Bereishit

Love Bends the Line

April 15, 2026

David Curwin

“Ahavah mekalkelet et ha-shurah.”
— Bereishit Rabbah 55:8

The sages used the above phrase “love bends the line” to describe Abraham’s actions before the akeidah: he rose early and saddled his donkey himself, driven by love for God, rather than waiting for a servant to saddle the donkey for him. Love, they observed, can pull a person off the straight line of rational or expected conduct, compelling an urgency or devotion that can look excessive from the outside. Yet this deviation is not chaos. It is what love looks like when it moves beyond calculation: still ordered, just not in straight lines.

There is intuitive truth in this image. Love resists neat boundaries; it can appear inconsistent or even unbalanced, yet its logic is never random. It reflects a different order, one grounded in attachment rather than analysis.

The Torah’s first description of love already suggests this tension. “It is not good for man to be alone” (Genesis 2:18) might sound like a utilitarian rationale—companionship as a remedy for isolation. But real love cannot be explained by utility alone. If it were merely functional, it would not matter whom one loved. Yet affection attaches to a particular person, not to the category of “spouse.” Love for a child or a parent may be natural, even expected—an extension of family and self. But spousal love is different. It is particular, chosen, and exclusive. We cannot justify our love by logic, nor persuade others to share it. Its truth lies in recognition rather than analysis. It is a logic born of attachment, not abstraction. This is the love the sages praise as ahavah she’einah teluyah be-davar—unconditional love (Pirkei Avot 5:16). Unlike ahavah she-teluyah be-davar—contingent love—which lasts only as long as its reason, this love endures because it does not require justification. Its strength lies in freedom from utility, not in the usefulness of what it seeks.

The tension between love’s apparent irrationality and its inner coherence lies at the center of both human intimacy and religious faith. To love another person, or to love God, is to act beyond strict rational necessity, yet not without meaning. Love often feels unexplainable, but it is not arbitrary. It introduces a coherence that linear thought cannot fully contain.

Love’s logic is irrational but not absurd. An irrational number will not reduce to a simple ratio, but it is perfectly real and coherent within mathematics, even if it cannot be expressed as a fraction. The irrational defies calculation; the absurd defies coherence. Love belongs to the former: beyond reason, not against it. To call love irrational is to acknowledge that it cannot be derived or proven, only recognized—a truth felt rather than formulated.

Creation: Love Without Need
Since God is whole and self-sufficient,^[1] creation cannot be an act of necessity, such as a need to be sustained or served by His creatures. Jewish sources therefore often describe creation not as a response to a lack but as an overflow of hesed: generosity, or even love. In that light, the very existence of the world reflects the principle that love bends the line.

Psalms 89:3 contains the evocative phrase olam hesed yibaneh, literally meaning “forever will kindness be built.” The Midrash^[2] reinterprets the phrase to mean that the world is built on kindness.^[3] The Zohar and later kabbalistic sources go further, framing creation itself as emerging from love.^[4] Rabbi Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto offers a philosophical parallel, describing creation as the result of a divine desire to bestow goodness upon others.^[5]

Classical Greek philosophy offers a useful point of comparison. For Aristotle, God is the “unmoved mover”: perfect and complete, untouched by the world, and not a being who chooses or acts within it.^[6] By contrast, Plato describes a Creator who acted “because He was good” and wished to share His goodness.^[7] Jewish tradition threads a path between those poles: it retains divine perfection while still speaking of creation as an act of giving, and it recasts that giving as love.

If creation stems from love rather than necessity, then ahavah mekalkelet et ha-shurah describes more than human emotion—it describes reality itself. The world is not inevitable; it exists because of love.

Ha-Levi: The Meaning of the Irrational
Four prominent Jewish voices—Yehudah Ha-Levi, Maimonides, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, and Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein—each grapple with the same experience: love can look irrational from the outside and still feel coherent from within.

In the opening of the Kuzari, Ha-Levi rejects abstract philosophy. His objection is not that it lacks rigor but that it remains detached from lived experience. The God of Israel, by contrast, is known through history and revelation, not philosophical speculation (Kuzari I:1–11).

