Va’eschanan - love our Creator with all that we have

“Who can assure that this heart should remain theirs, to fear Me and observe all My commandments, all the days, so that it should be good for them and their children forever? Go say to them, ‘Return to your tents.’

This week's Parsha contains one of the most fundamental commandments in our religion. The Torah commands us to love Hashem our God with all our hearts, souls, and financial means. The Ibn Ezra comments on this commandment that it is the foundation for all the other Mitzvos in the Torah. However, the commentaries have three difficulties with this commandment. Firstly, how can the Torah mandate something which is based on an emotion? Human emotions cannot be forced, they can only be felt. If this is so, how can the Torah command us to "feel" an emotion? Secondly, it does not seem realistic to express emotions toward something which is so far beyond our understanding. By definition, Hashem is beyond anything we are capable of comprehending. If so, how can we love that? And finally, the Gemorah learns out from this verse that we must love and serve Hashem with our two inclinations – our good one and our bad one. This dictum seems strange as "serving" God with our evil inclination would seem to result in not serving Him.

 The Slonimer Rebbi (whose Yoretzeit was this week), accepts the general premise of these difficulties, but deals with them by removing one of the specific premises. He explains that the love which the Torah is referring to is not emotional at all, but rather it is an intellectual decision. The Slonimer learns that when a person makes a decision to dedicate his life and all of his strength to God, this is the love that we are referring to. Indeed, the Rambam (Yesodei Torah 2:2) justifies this use of the word "love" which is usually has an emotional connotation, by saying that when a man loves a woman very deeply, he dedicates all of his time and energy to trying to determine what will make her happy. When a person chooses to devote all of his potency on this earth to trying to fulfill the word of his Creator, this is love. With this explanation we can remove all of our difficulties. The first two are obvious, and even regarding the third difficulty, a person can certainly serve Hashem with his evil inclination, because since he has dedicated everything he has to the service of Hashem, he will certainly not waste his time or energy on the needs and whims of the Yetzer Hara.
The Chovos Halevavos (Chp 6) relates an interesting story which happened to him during his travels. He was once traversing the desert, and he came upon a very righteous man who was camped out there in the wilderness, with no civilization around for miles. He approached this man and asked him, "Aren't you afraid to be camped out here all alone, surrounded by countless dangers?" The righteous man responded that because he had dedicated all of his emotions and vigor to Hashem, he would feel embarrassed to have any other emotion which would not be inline with that theme, and feeling fear for his situation would in no way serve Hashem, so he therefore had no ability to fear his surroundings. The Slonimer cites this powerful narrative to demonstrate how dedicated a Jew can be to Hashem, and asserts that this is the love which the Torah is referring to.
The Ohr Hachaim answers the above quoted difficulties slightly differently. He explains that we need to move on to the next verse to gain an insight how to fulfill the commandment to love The Creator. The Torah first commands us to love Hashem, and then immediately afterward tells us to put these words "on our hearts". The Ohr Hachaim explains that by constantly attempting to inculcate love of Hashem into our hearts, even if we never "get there", these motions are exactly what the Torah was telling us when it commanded us to a love our creator. By relentlessly performing ingratiating activities with an eye for how these actions can instill the truth and beauty of the Torah and its author into our hearts, we fulfill the commandment to love Hashem with all of our hearts. The way the Ohr Hachaim learns, the ensuing verse is coming to essentially answer the implied difficulty with the first verse – i.e. the difficulty we had.
I feel it important to point out that R' Chazkal Levinstein, the renowned Mashgiach of the Ponevich Yeshiva used a slightly different approach to explain how we can love Hashem even with our evil inclination. R' Chazkal would say that essentially, there is no such thing as a "bad" trait. (This makes sense from a Kabalistic standpoint as bad cannot exist on its own, by definition, but merely has the power to pervert the forces of good, and utilize them for their own nefarious purposes). Since the "bad traits" are simply good traits gone awry, one can benefit by studying them, and observing how far they can take a person, in order to determine what extent he can get to in his love of Hashem. R' Chazkal would give the example of honor. We know that pursuit of honor is an extremely bad characteristic, and it even removes a person from the world. But this desire comes from a genuine desire for perfection, which is a correct aspiration, but can be skewed and transformed into a desire for honor. Every Jew is hard wired to seek perfection, and closeness Hashem in every way, but when they cannot find it, or choose not to, then they seek as much honor as they can get. When one considers what people are willing to do for honor, he will have an understanding of how passionate his desire can be to perfect his relationship with the Creator. People are willing to give up exorbitant amounts of money for honor. They sacrifice their relationships, their passions, and even go through severe bodily harm in order to receive a modicum of honor. If somebody who has done any of those things would then decide to redirect that aberration toward his love of Hashem, he would have an inkling of the extent his love can get to, and that would be how he could use his evil inclination to serve Hashem.

May we all merit to love our Creator with all that we have!

source: Bircas HaTorah