Love is selfish, says Rabbi Motty Berger of Aish HaTorah, and that’s okay. Monday evening, Berger gave an engaging talk entitled “The Ultimate Relationship Manual,” describing the Torah’s instruction for humanity’s relationship with God as a model for relationships between individuals.
Berger began his talk by describing God as “infinite,” and explaining that “it is impossible to do anything for an infinite being.” What this has to do with romantic relationships became clear by the end of the talk. First, however, the rabbi established the premise that people choose to marry for inherently selfish reasons—they marry because they believe their partner will make them happy. As a healthy relationship progresses, each partner becomes devoted to the other’s well-being, but even at this stage there exists an element of self-interest: each partner thinks, “the happier my partner is, the better off I will be.”
Once he established this basic premise, Rabbi Berger elaborated that this desire to give, though motivated by self-interest, leads to love. “The more you give to someone,” he explained, “the more you will love them.” As an example, he pointed out the relationship of parents to their children; parents love their children more than children love their parents because it is the parents who are on the giving side of the relationship. In other words, he continued, “you don’t give because you love someone, but rather you love someone because you give.” Drawing on the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself,” he defined love as “your ability to expand yourself to a higher ‘you’ that includes others, one that is not only a ‘you,’ but rather an ‘us.’” When this happens, he explained, a person’s fundamental self-interest evolves into a desire to help someone else.
According to Berger, there are three necessary ingredients in a healthy relationship. The first is the ability to choose. The second, which comes with the ability to choose, is the ability to say “no.” Here again he used the parent-child relationship as an example: while the child is helpless and dependent on the parents, the parents choose to have — and take care of — their children. However, “relationships are only as strong as the one who wants them least.” In interpersonal relationships, this means that if one partner does not want to get married, the marriage will not happen. In a person’s relationship with God — on the assumption that God will always want a close relationship with humanity — the closeness of that relationship is determined by the person. The third ingredient is similarity; the more similar two partners are, the better they can relate to each other. When people use the Torah as a guide for their relationships, Berger said, it follows that they should aspire to love their partner as God does—they must become “infinite” by expanding their sense of self to include others, and in turn, they must give and want nothing in return.