He makes the point by turning to examples that can look irrational from a purely logical point of view. Physical intimacy, for instance, could seem absurd to an observer unaware of its purpose (Kuzari III:53). But once its context and consequence are revealed, it becomes an act that can lead to new life. The same is true, he continues, of the commandments. Practices such as sacrifices and other religious ceremonies can seem arbitrary from the outside, but understood as part of revelation, they are intelligible in a way that reason alone cannot provide.

Ha-Levi is not arguing that reason is useless. Rather, he is arguing that it cannot be the starting point. What looks irrational from the outside can make sense once it is seen as part of revelation, where meaning is expressed through loyalty and lived commitment, not deduced like a proof. In that setting, commitment comes first, and understanding follows.

Ta’amei Ha-Mitzvot: Commandments as Acts of Love
If mitzvot are part of a relationship, then ta’amei ha-mitzvot—the reasons for the commandments—start to look different. Love does not need to be justified, and a relationship can come before understanding. Ha-Levi does not say this outright, but his framework makes room for it: meaning can be recognized from within a relationship before it is explained.

What would that look like in practice? When people talk about ta’amei ha-mitzvot, they usually mean one of two things. Either the mitzvot are meant to accomplish something—refine us morally, elevate us spiritually, strengthen society—or they are meant to train something: submission, loyalty, the willingness to obey even without understanding why. The first approach is utilitarian, the second obedient. And they have long stood in tension, each accusing the other of missing the point—the utilitarianism of reducing divine service to human purpose, the obedience of draining it of meaning.

A classic rabbinic formulation gives a particularly sharp expression to the “obedient” model. The sages ask: “What difference does it make to the Holy One, blessed be He, whether one slaughters from the neck or from the nape?” They then answer: “The mitzvot were given only in order to refine human beings.”^[8] In this view, the commandments are not justified by their outcomes or their intelligibility. Their purpose is formative. Through disciplined submission to divine instruction, a person is tempered and elevated. The mitzvot matter not because of what they accomplish, but by how they shape the person who does them.

Even so, both approaches tend to speak about mitzvot in the same basic way: in terms of what they do for us. Either they produce outcomes (moral, spiritual, or social), or they shape the kind of person we become. What is harder to hear in either model is the relationship itself. The mitzvot are treated as means to an end more than as actions between a person and God. But if we view mitzvot as part of a relationship, another possibility comes into view: they may be expressions of love.

I once heard an analogy from Rabbi Aharon Wexler that captures this well.^[9] A man’s wife asks him to make the bed. To him, it seems pointless; no one else will see it, and it serves no function. Yet he does it anyway. Not because he understands why it matters. Not because he feels compelled. But because he loves her. The act may or may not have a reason behind it. What matters to him is that it matters to her. Love transforms the request into an act of care.

So too with the mitzvot. Some have clear reasons, while others remain inscrutable. But we fulfill them out of love for the One who commanded them. Whether or not they make sense, they are acts of relationship, not utility. When we fail, the loss is not procedural but personal—not disobedience alone but distance. And when we return, through teshuvah, we do not merely restore compliance; we restore connection.

In this model, ta’amei ha-mitzvot are no longer about what the commandments do for us nor merely about our willingness to obey. They are about what the commandments mean within a relationship. Their purpose is not utility or submission but love—a love that bends the line, because it acts for the beloved even when no clear rationale is in view.

Maimonides: From Intellect to Affection
Ha-Levi located religious meaning in revelation and lived commitment rather than philosophical proof. Maimonides, though, reaches love by a different route, through the very intellect Ha-Levi set aside. In Hilkhot Teshuvah 10:3, Maimonides describes the ideal love of God as constant preoccupation, as though afflicted with lovesickness, unable to stop thinking about the beloved. The analogy is startling. This is Maimonides, after all—the philosopher known for rational moderation.^[10] Yet Maimonides presents this passion not as a loss of reason but as its culmination: knowledge of God gives rise to love. The intellect, at its highest point, generates desire.

The psychological surprise in Hilkhot Teshuvah becomes a theological one in Hilkhot Avodat Kokhavim. There Maimonides sketches a story in which belief unfolds through human searching: Abraham comes to know God through reflection and inquiry. For much of the narrative, God appears passive, as human beings find their way back to the truth. But when Abraham’s descendants go down to Egypt and are drawn into its idolatrous culture, the story can no longer remain purely rational. Suddenly the tone shifts: “Out of His love for us … He appointed Moses … and sent him.”^[11] At that moment of crisis, the passive God of the earlier story becomes active. He intervenes out of love and sends Moses to redeem Israel.

