The Love That Many People Do Not Understand

Sometimes it’s more important to feel most excited

than feeling that you understand,

because excitement can make you feel so delighted

that you don’t answer the demand

that usually is made when men plead: “Please explain

what you’ve experienced.” Feeling an

excitement which can’t be explained helps you to gain

an insight into God and man.

Neither of them can be well defined without

the thrill they give, and an awareness

that their accomplishments do not depend on doubt-

ful categories like truth and fairness,

for they depend on shared ability to thrill

all those whose minds go far beyond

mere understanding, because such excitement will

help man, amazed, with God to bond,

and is perhaps he basis of the Cove-

nant the Bible tells us God first made with Noah

and then with Abraham, based on His love

of linking what’s what is high to what is lower,

as He expected Abraham and his descendants

to do in Israel, the so-called Promised Land,

transferred to them with the transcendence

of love a lot of lower beings cannot understand.

Meir Soloveichik writes in “The Miracle at 75,” Jewish Commentary, May 2023:

In 1949, nine months after the State of Israel was formally recognized by both U.S. President Truman and Soviet Premier Josef Stalin, Britain refused to acknowledge the existence of the first Jewish commonwealth to appear on the earth in 2,000 years. The Labor foreign minister, Ernest Bevin, known for his antipathy to Zionism, refused to consider that a fledgling Jewish state should be of interest when it was opposed by so many countries that seemed to matter more to Britain. In response, the leader of the opposition, Winston Churchill, stood in Parliament and delivered one of his addresses for the ages. He accused Bevin of presentism, of maintaining a stunted historical perspective.

“Whether the right honorable gentleman likes it or not,” Churchill said, “the coming into being of a Jewish state in Palestine is an event in world history to be viewed in the perspective, not of a generation or a century, but in the perspective of a thousand, two thousand or even three thousand years. That is a standard of temporal values or time-values which seems very much out of accord with the perpetual click-clack of our rapidly changing moods and of the age in which we live. This is an event in world history.”

Meir Soloveichik confirmed Churchill’s deprecation of presentism when in a podcast, “The Structure of Musaf and the Meaning of Memory,” he cited a story about how Rabbi Israel Meir Lau learned about the importance memory when at the tender age of eight he was reminded of its importance by his brother Naftali in Buchenwald, a concentration camp. Memory is not only the central pillar of the three pillars of Judaism that we recall on Rosh Hashanah, God’s kingship, memory and shofar blasts, but also why Rosh Hashanah is called in the Torah the festival of zikhron teruah. It is the festival on which our memory is restored when we hear shofar, and the reason why when we bless God after hearing the shofar we call Him the God who zokher habrit, remembers the covenant.