The Boundaries of Love
Q: Loving is dangerous. The minute someone realizes you’re willing to do anything for them, they take advantage of it. Isn’t there something like that in the relationship between the Creator and us?
A: Love can only exist where there are no boundaries! But if it is unbounded, it awakens disrespect and perhaps even hatred in the loved one. We find examples of that in the way children treat parents who are totally devoted to them. Therefore, in order to reach absolute and lasting love, the Creator created a system of inter-relations between Him and us.
At first, both He and His Love are concealed. This is done to prevent a situation where, after realizing how much love is available to us from the Creator, we begin to hate Him.
Therefore, we must first come to a state where we want to give everything to the Creator, and only then will we be able to sense correctly, without harming ourselves, the love of the Creator. We will then be able to receive from the Creator and express our eternal love to Him.
This is an eternal and unchangeable state. For that reason, the first commandment in the Torah is to fear God, and the second is to love Him. The Zohar says that the fear does not relate to a fear of losing the love, because the fear of losing is selfish. The fear is a spiritual attainment of the question, “Have I done everything I possibly could for the Creator?” It is much like a mother treats her child, except in this case, our attitude toward the Creator becomes the same as His attitude toward us.
You must understand that to perform an act of kindness means first and foremost to exit the boundaries of the desire to be kind only to yourself, and to be able to perform acts of kindness, regardless of how you feel. In this situation, any desire to give yourself pleasure, whatever form it takes, will not destabilize your desire to continue doing good.
Thus, it all depends on who does the good act and not for whom it is done. The question is, what are one’s intentions when one performs an act of kindness? Does one mean to benefit the person for whom one is doing the act, or does one mean to be rewarded for it?
If there is a link between an act of grace and a reward, the grace is not a grace, but another way to receive pleasure through a third party. That is what we call, in our world, “love.” But true spiritual love can only be attained after the first restriction, meaning the restriction of your own desires to receive for yourself.
That is the correction of our desires through the screen, because only if that correction takes place is the link between the desire (the act of the receiver) and the pleasure (the response of the giver) broken. That correction can only be attained through the wisdom of the Kabbalah.