"There is a wonderful old children's story retold by Shari Lewis in One-Minute Jewish Stories that illustrates how we all yearn to be loved for our true selves. Once upon a time, there lived a very good but very poor couple, who had a son. When the boy was born, a relative sent some expensive and elegant cloth as a present. The mother made a beautiful robe from the cloth, and said, 'When my son is a man, I will send him into the world with this beautiful robe.'
"The boy grew up and one day a rich merchant invited all the townspeople to a feast. The son came in his usual tattered clothing and no one made room for him at the table. Brokenhearted at the rejection, he went home and told his mother what had happened. To console him, she gave him the beautiful robe she had made from the elegant cloth and had stored away all these years.
"The son returned to the feast dressed in his new finery. The rich man saw him, rushed over and bowed, and asked him to sit beside him. The son took off his elegant robe, held it over the food, and said, "Eat, robe, eat all you want.'
" 'Why are you talking to your coat?' Asked the rich man.
" 'Because when I was here before in poor clothing,' the boy replied, 'no one paid any attention to me. But now I come in a fancy robe and you treat me royally. It is clearly not myself you invited to eat beside you, but my robe.'
"The lesson of this story is clear: if you love me for my robe, you rob me of my self. And, of course, the opposite is also true. If you love me for my self, you give me a treasure beyond price."
"The Talmud says that returning to the ways of the Torah brings healing to the world. In contrast, het is associated with sickness, because it causes disease in the world, or rather, dis-ease. If I'm behaving in a way that's stressful to the soul, then I'm bringing tension to the universe. And that's why het is connected to unhealthy living.
"We all know there is something called physical hygiene. You brush your teeth every day, and if you don't, you will eventually lose your teeth. So why do some people think that there is something called physical hygiene — things you must do as part of your daily routine — but that there is nothing called spiritual hygiene? Why do some people think that the physical body has some very real principles and rules that maintain healthy harmony between it and its environment, but that the spirit doesn't?
"The Hebrew word for healing comes from the word meaning 'loose.' What's hinted at here is that sickness comes through tension, strain, and stress. But there is a way of loosening tension and stress by becoming whole, harmonizing me, myself, and the Great I. And that way is like a dance. The Hebrew word for 'sickness' is mehala, and it has been said that one gets well by turning mahala into maholot, which means 'dance.'
"The mitzvot are about dancing. The Talmud says that in the next dimension, those who kept the mitzvot will dance in a circle around Hashem, and Hashem will lead them in a dance to immortality. How do you dance the dance of immortality? The mitzvot provide the lessons. They are like the footprints that are painted on the floor in dance studios to help teach people to dance. So you walk into life's dance studio and you see these footprints on the floor. And you say, 'Who tracked in all this mud? Look at the footprints on your floor.'
"And you are told, 'No, no, we painted them there for a reason. Follow the footprints and you'll learn how to dance.'
"If you do it, you feel silly and stiff at first, but the more you do it — the more you coordinate your life to the universal life — the more gracefully you move, and you catch on to the dance, to the harmony. Then you realize that there is so much more between the steps. It is written that when a person does one mitzvah, it already leads him into the next mitzvah, because the mitzvot are not understood as separate steps, but as the movement of life. They are the dance of life."
"Consider the parallel in your own life today, in the modern world. In the beginning, there is just you. In order to love, you need to withdraw yourself from the center and create a space for an other. Love starts only when you do that — move your self out of the way to make room for another person in your life.
"In other words, if you are self-centered, you are not ready for love. If you are self-centered, you can't make enough space to nurture an other. And true love is not only creating that space within your life for an other, but giving him or her that space and respecting and maintaining that space. It is being a part of another life and removed from that life at the same time.
"And once we're able to withdraw ourselves from the center and create space for an other, we must develop a keen sensitivity for just how uniquely different — just how other — our partner is. When we fall in love, we tend to see what we have in common and overlook the differences. That is what the expression "Love is blind" means. But true love is not blind. True love is seeing-seeing the differences, the otherness, the good and the bad. True love is seeing and still loving.
"In Hebrew, the verb 'to see' is directly related to the verb 'to respect.' And that is what seeing with the eyes of true love means. True love requires that we see and accept and respect those we love for who they are, without projecting our dreams and fantasies upon them. That is very hard, because we tend to try to fit those we love into our imaginary pictures of love. And if they don't quite fit, we try to alter them to fit.
"But if we succeed in seeing not just what we have in common with those we love, but what makes us different, and if we appreciate and honor those differences, then we can take the next step, toward giving of ourselves to our partners. And simultaneously we must enable our partners to do the same for us, which means allowing them to make a space in their lives for us, allowing them to acknowledge and respect our otherness, and allowing them to give of themselves to us.
"It's like hugging. When you hug another person you create a space with your arms to include him or her. But, of course, it must be in a manner that allows that person the freedom of opening his or her arms to include you. Similarly, if simultaneous giving and receiving doesn't happen, a relationship can't work. It is not love. It is something else, and the something else only creates friction and unhappiness, and eventually the relationship breaks down.
"Love is giving of oneself to an other. That is what the Kabbalistic story is telling us. Creation was an act of love. The breaking of the vessels represents our inability to receive the light of love independently. And the mending of the vessels is the challenging process of rebuilding ourselves within relationships, so that together we can receive the Endless Light of love, which is the gift of Hashem.
"Now we have the answer to the big question. What is life about? Love. The essence of life — the very theme of life — is love. What is the motivating drive in the world? What is driving us all, pushing us through life? It is love.
"Ultimately, all people want to love and be loved. The words of our popular songs about love are true: "Love makes the world go round." "All you need is love." But it's not so easy. It's a lot of work.
"In the Kabbalah and the Torah, the components of true love are kindness and justice — two ideals that are very hard to achieve. Kindness is giving of yourself. It is saying that what is mine is yours, without conditions or qualifications. Justice is respecting the other person, his or her individuality, position, possessions. It is saying that what is yours is yours. It is not some kind of a deal. It is not, What is mine is yours and what is yours is mine. It is, What is mine is yours and what is yours is yours-as simple and as difficult as that.
"And those two key components of love — kindness and justice — are also, not surprisingly, among the key organizing principles of the Torah, the Book of Life. When we follow the Book of Life we learn the ways of kindness and justice, the ways of love. And in so doing we create a world that can receive the gift of love."