You have loved us with a great love. You have shown enormous and boundless compassion toward us….” These are the opening words of the blessing that emphasizes revelation—specifically, G-d’s gift of the Torah to us. The significance of Torah as a divine gift is a topic for another time. Right now, I want to emphasize the experience of love that the prayer describes.
How often do we take love for granted! A personal story: my parents were married for a half century when my mother z”l passed away. They had built a loving relationship and a loving family. Seeing my father z”l alone was the single hardest part of shiva for me. But lo and behold, a year later he had found a wonderful companion, Miss Jean, who would be with him for the rest of his life. Seeing my father in a state of full blown puppy love was bizarre, and delicious. He was deliriously happy to have found his new partner.
Now, I knew from stories that I had heard that he had been head over heels in love with my mother when they were, as they always put it, “courting.” And that love never ended. But I never saw it expressed as passionately as the love he enjoyed at the twilight of his life. So summing up, he had experienced love in all its fullness when he met my mother, and then again when he met Miss Jean. But in between—and a half century is a lot of in between—the love was there but not expressed or experienced with the same vitality.
Back to our prayer: when we received the Torah we were ecstatic; but now, so many years later, our enthusiasm is in danger of lagging. Hence, the purpose of this prayer. It is a “refresher course” that brings us back to our beginnings. It reminds us of the power of love, a love so great that the Master of the entire Universe chose to focus divine wisdom on us. We need to bask in the warmth of that love and attendant compassion, to feel it wash over us as passion washes over people when they first fall in love.
It is that passion that leads to the explosion of activity described later on in the prayer, when we ask G-d to incline our hearts to “understand and discern, to hear, to learn, to teach, to guard and do and keep” all that we can of Torah—and most important, to do it with love!
There is nothing more painful than unrequited love. And nothing more glorious than love consummated by devotion.
A “great love” indeed.