"And you should love the Lord, your God with all your heart" Deuteronomy 6:5
Cupid's arrow sails rapidly through the air and strikes the unsuspecting heart. Without warning, you are in love.
If love - and feeling in general - is something that happens to me, something that emanates, seemingly randomly, from an external source, if I either feel something or I don't, then how can the famous second line of the Shema command me to "love"? What am I being asked to do - to decide to love?
In truth, Torah has a complex concept of how we feel what we feel. On one level it includes that idea of an unexpected, unsolicited and immense swell of emotion - the pure arrow of connection. This can happen when two people fall in love. On the national level this was seen at the moment of the Jews' intense closeness to the Creator on the night of Pesach as they left Egypt. A gift of emotion.
