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Searching for Holiness - Day 4
1. Deuteronomy 6:5 2. “The Love of God”, a note on a poem by Judah Halevi (Franz Rosenzweig)
1. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all of you soul and with all of your might.
2. It is difficult to love, even to love God. Indeed, the latter is the most difficult kind of love. For the share of unhappy love that is in all love, even the happiest, and that arises from the tension between wanting to, having to love infinitely, and being able to love only finitely, is here increased ad infinitum. To love God always spells happy and unhappy love simultaneously, the very happiest and the very unhappiest. He comes close to man, most close—and then again withdraws to the most distant distance. He is at once the most longed for, and the hardest to bear. His hand protects eternally, but no one can behold his eternal face and remain among the living. Thus the love he returns to his lover, who must entreat it, is always something that must be asked for… The solution of these difficulties and antitheses, like the solution of all the difficulties and antitheses of love, lies with the lover, with his strength to face “notwithstangingness,” to bear notwithstanding, to let himself be borne notwithstanding. Here it lies with man and the strength he can put into his entreaty that God love him in return.
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