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