“If someone tells you that he loves God but hates his neighbor, don’t believe him.” (old Hasidic saying)
We begin the second week of Elul, the month of our spiritual preparation for the Days of Awe, today. This week’s topic is How to Love God. We are, after all, commanded: You shall love HaShem your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your being in the Shema that we recite every week! But what does that mean? Everything that follows in the Shema prayer’s first paragraph seems to spell it out. But what does it mean for our daily life, this prayer’s prescriptions that we all know by heart?
As this week’s reading assignment in our Elul text, Creating an Ethical Jewish Life, I invite you to join me this coming erev Shabbat to talk about Dr. Byron Sherwin’s chapter on How To Love God. We’ll have a chance to review the text he chose and his treatment of it, and ask questions you yourself might have wondered about.
I hope that your Elul preparations are meaningful and anticipatory, as we count down – or up, actually – toward our Days of Awe.
Rabbi Ariel
