Notions of divine love in Jewish theologies address not only the human soul’s relation to God, but also God’s striving for fulfillment in and through relation to humanity.
The contemporary rabbi and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel begins his reflections on the unique role of God in Jewish theology this way: “The Lord looks down from heaven upon the children of man . . .” (Psalms 14:2).
Heschel distills the biblical notion of God’s search for man in this way: “The incidents recorded in the Bible to the discerning eye are episodes of one great drama: the quest of God for man. . .. At Sinai we have learned that spiritual values are not only aspirations in us but a response to a transcendent appeal addressed to us” (Heschel 1955, 197).
God exists in His relational call to a human being—a notion already seen in the very opening Genesis tale of Adam and Eve, in God’s fragile cry “Where are you?” (Genesis 3:9). Envisioning God’s subsistence in his outward call, one may further theorize the history of the Jewish people itself as a complex relational act of joint human-divine fulfillment.
The very idea that God needs humankind can be found not only in theologies of revelation such as Heschel’s, but also within theologies that ponder “Why does God create at all?” or “Why does God prefer there be anything other than just God?” A response to these questions is found in a number of midrashic traditions on the opening words of Genesis, “In the beginning, God created. . .” (Genesis 1:1). Thevery act of creation rests on the precreation of Torah and Israel, a context in which God emerges as longing for the performance of Torah injunctions and moral codes by His people. Medieval theological responses to these questions can be seen in the words of the eleventh-century neoplatonic Jewish poet-philosopher Solomon Ibn Gabirol (1991, 182-183):
The heavens do not have room for you to dwell. . .Your love (hesheq—literally, desire) spills over, it cannot be confined.
And so I praise God with my poetry,
While yet he breathes the living soul in me.
Ibn Gabirol gives voice to what may be called a theology of divine love in which God’s love-for-other spills open from the heavens, forging the very core of the human soul. In the context of his larger philosophical work— the Fons Vitae (“Fountain of Life,” or Meqor Hayyim), Ibn Gabirol is part of a tradition of Neoplatonic emanationism. Neoplatonic ema-nationism envisions the universe as an eternally pulsing flow, a loving outpouring that finds its flowing source in the Divine Himself or, at the very least, in God’s first creation, a cosmic intellectual conduit through which God breathes forth reality. Drawing on Psalm 36:10, “For with You is the fountain of life; by Your light we will see light,” he envisions a God who creates through unbounded flow, pouring open his Essence in a constant relational dance-with-other.
The theme of divine love met by human love for God can be found in various traditions of medieval philosophical, poetic, and mystical interpretations of the Song of Songs as an erotic love poem between God and the People of Israel, in which both human and divine longing are laid bare.
This theme of divine love makes its fullest appearance in Jewish mystical traditions wherethe very essence of God is defined in explicit terms of erotic union between the masculine and feminine aspects of the single Godhead. This can be seen in the Zoharic doctrine of the divine Sefiroth, and in later kabbalistic traditions where the divine feminine aspect, Shek-hinah (Indwelling), is depicted as torn away from her loving union with God’s masculine aspect, precisely in her being sent off to accompany the sinning people Israel in their exile. In this dynamic—linked to mystical interpretation of the Song of Songs—the People Israel and the Shekhinah emerge as the lost brides to their beloved Divine bridegroom, often underscored by arrestingly sexual images of the reunion.
Jewish mystical discourses of “devequth” (cleaving) suggest the goal of the human soul is to intimately cling to God through the observance of His law. Moses Maimonides’ The Guide of the Perplexed (thirteenth century), a cornerstone work of Jewish medieval philosophy, also speaks of a divine cleaving—although in very different terms. For Maimonides, the notion is intellectual in nature, referring to the ability of the properly trained human soul to “conjoin” with the Active Intellect, itself described at times as divine in nature (although in no way meant to describe a part or aspect of God Himself). Here (as in other Jewish Aristotelian traditions), the “conjunction” is between the well-honed human intellect and the divinely ordained cosmic principle of Intellect. An exception for Maimonides is when he employs explicitly erotic Sufi terminology (‘ishq) to describe this union as a passionate moment of love between man and God (Mai-monides 1974, 3.51). In this context, Maimonides is inspired by the Biblical and Rabbinic descriptions of Moses’ and Aaron’s deaths in the intimate terms of a divine kiss (Numbers 33:38; Deuteronomy 34:5; Baba Bathra 17a).
Modern Jewish thinkers such as Buber and Levinas focus on notions of reception and need at the core of the human being, and can in this way also be seen as mirroring in their ethics theological ideas of lack, need, and foundational love-for-other as the core principles of sacred life.
