Have you ever heard a Jew talk that way?
I have not. If we heard a Jew talk that way, we’d send him for psychological help, notes Dennis Prager.
So why don’t Jews talk that way?
The Torah has a lot about love in it. God loves Israel. We’re commanded to love God, to love our neighbor as we love ourselves.
I think I know why Jews don’t talk this way. Because Christians do.
(Mark Kirschbaum says Jews don’t talk this way because they are reluctant to talk for God. He’s right. You don’t hear Jews going around talking for God.)
I heard so much about “God loves you!” growing up as a Christian, that I never want to hear it again.
Jews living in Christian lands hear so much Christian love talk, faith talk, charity talk, that they never want to talk this way. The pragmatic concrete practical Jewish mind is repelled by this Hellenic airy fairy talk.
When the goyim lean to extremes, the Jews tends to go to an extreme in the opposite direction.
Christians talk about God directing their lives. Jews never talk this way.
Yet I doubt that Jews living in Muslim countries told their kids before tucking them in bed at night, “God loves you!”
Rabbi Joe emails: Rabbi Soloveitchik’s Uvikashtem Misham (translated as And From There You Shall Seek) is all about man’s love of God and God’s love of man.
This is from page 154: The Torah, which bases all of Judaism on the
principle of creation and providence, but also on the principle of the
chosenness of the Jewish people, introduced into the center of our
world the concept of lovingkindness and of love as a reciprocal
process. The creation of the world is the embodiment of God’s grace.
God’s providence over His creatures in general, and His choice of the
congregation of Israel in particular, is a manifestation of infinite
love. Anyone who says that Judaism commands the individual to love God but does not promise him reciprocal love is a heretic. How unfortunate it is that many scholars pursued folly and suspected that Maimonides, Heaven forbid, agreed with the teaching of Aristotelian philosophy that the yearnings of the world for God are one-way, without any reciprocal yearnings.
