What really counts

It’s no secret I’m a Boston Red Sox fan because I spent the first 25 years of my rabbinical career in Massachusetts.  But I’m not a fanatic like Ben Wrightman. In the movie Fever Pitch, Ben Wrightman is crazy about the Boston Red Sox baseball team. He rarely misses a game during the spring and summer months.

One winter, Ben falls in love with a young woman named Lindsey and wins her heart. Then spring rolls around, and she finds out that he’s a different person during baseball season. He has no time for her unless she goes to the games with him.

When Lindsey ends her relationship with Ben because of his fanaticism, he talks with a young friend, who says, “You love the Sox. But tell me, have they ever loved you back?” Those words cause Ben to analyze his priorities and to give more time to the woman he loves, who loves him back.

We pour our lives into hobbies, pleasures, activities, work—many good things. Yet we feel that there must be more to life than that. Three times the Torah commands us to consider love in our decision-making. In this week’s Torah portion Akharei Mot-Kedoshim we are told to love our neighbor (19:18) and the stranger.  (19:34) Finally in the book of Deuteronomy we are commanded to love the Lord our God with all our heart with all your soul and with all her might. (Dt. 6:4)

A religious person might think that loving God should come before loving other human beings in the Torah. Obviously, that’s not the case for loving human beings come before loving God. Because this sequence, one Hasidic Master taught that you can’t really love God if you don’t love other human beings especially those who are not like you.

So, when it seems that your life is getting out of balance, the question, “Has that hobby or activity or thing ever loved me back?” may help to keep us in check. Loving God and loving people are what really count.