A WORD ABOUT LOVE
February 14, 2003
Rabbi Edward Paul Cohn
Temple Sinai
New Orleans, Louisiana
I suppose it all began about 30 years ago when someone told me how students at the Atlanta Jewish day School were forbidden to exchange Valentine cards. It seems the headmaster determined that Valentine's Day was too Christian an observance. Since then, I have engaged in a one-man crusade to canonize the day on our Jewish calendar, "Yom ha-Valentine." It is my firm suspicion that, in its first year, it will outdraw L'ag B'omer in popularity! 5:1!
I readily admit that Valentine's Day was originally named after a Christian saint-three saints, to be more accurate. There was a priest who lost his head in Rome in 269 CE. There was a Bishop Valentine who lost the same appendage in the same city 4 years later. And there was a third St. Valentine who lost something equally vital in Africa-just when, no one is quite sure.
The point is this. February 14th had long ago become special day of celebration for the pagans, and when Christianity came on the scene, the day was adopted in an "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy. None of these previously mentioned Saints Valentine are currently recognized as saints by today's church calendar-only Hallmark's!
So you see, my friends, religious objections really do not hold. And besides, it has always been "our day"--a special day for me and my Valentine. The day centers on all of the right moods and themes with which today's terrorism and war-weary world desperately needs to become intimately reacquainted.
Not long ago a columnist wrote this:
everyone I know is either falling in love, wanting to fall in love, in love- or in court.
Truth is, everyone wants it, but few of us can define love. Says one high school sophomore, responding to his teacher's assignment to write a definition of love:
Love is that feeling you feel when you feel you are going to have a feeling you have never felt before.
Well, that was a good try anyway.
The late Charles Schultz once portrayed in his cartoon, Peanuts, Lucy's
admitting to Charlie Brown:
You know what I don't understand? I don't understand love.
"Who does?" says Charlie. To which Lucy replies, "Explain love to me, Charlie Brown." And Charlie answers:
You just can't explain love. I can recommend a book, a poem or a painting, but I can't explain love.
"Well, try, Charlie Brown, try."
Charlie says, "Well, let's say I this cute little girl walk by. . . ."
Why does she have to be cute? Huh? Why can't someone fall in love with someone with freckles and a big nose? Explain that!
Charlie says,
Well, maybe you're right. Let's just say I see this girl walking with a great big nose. . . .
Again Lucy interrupts, saying,
I didn't say a great big nose.
By now Charlie Brown has really had it. He looks the readers square in the eye and says:
You not only can't explain love, you can't even talk about it!
Valentine's Day: flowers, chocolates, cards, perfumes, trinkets-and who knows what expensive baubles Tiffany will provide on this day! Now, mind you, I am not above cynicism and the certain knowledge that behind Valentine's Day there exists enormous economic incentive. So what, I say, so what if it also brings us a day set aside for the expression of tenderness and those long overdue tributes of the heart?
Now here's another fact. Our Judaism gets a poor rap when it comes to this subject of love. People automatically equate Christianity with love, but Judaism, with its so-called "Old Testament," is associated with a stern, judgmental and harsh God. But what a misinterpretation, because our Judaism is brimming with texts that praise and speak of love.
The love of both God and neighbor are central to our Judaism.
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"-Leviticus.
"And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart. . . and soul and might"-Deuteronomy.
From the Book of Amos-"Hate evil and love what is good."
From Psalms-"I will sing of your steadfast love, O Lord, forever."
The Prophet Hosea refers to "the bonds of love."
And in Song of Songs we read, "For I am lovesick! And your love is better than wine."
"Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it."
"Love is strong as death."
You know, the medieval Jewish thinkers and poets wrote eloquently of the mystical love of God. They wrote magnificent love songs and poetry. Notice that even the rationalist philosopher Maimonides appears very much the mystic when he attests:
When man loves God with a love that is fitting, he automatically carries out all of the precepts in love. . . . It is as if he were love-sick, unable to get the woman he loves out of his mind, pining for her constantly when he sits or stands, when he eats and drinks. Even more than this is the love of God in the hearts of those who love Him and yearn constantly for Him. . . .
Now, don't forget: the love of one's neighbor is an equal imperative within our Judaism. Rabbinic literature calls it the "ahavat ha-Beriot-love of all God's creatures." One 16th century mystic of Safed, Moses Cordovero, wrote:
A man should train himself to do two things: the first is to honor all creatures. . . . the second is to bring the love of his fellow men into his heart, even loving the wicked as if they were his brothers. . . .
And as for the love between a husband and wife, the Jewish ideal and emphasis is that they should love one another and rejoice as did Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Did you perhaps note Oprah's magazine this month? It's all about love, and she did a pretty good job with it. Oprah offers what she calls, in all modesty:
not another empty promise that involves bending yourself into what someone else needs, but a way of bringing love into your life while respecting who you are. . . .Grown-up love [says Oprah] should bring you joy, not just some of the time, but most of the time. And whether you're 25 or 45 [I'd like to know what happened to 65 and 75], single or married, it should involve bringing all of who you are to the table-and walking away together with even more.
Oprah has some well-conceived ideas about love expressed in this month's issue.
