What is the meaning of love?

In Jewish thought, love is not primarily a feeling that happens to you. It is something you do, something you practise, something you build through repeated choice. The Hebrew word most often translated as love, *ahavah*, carries within it the sense of giving. One rabbinic reading connects the root of the word to the idea of offering, of extending yourself toward another. This matters because it shifts the whole question. If love is essentially a feeling, then you are its passive recipient, waiting for it to arrive or mourning when it fades. If love is an act of will and attention, then it is something you can actually cultivate, deepen, and, when necessary, repair.

The Torah places love at the very centre of Jewish life, and what is striking is the scope of it. There is the command to love God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might. There is the command to love your neighbour as yourself. There is even the instruction to love the stranger, the one who is not part of your community, not familiar to you, perhaps not easy to understand. These are not gentle suggestions. Jewish tradition treats them as serious obligations, *mitzvot*, bound into the fabric of how a human being is supposed to move through the world. The medieval philosopher Maimonides wrote about love of God as something that grows through knowledge and contemplation, the more you come to understand the universe, the more you are drawn toward the source of it. Love, on this account, is not blind. It is the fruit of paying close attention.

The rabbinic tradition is wonderfully practical about all of this. The Talmud and the later legal codes spend considerable energy on what love actually looks like in practice: visiting the sick, comforting the bereaved, celebrating with a bride and groom, accompanying the dead to burial. These acts of *chesed*, lovingkindness, are not optional extras. They are the texture of a life properly lived. The Hasidic masters added another layer, teaching that every human being contains a spark of the divine, and that to truly see another person is to encounter something sacred. Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov, the eighteenth-century founder of Hasidism, placed love of God, love of Torah, and love of the Jewish people as an inseparable threefold foundation. You cannot genuinely hold one without the others pulling you toward the rest.

There is also an important tension in Jewish thought between love and justice, and the tradition does not try to dissolve it cheaply. God is described in terms of both *chesed*, steadfast love, and *din*, strict judgment. The great mystics of Kabbalah saw these as complementary forces in the universe itself, needing to be held in balance. Love without limits can become indulgence or even harm. The point is not to choose one over the other but to learn how they inform each other. When you love someone, you want what is genuinely good for them, which sometimes means holding a line, telling a truth, refusing to look the other way. This is a demanding vision of love, one that takes the other person seriously enough to be honest with them.

If you are wrestling with what love means in your own life, whether it is love that has cooled, love you are trying to understand, or love you are wondering if you are capable of, the Jewish framework offers something genuinely useful. It says that love is less like a fire you either have or do not have, and more like a garden. It requires tending. Small, consistent acts of attention and generosity are not a substitute for love, they are, in fact, how love is grown and sustained. The Talmudic saying that a person should say, "the world was created for my sake," is not about arrogance. It is about recognising that your life, your relationships, your capacity to give and receive, carry real weight. You are not a bystander to love. You are one of its makers.