Exploring Divine Love: Jewish Insight in a Sufi Shrine

Companionship after a three-day conference in Boujaad, Morocco. 2022.

Commanding Love: Reflecting on Duties of the Heart in a Sufi Shrine

By Rachel Friedman

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. (Deut. 6:5-7)

These verses of the Bible are recited as part of Jewish prayers every morning, afternoon, and evening. Jewish commentators have explained that reciting these verses in daily worship is a perpetual reminder of the importance of loving God and of accepting the One God, as Jon Levenson has written. In reciting these verses, the worshiper repeats these Divine commandments, reaffirming their importance and the significance of the type of relationship to God that the verses describe.

This Scriptural passage begins with an imperative verb that issues a command to love God. How can we understand the command to love? Today, love is often understood to be a feeling, but many interpreters have understood the injunction to love God as primarily a command to undertake acts of service to God. These actions should be woven deeply into everyday life: the verse specifies to teach these commandments to one’s children and talk about them daily. This is a love that imbues and pervades the life of the person and of the community. As such, this central concept has inspired a rich tradition of contemplation and scholarship on different aspects of this relationship of Divine love.

Duties of the Heart

Among the many rabbis and scholars who have elaborated on what it means to love God over the centuries was Bahya ibn Paquda, a scholar who lived in 11th century CE Zaragoza (in what is today Spain). He lived in a multicultural environment in which he engaged with Greek and Islamic thought, folding ideas from those traditions into his own work. In his book Duties of the Heart, Ibn Paquda discusses the practice of loving God. He originally wrote the book in Judeo-Arabic—a form of Arabic written in Hebrew letters—and it was later translated into Hebrew and then other languages. In this book, Ibn Paquda emphasizes the importance of heartful love of God in performing actions. Ibn Paquda writes that the “duties of the limbs” (the physical body) include ones such as prayer, fasting, and giving charity, but “internal obedience is the duties of the heart.” Complete devotion to God involves undertaking the “duties of the limbs… accompanied by the will of the heart,” he writes.

Ibn Paquda writes of the love of God in terms of a spiritual journey toward God in which the soul yearns to cling onto God. But preparation is needed in order to grow closer to the Divine. One prerequisite is awe of God’s majesty. Another is turning away from worldly desires and appetites, an effort that Ibn Paquda calls zuhd—the Arabic word for asceticism. For Ibn Paquda, zuhd is a practice that involves humility before God, dedication to God, and reflection on the divine. The practices of zuḥd ready the believer to love God most fully, as he writes:

[W]hen the heart of the believer is empty from the love of this world and free of its lusts, out of recognition and understanding - the love of the Creator will establish in [the believer’s] heart, and it will be set in [the believer’s] soul according to [the believer’s] yearning to [God], and [the believer’s] recognition of [God].

For Ibn Paquda, emptying oneself of worldly attachments and desires creates the space for love of God.

Although Ibn Paquda’s famous book sets out this ascetic vision for drawing close to God, it is important to note that Jewish traditions are diverse and are not generally characterized by asceticism. Indeed, there are also pious groups that make sense-rich experiences of joy a central focus of their spirituality, such as the modern devotional movement of Hasidism. Interestingly, though, Hasidic communities have also been inspired by Ibn Paquda’s descriptions of the believer directing thoughts and actions toward God as a means of trying to attach one’s soul to God, as Diana Lobel has written.

Sharing the Love

These are just some of the many ways that the Jewish tradition has understood and reflected on what it means to love God. I shared these ideas in the small but mighty city of Boujaad, Morocco at a 2019 conference about religious conceptions of love. The conference was held at the shrine of an important Sufi figure, and it brought together religious thinkers from Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The presentations reflected on the diverse ways in which members of these religious traditions have thought about and lived out their conceptions of love.

Those who gathered in Boujaad for this conference—including those who call this city home as well as those who came from other parts of Morocco and from abroad—continued the conversations over meals and walks around the city. The examples of love that the presentations highlighted were sources of curiosity, inspiration, and discussion. They sparked further conversation and planted the seeds for shared perspectives on religious love as well as the nature of wisdom and insights in these religious traditions. I heard from some of my Muslim brothers and sisters how Ibn Paquda’s ideas resonated with some from their own textual and lived traditions. I also heard how historical and modern examples of love have served as the basis for inspiration, meditation, and deepened understanding in scholarly as well as spiritual and theological realms.

Departing Boujaad after several days of richly intense scholarly companionship, I was left with a sense of inspiration—thanks to the resources I’d heard for meditating on and understanding what love can do, and also the ways that being in relationship with a diversity of religious scholars and practitioners can produce and share this understanding in meaningful ways.

Rachel A. Friedman, PhD, is Associate Professor (Teaching) in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures & Cultures at the University of Calgary (Alberta, Canada).