Does unconditional love even exist?

Can someone really, truly and honestly love another person unconditionally—with no ifs and buts, no fundamental assumptions, no essential ingredient that binds one’s affections? An anonymous mishnah in Avot says “yes”. At Avot 5: 19 we learn:

כָּל אַהֲבָה שֶׁהִיא תְלוּיָה בְדָבָר, בָּטֵל דָּבָר בְּטֵלָה אַהֲבָה, וְשֶׁאֵינָהּ תְּלוּיָה בְדָבָר, אֵינָהּ בְּטֵלָה לְעוֹלָם. אֵיזוֹ הִיא אַהֲבָה שֶׁהִיא תְלוּיָה בְדָבָר, זוֹ אַהֲבַת אַמְנוֹן וְתָמָר, וְשֶׁאֵינָהּ תְּלוּיָה בְדָבָר, זוֹ אַהֲבַת דָּוִד וִיהוֹנָתָן

Any love that depends on something—when that thing ceases, the love also ceases. But a love that does not depend on anything never ceases. What is [an example of] a love that depends on something? The love of Amnon for Tamar. And one that does not depend on anything? The love of David and Jonathan.

Most commentators explain this mishnah simply enough. The Me’iri simply adds that a condition is a sibah, a cause, while R’ Chaim Volozhiner’s Ru’ach Chaim offers no comment at all. In general terms, though, Amnon’s love for Tamar is understood to be conditional upon his urge to possess her. Once he had done so, that condition had been fulfilled and, there being no further basis for it, this love turned to hatred. David and Jonathan however shared a love that did not depend on the fulfilment of any condition.

Maharam Shik challenges the very basis of this mishnah and asks: “Does not every love depend on something?” Even the love of David and Jonathan, he hypothesizes, is firmly pinned on their mutual recognition of the qualities found in the other: they were men of action and their behaviour was in keeping with principles of good conduct. Would their love have persisted, he asks, if it later transpired that either one of them turned out to be evil? Would that not automatically eliminate the basis of their love? It’s a good question.

Maharam Shik does not appear to answer this question. He does however question the validity of the concept of conditional love. He cites the Akedat Yitzchak (R’ Yitzchak Arama) as proposing that everything depends on the factor that motivates the way one acts. If a person’s actions can be attributed a cause or motivation other than love for another person, there is no love. Amnon’s apparent love for Tamar may have felt to him like love for her at the time he desired her, but what he really felt was love for his own desires. This he categorises as desire itself, and not real love. And if it is not love, then it cannot be conditional love either.  In other words, if a feeling is conditional on some external factor, it is disqualified from even being love.

Incidentally, the concept of unconditional love is not only discussed in the context of this mishnah. It is also relevant to one of the very first mishnayot in Avot where (at 1:3) Antigonus Ish Socho teaches that one should serve God like a servant who does so with no expectation of receiving anything in return. On this teaching Rabbenu Yonah observes:

“What is perfect love among people? The desire to serve a loved one only because he has always loved him, even if he knows he will receive nothing in return. It is with this sort of love that man should serve God” [translation by R’ David Sedley].

This might better be termed altruistic love and it is certainly of a high order. Members of Klal Yisrael, the Jewish people, are commanded to love one another just as they love themselves (Vayikra 19:18, וְאָהַבְתָּ לְרֵעֲךָ כָּמוֹךָ, “You shall love your fellow human as you love yourself”) and there is no express stipulation that this love can be made subject to conditions.

Bearing in mind Maharam Shik’s concern about whether unconditional love can exist at all, we can ask why we cite the example of David and Jonathan and not God’s love for His people. We are told that this love is eternal, as we remind ourselves every time we recite the berachah that immediately precedes recitation of the Shema. This love persists even when we disobey God’s instructions and even when He is angry with us and punishes us. But maybe the point our mishnah makes is this: God’s love is divine and we are incapable of comprehending it, never mind emulating it. Our mishnah was however given for mortals. It is in our nature to place conditions on all our relationships—some explicit and some being merely understood. We have to learn that, while we are fully capable of placing conditions on the love we have for others, and of declaring that love to be at an end if those conditions are broken, we should not do so. We should be magnanimous in our relationships and love others the way we would like them to love us.

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"I'm gonna make you love me"

An Avot baraita for Shabbat (Parashat Balak)

Continuing our series of erev Shabbat posts on the perek of the week, we return to Perek 6.

Readers of a certain age may recall a soul number popularised in the late 1960s by Diana Ross and the Supremes, together with the Temptations. Its title was also a catchy refrain, “I’m gonna make you love me”. While the precise means by which this objective might be achieved lie somewhere beyond the parameters of discussion on Avot Today, the need to be loved occupies an important position in Pirkei Avot.

