Ten Days of Love

RH² 5778 / 20 September 2017

Camus observed that “Love asks something of the future.”^[1] I think he means that in order for us invest in loving someone else, we need to believe we have a future, something beyond this moment. But if it’s true that we need to believe in the future in order to love, I think it’s equally true that any future depends on our capacity for love. We can’t love without believing we have a future, and we have no future unless we can love.

There’s a verse in Psalms that reads,^[2] עוֹלָם חֶסֶד יִבָּנֶה, which we often translate to mean, “The world is build on love.” But I’m not feeling a lot of love in the world these days. Instead I’d like to suggest a different way to read the verse. The Hebrew word עוֹלָם, “world,” can also mean “forever;” it’s a word that talks about the future. So tonight I want to say, עוֹלָם חֶסֶד יִבָּנֶה, the future is built out of love.

When we say in Rosh HaShanah prayers היום הרת עולם, maybe we’re not saying “Today is the birthday of the world,” remembering creation in the past; maybe we’re saying, “Today is the birthday of the future.” This is the moment when the future is born — and the future is born from love.

We have no future without love, and on these ימים נוראים, these Days of Awe, God shows us the ultimate act of love — and asks the same of us. I’ll tell you what I mean by that: we’re coming into the ten days of teshuvah. We’re coming into ten days of return, coming back to the life that we want to live; and there is no greater act of love then teshuvah.

I’ll be honest: I have a lot of pride. I don’t like to be wrong. I certainly don’t like to talk about it when I am. How much love will it take for me to walk over to my wife, to my kids, to friends, co-workers, my parents, look that person in they eye and say, “I hurt you this year. I let you down when you were counting on me. I betrayed your trust. It was me.” It takes a lot of love to overcome the pride.

Now imagine you’re that person on the other side, looking back, saying, “Yes, you did hurt me, you did let me down, and I forgive you, and there’s going to be a future for us.” That won’t happen without love.

That is the future. That is the only future. Everything we did, everything we wish we could change or take back — none of that goes away. But the act of forgiving lets us go forward, even with our past regrets. Forgiving — the ultimate act of love — creates the future.

So these ten days that we have now and through Yom Kippur, these are ten days for us to love. These are ten days for us to love harder than we’ve ever loved before. To love more, maybe, than we thought we could love. Ten days to reach out. Ten days to connect. Ten days for us to choose a future, to love enough to build a future. For us to reach out to others and say, “If we’re going to build a future out of love, we’re going to build it together.” We’re going to build it together in the family. We’re going to build it together here at BZBI, in our community. We’re going to build it together in Philadelphia, this city of love.

We have a future. It starts now.

שנה טובה.

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