Egypt is a love story. When we retell it each year at the Passover Seder, it’s framed by four cups of wine that—the sages tell us (Genesis Rabbah 88.5; Exodus Rabbah 6.4)—reflect God’s four-fold promise at the beginning of the story, as he instructs Moses:
Therefore, say to the Children of Israel:
I am Hashem.
I will bring you out from beneath the burdens of Egypt;
I will rescue you from servitude to them;
I will redeem you with an outstretched arm, with great acts-of-judgment,
I will take you for me as a people, and I will be for you as a God;
and you shall know that I am Hashem your God, who brings you out
from beneath the burdens of Egypt. (Exod 6:6–7 Schocken Bible, adapted)
Hashem’s promises to Israel here are highly relational, and even romantic, if I can stretch that term a bit. Translator Everett Fox comments on the final promise, V’lakachti: “I will take you … : This covenant language recalls the vocabulary of marriage in many societies (‘take you,’ ‘be for/to you’).” Or as the Jewish Study Bible has it:
The expression of this relationship (“take” and “be someone’s x”) is modeled on idioms for marrying and adopting (Gen. 4:19; Exod. 2:10; Deut. 24:1–2; 2 Sam. 7:14), implying the intimate nature of the intended relationship between God and Israel.
The romance of Passover is intimate, but it’s not all moonlight and roses; it’s active. Each of the four “I will” promises of Exodus 6 entails a verb. Hashem will act toward Israel on the real-life stage of human history to set us free and quite literally bring us to himself at Mount Sinai. The encounter at Sinai is often imagined in midrash as a wedding scene, with the glory-cloud over the mount providing the wedding canopy or chuppah, the Ten Words of Exodus 20 as the ketubah or wedding contract, and so on.
So, if Passover is a love story, it teaches us that real love has legs.
The feelings are important, of course, but they’re not the leading edge. At Sinai, Hashem promises to act on behalf of his people, and he expects a response of action as well—“Now then, if you listen closely to My voice, and keep My covenant, then you will be My own treasure from among all people (Exod 19:5 TLV); and Moses took the “Scroll of the Covenant and read it in the hearing of the people. Again they said, ‘All that Adonai has spoken, we will do and obey’” (Exod 24:7 TLV).
This year in the UMJC community, we will count the Omer together, as we’ve done for several years now. Following Leviticus 23:15–16, we count the seven weeks from Passover to Shavuot, anniversary of the intimate encounter at Sinai. Our theme this year is the Fruit of the Spirit listed in Galatians 5, and each week we’ll seek to put one fruit (or occasionally two) into practice. In this pursuit, we’ll draw on the wisdom of Mussar, a traditional Jewish practice of developing character by focusing on specific positive traits called middot day by day and week by week. The Union staff has created an Omer journal to lead you through the seven weeks with a deeper look at each fruit of the Spirit and how to nurture it in our lives. You can get a free download here: Sefirat Ha’Omer 5782 (umjc.org).
It’s fitting that Paul opens his list of the fruit of the Spirit with love. Love, after all, is the first word of both of the two great commandments identified by our Messiah—V’ahavta. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and might; and love your neighbor as yourself (Mark 12:28–31).
In line with Mussar practice we’ll treat each fruit of the spirit as a middah (singular form of middot), a positive character trait that we can actively cultivate. Paradoxically, though, lists of middot don’t usually include “love,” or ahavah in Hebrew. Why would that be so? Perhaps because it’s so easy to think of love in vague, sentimental terms, and the middot are always concrete and observable, traits that you can apply in real-life settings today. As we learn in life, sometimes with great sadness, love is easy to talk about, and even to declare, but not always so easy to act on. One expression of love that we can sense in others and practice ourselves is compassion, which is the middah we’ll focus on this week to reflect love as a fruit of the Spirit. Compassion isn’t just “feeling with” someone else (the literal meaning of “compassion” as well as of “empathy”)—it entails embracing that feeling deeply enough to do something about it.
Each week the Omer journal provides real-life prompts to help us practice the fruit of the Spirit. And so this week, with its focus on love/compassion, we might ask ourselves . . .
Who do I have difficulty showing compassion to?
And what can I do to show them compassion this week?
Who else can I reach out to this week to extend compassion?
Part of the genius of Mussar is transforming bothersome, distracting, or difficult life circumstances into opportunities for character development. If I happen to be working on the middah of patience and I arrive at the busy intersection just as the yellow light switches to red, I don’t have to fret—I’m getting a mini-workout in patience! Or I might imagine myself walking down the road from Jerusalem to Jericho in ancient times. I catch sight of a guy by the side of the road who looks like he needs help and I don’t talk myself out of getting involved, although there might be some good reasons to do so. Instead, I realize this is a crash course in compassion—just what I need!—and I pursue it with a whole heart and a generous purse. The guy gets the help he needs and I get the workout in love/compassion that I need.
Real love has legs, and life provides plenty of opportunities to walk with those legs. Starting this week with the fruit of love, may we respond to the opportunities for good that life presents to us. May the Spirit who bears fruit in our lives lead us in cultivating that fruit in the weeks ahead!