In the Torah, in the Book of Devarim, Chapter 6: Verse 5, we are commanded as follows: “You wall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Every word in this sentence has many interpretations. The entire sentence has multiple meanings.
The word “love” has an incredible number of meanings. These have been expressed and written about in literature and cave walls from time immemorial. There are poems and books and essays and plays and images. All are trying to convey the sense of the concept of love. Each author thinks she or he has touched the essence of this term.
Each may be correct, despite the wide variety out there.
The preponderance of the writing about love refers to the love of one person for another, love of a place or a thing or an animal or a plant, love of an artistic creation, love of a concept or idea, and many others. What these objects of love have in common is that they all have a material or physical aspect to them. Even a concept, like democracy, is associated with its potential actualization in the real world.
To love God carries no envisioning that there will appear some kind of manifestation of that entity. God is unique in being 100% spirit. Physical actualization is not a potential for God.
Love of God means to feel so strongly about God that one wants to be like God. Of course, being like God is a prime directive. We are commanded to be like God. Thus, we are told to connect with the spiritual world. The ethereal is part of our nature and being.
“Loving” God is nothing akin to “loving” another person or anything else we really care about. God issues a directive to love God. We do not follow orders to have an emotion. Loving God is embracing the God-like within us.
Loving God is strongly wanting, with joy in our hearts and in our minds, to activate our heavenly powers. When we become more like God, we are closer to God. Sharing something in common bonds. God is always and only spiritual. We are so caught up in our physical that we have to work hard to bring in our spiritual.
Learning to love God does not mean to teach oneself to have a certain emotion. Nor does it mean that we have to feel a certain way which does not arise naturally. Nor must we even desire to be like God. We need not I even care about God. It is not necessary to recognize that there is a God.
Within the context of believing in the existence of God, we are told to love God by concentrating on that aspect of ourselves which is similar to God. That aspect would be the soul. The soul is the spiritual portion of our human condition.
God commands us to be like God because this is how we enhance our lives in the physical realm. God wants each of us to have the greatest benefit that one can attain from life. And the way to that reward is to make ourselves like God. The path to that reward is coming closer to the spiritual selves. This is loving God.
Creating love for God involves enhancing our relationship and experience with one’s soul.
In life, we each have opportunities to enhance many aspects of our selves. We strive to build and refine our relationships and our pursuits. A person can develop her mind and body, skills and wisdom, and anything else imaginable. People naturally become attached to the things that we desire to become. It is human to seek to enrich life. All of these endeavors make living a better experience. They make the world a better place.
Activating the soul brings us closer to God whether that is our conscious concern or not. Building one’s spiritual nature affects our lives even if that is not one’s purpose in doing so.
The way to relate and connect to the soul is through meditation. This is a process of distancing from the material world by focusing the mind and pushing distraction away. The Torah teaches that following God’s commandments is a means of hitching to the soul. Any meditative activity activates the soul.
An ultimate result of establishing a relationship with the soul is to improve the experience of life in the physical world. The result of coupling the material with the spiritual if often unpredictable. The outcome may not be what predict or desire. It is the consequence of the interaction of the earthly and heavenly powers.
Everybody meditates in their lives. Whenever someone concentrates of a task, thought, idea, or feeling, that person is meditating. Binding the spiritual to the physical creates the unexpectedly wonderful.
Nonlinear life events arise from the alliance of these symbiotic worlds. Meeting the right person, finding the ideal career path,
“accidental” discoveries, epiphanies, serendipity, and luck are experienced by most people. It may not be a blinding light, but this type of life event is common. It is the mysteries of life that science cannot answer. These imponderables were ignited by those meditative moments, intentional or not.
We can have more of them. We can exercise our contemplative skills. Then the heavenly powers unite with the earthly to bring forth miraculous change. lose observation may suggest less obvious things are affected by this activity.
One might argue that there need not be a soul to benefit from meditating. This may be true. If meditation leads to a better life, that neither negates nor proves the existence of the soul. We certainly do not need a soul for meditation to help lower blood pressure or reduce stress reactions.
Proving the existence of God or the soul is not possible. Recognizing the interaction as I have described it seems to offer coherency. Each person must decide.
The commandment to love God presupposes acceptance of the existence of a spiritual deity. God tempts people to use their humanity to optimize life. Making ourselves Holy like God means harnessing our God-like spirituality to bridge the heavenly and earthly realms. Building this connection is what love of God is all about. By creating the physical world, the potential to combine it with the spiritual world is also created. The two complete us and heal our reality.
What does it mean to love God “with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might”? Meditating involves every aspect of what a human being is. This process should consume us when we pursue it. The act is physical, emotional, and intentional. Success requires we desire to love God. Our sincerest inclinations drive the task. Urging ourselves from our fundamental depths assures progress. The more totally involved, the greater the attainment. Ideally, nothing that we are is left aside as we scale the heights of our potentials.
Health and Spirit by Dr. Jack Zoldan 