With All Your Heart…

“You shall love Hashem your G‑D with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your might.”

All of it.

Not the agreeable portion of the heart available after a decent night’s sleep. Not the soul on days when faith is behaving itself. Not whatever might remain after life has finished invoicing you.

All your heart. All your soul. All your might.

I have been trying to understand what that degree of love would feel like and have concluded that the question itself may be wrong. The Torah is perhaps not attempting to measure emotion. Love is not a liquid to be poured into three labelled containers until each reaches the devotional fill line.

The Hebrew describes something more difficult than intense feeling. It describes an undivided self.

B’chol levavcha—with all your heart—is traditionally understood to mean with both inclinations: the noble and the unruly; the part of us that reaches instinctively towards holiness and the part that has to be dragged there while making representations on its own behalf.

B’chol nafshecha—with all your soul—means even when devotion costs you your life.

B’chol me’odecha—with all your “muchness”—means with everything at your disposal: your strength, your circumstances and your possessions. The Sages include money, having observed human nature with their customary absence of sentimentality.

This is not necessarily a command to exist in a state of uninterrupted spiritual passion. Nobody could survive that, and very little laundry would get done. It is a command not to divide yourself—to reserve one part for Hashem while declaring the remaining territory independently governed.

I have wondered whether we can love anything else with comparable depth.

Children, certainly. Animals, inexplicably and often ruinously. Another human being, perhaps.

But no created being can rightfully demand the whole self. Children must eventually separate from us. Partners can fail us. Animals leave us indecently early. To give any of them ownership of our conscience, identity and ultimate meaning would not be the highest form of love. It would be the disappearance of the person doing the loving.

Only Hashem can ask for all because Hashem is not one object of love competing with the others. The Shema first declares that Hashem is One, and only then commands us to love Him wholly. Perhaps love of Hashem is meant to gather all our other loves into some moral order, preventing affection from becoming possession, loyalty from becoming blindness and passion from promoting itself to righteousness.

I have been thinking about this in Australia, where I am currently visiting family and where being visibly Jewish has acquired calculations that should be foreign to a liberal democracy.

Australia is not an antisemitic country. That sentence matters. It is an overwhelmingly decent country containing millions of people who neither hate Jews nor spend their mornings devising new ways to make them uncomfortable.

But Australia has an increasingly serious antisemitism problem, and the distinction between those two statements must not become an excuse for ignoring the second.

The Royal Commission on Antisemitism and Social Cohesion has this week been hearing what Jewish life now requires in Australia.

Representatives of Jewish schools testified that 18 schools spent an estimated $58 million on security between 2022 and 2025. A Jewish youth camp reportedly altered its activities to reduce the public visibility of its children. Synagogues have described guards, barriers and reinforced entrances. Jewish students and academics have spoken about intimidation, exclusion and Nazi salutes on campuses whose institutional commitment to inclusion has apparently developed a Jewish exception. (ABC News, The Guardian)

Jewish children have reportedly been called “genociders”.

There is a particular moral collapse required to hold an eight-year-old personally accountable for a war conducted by a government thousands of kilometres away. However, it does save the accuser the inconvenience of developing a coherent political argument.

None of this is entirely new to me.

Five or six years ago, in Cape Town, our community already provided volunteer security at shul alongside a permanent guard. We prayed under protection then, too. Diaspora Jews have long accepted the peculiar arrangement whereby entering a place of worship first requires the approval of a large man who knows every congregant’s face and becomes immediately interested in yours.

South Africa had already supplied the practical course in Jewish vigilance, together with crime, load-shedding and enough general menace to make suspicion feel less like paranoia than sound citizenship.

So I cannot honestly claim that Australia has suddenly introduced me to Jewish fear. The guard outside a synagogue is not new. Nor, regrettably, is the mental recording of exits, unattended bags and unfamiliar faces while ostensibly concentrating on the Amidah.

What is different here is the escalation—and the extent to which security has moved beyond protecting Jewish buildings and begun shaping Jewish behaviour.

It is not merely the guard at the synagogue door. It is the youth camp reducing the public visibility of its children; the student deciding whether Hebrew can be spoken safely; the family considering whether a Magen David is jewellery or an announcement; and 18 Jewish schools spending an estimated $58 million on security over four years.

A guard protects Jewish life.

The perceived need to become less visibly Jewish to remain safe diminishes it.

That distinction matters.

Criticism of Israel is not inherently antisemitic. Israel is a state, not a delicate relative whose behaviour must never be discussed outside the family. Its government may be criticised. Its military decisions may be scrutinised. Israelis themselves conduct both activities with an enthusiasm few foreign protesters could hope to match.

But daubing a synagogue, threatening a Jewish family or demanding that a Jewish student denounce Israel before being admitted to polite society is not criticism of a government. It is the imposition of a political test upon an ethnic and religious minority.

Changing the noun from “Jew” to “Zionist” does not purify the conduct.

Jews have become very skilled at accommodating the unacceptable. We note the nearest exit. We assess whether to wear the Magen David outside our clothing. We lower our voices when discussing Israel in public and then despise ourselves slightly for having done so.

Sometimes this is sensible. Judaism has never required theatrical martyrdom. Preserving life takes precedence over making a point.

But there is a difference between protecting Jewish life and steadily editing Jewishness out of it.

Antisemitism does not require every Jew to disappear. It has often been prepared to retain a small number on favourable terms. The acceptable Jew is the one who first repudiates the unacceptable Jews; who treats Israel as an embarrassing allegation; who understands that belonging in polite society is conditional upon demonstrating the correct distance from her own people.

This is precisely the division Va’etchanan refuses.

To love Hashem with all one’s heart may mean refusing to become internally estranged from oneself. To love Him with all one’s soul may mean understanding that Jewish identity cannot be granted by public approval and therefore cannot be withdrawn by it. To love Him with all one’s might may mean using whatever we possess—not merely money, but voice, judgement and courage—to resist the gradual normalisation of Jewish fear.

This is also Shabbat Nachamu, the Shabbat of consolation. After the devastation recalled on Tisha B’Av, Isaiah begins:

“Comfort, comfort My people.”

It is striking that the prophet does not demand an explanation from the wounded before offering comfort. He does not ask whether they have made themselves sufficiently unobjectionable. He does not require them to condemn anyone as the price of being mourned.

He calls them My people.

Perhaps loving Hashem with all our heart, soul and might is not an emotional summit reached by unusually holy people. Perhaps it is the repeated refusal to surrender pieces of ourselves whenever history—or fashionable society—suggests that life might become easier if we did.

We are frightened because there is reason to be frightened.

But we are still here, wholly.

And that, for now, may be the most honest measure of our love.