Now I always preach to myself when I get up here. Every sermon I preach, I preach to myself---to Cohn==-but believe me, it's especially so on the Shabbat Yom ha-Valentine! Time and experience prompt me to conclude that if you and I want to become better lovers, we'd best consider these few steps:
Step Number One: Maybe it's time we learn to listen. What could make us feel more worthwhile as individuals than sharing our hearts with someone who is really willing to listen to us? Who doesn't feel rejected, after all, and unloved when our dreams or our fears, our frustrations and our discoveries, our ideas and our hurts are summarily dismissed unheard due to a lack of interest. Talk about a put-down!
But when you and I are willing to listen, when our minds are "in gear" and we're receptive to ideas and emotions, then do you know what we are saying to the ones we presume to love? We're saying:
You count in my life! The barriers are down and I'm all yours. "Ani L'dodi, V'dodi Li-I am my beloved's and my beloved is mine." I'm willing to open my world to you. Yes, I'll listen, because you matter.
II.
Here's something else. Learn to touch. We may become more loving people by reaching out and placing a hand upon that special someone who needs and craves us to do that. Too many have abused and, frankly, given a bad name to this notion of touching so as to jaundice our thinking. But there is a time and there is a proper place for the right kind of touch. Touching is healing and therapeutic, and it can profoundly relay our feelings of love and commitment from one person to another.
If I had my way, all premarital couples would learn the art of tender massage. At least touch one another and hold hands, for goodness' sake.
It's funny the things you remember from the past. My Dad died eight years ago today. I can remember like it was yesterday, how he would gently tug at my little boy necktie on Sundays when I as a little boy when he was helping me get dressed for Religious School.
I can still feel my mother holding my impatient and bobbing head in place as she worked with a hairbrush to get rid of a cowlick on top of my head on a hurried school morning. (Oh, for a cowlick now!)
My mind will ever recall the tender touch of my grandmother's lips as she kissed my cheek goodbye on that last time that I saw her in 1967. Now, add to these a brother's hug, a lover's exciting embrace, a newborn baby's little finger entwined with my own as the early, early morning feeding progressed. Yes, touching says "I love you," and it says it so well without even using words. We ought to learn to touch.
III.
Now here's another one to remember: Learn to let go. Remember the old song advises, "Let me go, let me go, let me go, lover." We increase our ability to love when we encourage one another to grow and to explore new opportunities. A living relationship offers room for separate interests, friends, and activities. The great Kahil Gibran put it this way: "Let there be spaces in your togetherness." Do you get that?
They say "Love is the connective tissue of existence." Well, real relatedness prompts us to transcend our own ego needs so as to put the other first. And this infers trust, loyalty, selflessness, and the handing over of control.
IV.
We've got to keep moving, so here's a fourth: We've got to learn to tell! So there's listening, touching, liberating, and now telling. We need to tell the one we love that we love them and that we still care about them. Years ago I saw a cartoon strip which depicted a couple talking. And the husband says-
Of course, you're still my valentine, Shirley. I haven't stopped loving you. I've just stopped talking about it.
Well, we all seem to stop talking about it, don't we? But remember what happened on 9-11? The phone lines were jammed. No called his broker! No one reserved a table in the finest of restaurants or tee time for their golf game. No one called their orthodontist or reserved their bikini wax. They called the ones they loved-
Honey, I love you. I don't know what's going to happen. but I want you to have a good life if I'm not there with you. I'll be ther with you somehow, even if unseen.
Some time ago I participated in a baby naming in the home of one of our members. There gathered were no less than four generations of that family. The great-grandmother who was ill---she knew it and everyone else knew it---shared the spotlight at that time with her great-grandchild.
Lovingly, tenderly and with the utmost of respect, I watched as each member of the family came up to the grandmother during that brief ceremony and whispered to her how much she meant to their lives and how cherished was her presence at that poignant moment.
Well, you know she died barely two weeks after that naming, but there was a family that had a lot to teach all of us about the importance of telling in real love.
V.
And finally, to love is to be empathic. We must learn to feel, to empathize. When we love, the happiness of another person becomes as essential as our own-even more so!
Seldom can the heart be lonely [wrote the poet Hamilton] if it seeks a lonelier still; self-forgetting, seeking only emptier cups of love to fill.
This, my dear friends, is where the love of God and the love of humankind are wed. Here is the locus where theology becomes practice and where theory reality.
And so we have five steps to a truer, more vital, and honest love: listening, touching, liberating, telling-empathy. Love is, after all, the most powerful of all human desires, is it not, that desire to be loved and to love? If our religion, our Judaism, can aid us in doing but that-learning to love more profoundly, and in turn, to be more profoundly loved, then truly it will have performed a noble service for us.
For we live in a world which hungers for such love, one in which too often only the basest and cheapest facsimiles of love masquerade for the real thing. It was Teilhard de Chardin, that great philosopher and theologian, who called us to our rightful task when he made this exciting prediction:
Some day after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then for the second time in the history of the world, we will have discovered fire.
Do you now what he meant? The discovery of fire--the awe-inspiring potential of human love. Yes, it is a subject which is worth at least a day-if not a lifetime! So let us devote ourselves, dear ones, to its full realization. And blessed be you in your search for love and in your every finding. A happy Yom Ha Valentine to each and everyone!
Amen.