Eikev / It starts with love

“If you listen to God, He will keep his covenant with you. He will love you, He will bless you…” (7:13)

And what does He want of you? “To walk in His ways, to love Him, and to serve” Him. (10:12)

After all, “God desired to love your forefathers, and He chose their children” (10:15) to be His nation, to whom He gave His Torah and has asked of them filial devotion. He models this kind of love through “loving the stranger” (10:18), an expectation He commands and demands of you as well (10:19).

In the Shma we are famously instructed to love God (6:5), and that exhortation is repeated in 11:1, as a condition to receiving rain and good tidings in the land (11:13, in “V’haya Im Shamoa”), and as a condition to inheriting the land from those who no longer deserve to be its inhabitants (11:22).

One can argue that a theme of the parsha is all about love. Sometimes love is natural, as in God’s love for our forefathers and for the stranger; sometimes it is commanded, as in our love for God and our love for strangers.

Coinciding with the command to love God is a command to revere God. The Shma is preceded by “Fulfill the commandments so you may revere your God…” (6:2), and is followed by “Revere and serve your God” (6:13); and in our parsha, the instruction quoted above in 10:12 of what God wants of you actually begins with “to revere Hashem your God”.

In Vayikra 19:14,32 and Vaikra 25:17,36,43, we see a number of “You must revere your God” instructions as well.

Essentially, these two themes, loving and fearing God, are counted as two separate commandments. The Sefer HaChinukh lists them as commandments 418 and 432 respectively, while Maimonides has them as positive commandments numbers 3 and 4.

Now that we are a little over a week away from the month of Elul, it is an appropriate time to revisit these commandments to understand how we can best go about fulfilling them.

Sefer HaChinukh suggests a person can’t fulfill commandments properly without loving God. If our attitude is such that every deed we undertake as part of our religious experience is fulfilled under the premise that we are doing this for love of God, the act is elevated and becomes more real. This is why the Shma reminds us that these words must be on our hearts all day and every day, and we must review them in our heart and soul.