Israel is commanded to "love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might" (Deut. 6:5). Elsewhere (Deut. 6:13), the Pentateuch commands, "You shall fear the Lord your God ...." (see Fear of God). Commentators have interpreted fear and love as two different aspects of the manner in which man relates to God (Maimonides, Sefer ha-Mitsvot, positive commandments 3, 4). In the Bible, both seem to be commended, not as a desired emotional state but rather as a motivation for doing God's will. From the contexts in which love of God appears in the Bible, it would appear to represent the highest form of religious relationship---a relationship in which man communes with and comes close to God: "to love the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways and to cleave unto Him" (Deut. 11:22, 13:4, 5). In the Bible, the object of Divine love is almost always the people of Israel. God's love for Israel demands a corresponding love. In the talmudic period, the differentiation between love and fear of God was taken for granted, with love clearly the preferred mode of relating. The Sifré to Deuteronomy 32 states: "Act out of love, for the Torah makes a distinction between one who acts out of love and one who acts out of fear .... In the former case his reward is doubled and redoubled." Maimonides saw fear as a stage in the development of love of God and wrote that those whose religious capabilities are limited might not advance beyond this level. Love of God was, in any case, the level to which one should aspire (Yad Teshuvah 10).
Maimonides, as well as other thinkers, was not unaware of the difficulties posed by the commandment to love God. He therefore described how this might be achieved: "What is the way that will lead to love of God and fear of Him? When a person contemplates His great and wondrous works and creatures and from them perceives His wisdom which is incomparable and infinite he will straightaway love Him, praise Him, glorify Him, and long to know His great Name" (Yesodé Torah 1:1, 2). God Himself can be known only by His works, contemplation of which, to Maimonides, reveals God's wisdom, kindness, and love for man and Israel. More than naked power or cold intelligence, Maimonides would argue, man may perceive in the universe the good, the true, and the beautiful, which reflect a loving God. Man's love of God in its most sublime form is disinterested, not for the sake of any practical need. While this love, in Maimonides' conception, could indeed give pleasure, it arises from the contemplation of intrinsic value. It is essentially an intellectual, cognitive process. Maimonides retained, out of the range of emotions normally associated with the word "love," its exclusivity and comprehensive relation to its object.
Others, however, equated love of God with the ecstatic joyful state of the mystic. In the words of Joseph Albo, "Love is the union and complete mental identification of love and the loved." According to Baḥya Ibn Pakuda, "It is the inclination of man's divine spiritual substance to its Maker, to adhere to Him aglow with His sublime light." A natural consequence of such intense and obsessive mystical longing is the withdrawal from all worldliness and its pleasures and disdain of the material world and all other interests. The rabbis, however, while appreciating the powerful nature of love of God, saw it as the highest value among a hierarchy of values and denied that the service of God requires a total withdrawal from all else.
A third approach may be discerned in the words of the Sifré to Deuteronomy 6:5: "'These words, which I command you this day, shall be upon your heart; and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you rise up.' Take these words of the Torah to your heart, and in this way learn to acknowledge Him at whose word the world came into being and cleave to His paths." Unlike Maimonides' approach or that of the mystics, this approach does not suggest that the study of the Torah and the performance of the commandments lead to the love of God, but rather that these actions in themselves are the love of God.
Jewish thinkers in modern times hardly relate to the notion of fear of God, in that it seems to represent man as a passive and abject creature. The modern emphasis on the reciprocal love between man and God to the exclusion of fear continues a trend that may be traced from the Bible's apparent preference of love through the Talmud and the medieval thinkers. Since, however, such trends may ultimately minimize or eliminate entirely the distance between man and God, as in certain humanist systems, some thinkers have begun to consider the possibility that fear of God is a necessary consequence of His transcendence and not altogether incompatible with the dignity of man.