The first Baraita in Perek 6 opens with the words

כָּל הָעוֹסֵק בַּתּוֹרָה לִשְׁמָהּ זוֹכֶה לִדְבָרִים הַרְבֵּה, וְלֹא עוֹד, אֶלָּא שֶׁכָּל הָעוֹלָם כֻּלּוֹ כְּדַאי הוּא לוֹ. נִקְרָא רֵֽעַ, אָהוּב,

Whoever studies Torah for its own sake merits many things; not only that, but the entire world is worthwhile for him. He is called “friend”, “beloved”...

Avot 6:6 goes even further, listing being loved as one of the 48 things through which a person acquires Torah.

There’s an obvious problem here. While we can love others—whether they love us back or not—there is no mechanism that can be guaranteed to trigger love for us in someone else’s heart. Love is an emotion; it is not subject to rational analysis. How often do we see the heartbreak of lovely souls whose love for another is not reciprocated. So how do we understand these baraitot?

The simplest answer is to say that “beloved” (in Hebrew, ahuv) means “beloved by God”, but this doesn’t solve any problems. Rabbi Akiva (Avot 3:18) has already established that, even if God were to prefer those of us who study Torah for its own sake, we are all still dear to God because we are created in His image. So it must mean something else.

Rabbis Nachman and Natan of Breslov suggest that ahuv here means “loved by oneself”. Strange as this may seem, there is good reason to adopt this view. We are commanded to love others as we love ourselves—and until we love ourselves properly we cannot demonstrate the right level of love for others. However, this still requires us to explain what connection, if any, exists between self-love and (i) learning Torah for its own sake and (ii) the acquisition of Torah per se. Stretching the word ahuv well beyond its normal meaning, R’ Mordechai Frankel-Te’omim (Be’er HaAvot) suggests that it embraces all types of love that a person has for mitzvot between him and God and other people: someone who lacks this quality is by definition lacking in the degree of interest and commitment one needs in one’s learning in order to make it effective. Ultimately, though, it seems to me that we are left with questions we cannot convincingly answer.

Incidentally, these baraitot in Avot are not the only occasions on which being loved is mysteriously and apparently linked with learning Torah. Twice a day, in the paragraph that immediately precedes the recitation of the Shema, we are required to recite a blessing that is a sort of “love sandwich”: it opens with a declaration that we are loved by God and closes with a declaration that we are loved by God. The “filling” in the sandwich is a prayer that God in His mercy should help us to learn His Torah. This invites us to speculate as to why our desire to learn Torah, with God’s assistance if and when it is available, should come wrapped in His love for us. R’ Chaim Friedlander (Siftei Chaim, Rinat Chaim: Bi’urei Tefillah) offers a possible explanation: the greatest act of love that God has shown to us is His gift to us of the Torah: we should seek to reciprocate this demonstration of love by loving Him in return, as the first paragraph of the Shema requires of us.

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What applies to love applies equally to hate -- and maybe also to fear

The mishnah at Avot 5:19 begins with the words:

Any love that depends on a specific thing, if that thing is lost, to too is that love; and if it doesn’t depend on anything, it is never lost.

In “Hate: Curable and Incurable”, Covenant and Conversation: Deuteronomy, Renewal of the Sinai Covenant, 2019) Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks opens the possibilities contained in these few words by arguing persuasively that this proposition does not apply to love alone. It also applies to hate. In doing so, it explains an apparent anomaly in the Torah’s commands. This anomaly relates to how the Children of Israel should view the Egyptians, who had enslaved, oppressed and exploited them for centuries, even attempting genocide, and the Amalekites, who attacked them just once in the desert. 

The Torah commands that we are not to hate the Egyptians (Deuteronomy 23:8). We are however obliged to maintain perpetual hostility against the Amalekites (Exodus 17:16), even though we suffered far more at the hands of the Egyptians. Why should this be? 

An explanation is offered that, while both the Egyptians and the Amalekites hated the Children of Israel, the Egyptians had some reason for doing so: they saw this strong and increasingly populous alien tribe within their borders as a threat to their security (Exodus 1:19-20).  This reason might have been irrational and unfounded, but it was genuinely held. Once this alien tribe had departed, the reason for the Egyptians’ hatred departed too and, with it, the hatred itself. The hatred of Amalek however had no cause. A hatred that has no cause is a hatred that has no end.

It is worth considering whether this argument can be applied not only to hatred but to another word that is regularly contrasted with love: fear. Prima facie, the answer is yes, or at least it should be. If there is a reason why a person is afraid of anything—be it a dog, the dark, an unwelcome event, or another person—it is possible to address the cause of that fear. But where a fear is not conditioned upon anything it all and is quite irrational, it may never be possible to eradicate it.