50 | AUGUST 15 • 2024

O

ver the past few months,
I’ve been having
conversations with leading
thinkers, intellectuals, innovators
and philanthropists for a BBC
series on moral challenges of the
21st century. Among
those I spoke to was
David Brooks, one of
the most insightful
moralists of our time.
His conversation is
always scintillating, but
one remark of his was
particularly beautiful.
It is a key that helps us unlock the
entire project outlined by Moses in
Sefer Devarim, the fifth and final
book of the Torah.
We had been talking about cove-
nants and commitments. I suggested
that many people in the West today
are commitment-averse, reluctant
to bind themselves unconditionally
and open-endedly to something or
someone. The market mindset that

predominates today encourages us to
try this, sample that, experiment and
keep our options open for the latest
version or the better deal. Pledges of
loyalty are few and far between.
Brooks agreed and noted that
nowadays freedom is usually under-
stood as freedom-from, meaning
the absence of restraint. We don’t
like to be tied down. But the real
freedom worth having, in his view,
is freedom-to, meaning the ability
to do something that’s difficult and
requires effort and expertise. So,
for example, if you want to have the
freedom to play the piano, you have
to chain yourself to it and practice
every day.
Freedom in this sense does not
mean the absence of restraint, but
rather, choosing the right restraint.
That involves commitment, which
involves a choice to forego certain
choices. Then he said: “My favorite
definition of commitment is falling
in love with something and then

building a structure of behavior
around it for the moment when love
falters.”
That struck me as a beautiful way
into one of the fundamental fea-
tures of Sefer Devarim, specifically,
and Judaism generally. The book of
Deuteronomy is more than simply
Moses’ speeches in the last months
of his life, his tzava’ah or ethical will
to the future generations. It is more,
also, than Mishneh Torah, a recapit-
ulation of the rest of the Torah, a
restatement of the laws and history of
the people since their time in Egypt.
It is a fundamental theological
statement of what Judaism is about.
It is an attempt to integrate law and
narrative into a single coherent
vision of what it would be like to cre-
ate a society of law-governed liberty
under the sovereignty of God: a soci-
ety of justice, compassion, respect for
human dignity and the sanctity of
human life. And it is built around an
act of mutual commitment, by God

to a people and by the people to God.

A LOVE STORY
The commitment itself is an act of
love. At the heart of it are the famous
words from the Shema in this week’s
parshah: “You shall love the Lord
your God with all your heart, with
all your soul, and with all your
might” (Deut. 6:5). The Torah is the
foundational narrative of the fraught,
sometimes tempestuous, marriage
between God and an often-obstinate
people. It is a story of love.
We can see how central love is to
the book of Deuteronomy by noting
how often the root a-h-v, “to love,”
appears in each of the five books
of the Torah. It occurs 15 times in
Genesis, but none of these is about
the relationship between God and
a human being. They are about the
feelings of husbands for wives or par-
ents for children. This is how often
the verb appears in the other four
books:
• Exodus: 2
• Leviticus: 2
• Numbers: 0
• Deuteronomy: 23
Again and again, we hear of
love, in both directions, from the
Israelites to God and from God to
the Israelites. It is the latter that are
particularly striking. Here are some
examples:
“The Lord did not set His affec-
tion on you and choose you because
you were more numerous than
other peoples, for you were the few-
est of all peoples. But it was because
the Lord loved you …” Deut. 7:7-8
“To the Lord your God belong the
heavens, even the highest heavens,
the earth and everything in it. Yet
the Lord set His affection on your
ancestors and loved them, and He
chose you, their descendants, above
all the nations — as it is today.” Deut.
10:14-15
“The Lord your God would not
listen to Balaam but turned the
curse into a blessing for you, because
the Lord your God loves you.” Deut
23:5
The real question is how this

Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks

SPIRIT
A WORD OF TORAH

Making Love Last