This development does not follow Aristotelian logic. The unmoved mover neither chooses nor loves. It just is, and everything else desires it. Yet here, God acts out of love. Something shifts. The Aristotelian frame can carry the story only so far. Once you reach Egypt and redemption, it starts to strain. Maimonides—almost against his own grain—has to speak about divine initiative and benevolence. The narrative begins with human reasoning and ends with divine intervention. Maimonides frames that intervention as love.

Soloveitchik: Recognition Without Absurdity
In the modern period, this discussion continues in a new form. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard defines faith as a leap “by virtue of the absurd,”^[12] grounded in paradox and even contradiction. Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (the Rav) agrees that faith is not founded on philosophical speculation but rejects Kierkegaard’s premise that faith rests on paradox. For him, faith is not built on contradiction but rather on recognition: the believer knows God through encounter, not through proof.

The Rav renders this idea vividly in his treatment of rational proofs for God’s existence. In both The Lonely Man of Faith^[13] and And from There You Shall Seek,^[14] the Rav turns to concrete metaphors: Does a bride in her beloved’s embrace need proof that he exists? Does a baby in its father’s arms require evidence of his reality? These metaphors point to a form of knowledge that is direct and relational, not demonstrative. One who loves, or is loved, does not require validation through evidence. You do not reason your way into that kind of certainty. You live inside it.

For the Rav, this intimacy defines faith. The relationship between humanity and God is known from within, through the lived reality of encounter, not by external verification. Just as a lover does not need proof of love, nor does a child need evidence of a parent’s presence, the faithful person does not rest faith on proofs. Love affirms itself through presence.

Lichtenstein: The Privacy of Love
Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein shifts the focus: from how faith is known to how faith is held. When Rabbi Haim Sabato pressed him to describe his personal faith, Lichtenstein demurred: “You ask me to talk about my belief in God? But that is man’s Holy of Holies! His inner sanctum! His most intimate relationship!”^[15] The point of the analogy is not mysticism. It is modesty: some things are not meant to be shown. There are forms of intimacy that lose something when they are exhibited, and Lichtenstein suggests that faith belongs in that category.

There is a precedent for this way of speaking. Rabbi Akiva says of the biblical book Shir Ha-Shirim: “All the Writings are holy, but the Song of Songs is the Holy of Holies” (m. Yadayim 3:5). The claim is surprising because Shir Ha-Shirim is, on its surface, a love poem—full of longing, desire, and the language of human intimacy. One might think that this kind of speech would sit uneasily inside a canon of sacred texts. Rabbi Akiva argues the opposite: the language of love is not a lowering of holiness but its highest expression. And because that language is intimate, it must be read with reverence.

For Rabbi Lichtenstein, faith operates in the same register. Its truth is not something you demonstrate to an audience. It is something you hold close.

Conclusion
The sages saw Abraham saddling his own donkey and called it love bending the line. Not chaos—just devotion that will not stay on the expected path.

We tend to trust the straight line: what is clean, rational, defensible. But the bent line may be closer to what is true when it comes to love. A world that exists without needing to. A life shaped by commands whose full reasons are not always available. A faith that stays private because some things lose their meaning when they are put on display.

Not everything that matters can be proven from the outside. Some of it can only be known from within, and then guarded. Ahavah mekalkelet et ha-shurah—love bends the line, outward in giving and inward in privacy.

[1] See Psalms 50:12.

[2] Mekhilta De-Rabbi Yishmael, Tractate Shirah 9:6; Sifra, Kedoshim 11:11; Midrash Tehillim 119:25.

[3] In biblical Hebrew, the word olam meant “eternity.” In the rabbinic period, it also gained the meaning “world.”

[4] Zohar, Introduction 22:198; Reshit H okhmah, Sha’ar Ha-Ahavah 1:20.

[5] Derekh Hashem Part 1, 2:1; Da’at Tevunot 18:1.

[6] Aristotle, Metaphysics XII.7.

[7] Plato, Timaeus 29e–30a.

[8] Bereishit Rabbah 44:1; see also Vayikra Rabbah 13:3.

[9] Personal communication to the author.

[10] Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot De’ot 1:3–5.

[11] Hilk hot Avodat Kokhavim 1:3.

[12] Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1983), 46.