If you’ve been reading my articles until now, you may have noticed that pretty much all of them have to do with relationships. My examples are almost always of people in relationships, and my previous article while completely being about Emunah is also completely about relationships.
This is not a coincidence or just happenstance, but also not completely intentional on my part.
After all, what even is Judaism?
It isn’t a religion or a faith because many Jews have no connection to any spiritual elements and yet are still Jews. It’s not a culture or race, since Jews practice many different cultures and come from numerous races. Not to mention that a convert can be of any race or culture.
Well, considering that you’re a Jew if you’re born a Jew, it’s safe to say that what Judaism is: is a family.
And HaShem too is a part of our family. Our grand patriarch, if you will, and like your grandparents/parents that you don’t call enough, he wants a relationship with you, just like he wants all of us to relate to each other.
I’m IN love with HaShem. No, it’s not that I love HaShem… HaShem and I are in a romantic relationship. I think of HaShem as I would my wife, and therefore I maintain my relationship with him as I would with my wife.
And while there’s much about HaShem that I don’t know, I do know for sure that he loves me and that he wants a relationship with me, and that it’s in my own best interest to foster the deepest, most loving relationship with HaShem that I possibly can. For my own sake.
So how does my being in love with HaShem drive my relationship with him?
You see, the people who are more likely to succeed in marriage are the ones who aren’t just looking for the other to provide you with whatever they can offer, nor are they the ones who look at marriage like a transaction: you be good to me, and I’ll be good to you. That’s simply not what love is.
Rabbi Noach Weinberg ZT”L defined love as the following: The pleasure you get from: Seeing the good, positive, and virtuous qualities in another, and from taking positive steps to cultivate and refine the qualities that your partner embodies.
A Gottman Institute study of divorce found that amongst the most potent predictive indicators of divorce was failing to respond to a ‘Bid for Connection’.
Imagine you and your partner are sitting down eating breakfast and your partner starts letting you know something interesting they’re reading about in the newspaper. You have essentially three options of how you can react: 1. I don’t care, 2. That’s cool and 3. Wow, tell me more.
It seems obvious to anyone that picking option 1 is bad because it’s pure negativity, but picking option 2 is also bad since it’s pure contempt and the reason why your partner is telling you about what she’s reading is because she wants to involve you in her interest.
The best way to maintain your relationship is to pick option 3 even if you absolutely don’t care about what your partner is telling you.
The reason for this is that when your partner is telling you about the interesting thing they’re reading in the paper, they’re not just wanting to preach a story to you, but rather they’re presenting a bid for you to connect with them, and when you pick option 2, you may think that you’re treating your partner with due respect, but in reality you’re just passing on an opportunity to connect with them. Forcing yourself to be involved with what your partner is inviting you into will always be the best way to ensure your relationship is as strong as it can be.
The point of the above two paragraphs is to say that when you’re IN love with someone, when they ask you to do something, you don’t see it as a transaction for them to repay you, and certainly you don’t see it as a burden. Rather, you see it as an opportunity to connect with them; an opportunity to do something for someone you love.
The more you do for someone, the more you connect to them, the deeper you love them, the more chance that your relationship will be eternal, and the more you yourself will get out of it.
And the same is true for HaShem!
If you look at a mitzvah as a burden, you’ll hate HaShem, and so too, if you see a mitzvah as a transaction since it’s not obvious how HaShem re-pays us for the performance of mitzvot.
And even if it was obvious how HaShem repays us, that’s still an unhealthy way to maintain a relationship… I, for one, am glad that I don’t get a hit of dopamine every time I respect my parents or say shema in the morning.
But if you see a mitzvah as a bid from HaShem to connect with him, then you’ll love the mitzvah for that purpose, and you’ll love HaShem through the connection you make with him via his mitzvot.
| It’s important to note that when I say ‘mitzvot’, I’m equally including bein adam le’chavero (mitzvot between people and people) with bein adam le’makom (between oneself and HaShem). Opportunities for being honest in business, treating people with respect and goodness, and abstaining from and stopping gossiping are just as much an opportunity for connection with HaShem as keeping Shabbat, saying shema, and keeping kosher. |
And now that we’ve established that ‘bids for connection’ which can predict the success of romantic relationships can also hold up a relationship with HaShem, let’s see if there are any other predictors of romantic relationships that can also help us with our heavenly relationship, namely, what the Gottman Institute refers to as The Four Horsemen of a Relationship.
I won’t go into detail on the concept, and instead, I recommend you read the article, but essentially the four horsemen, being criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling, are behaviors which in that order lead one to another and are surefire predictors of a relationship doomed for divorce.
When going about our day-to-day lives, it’s too easy to forget that HaShem is a part of everything we go through and experience, and oftentimes we only acknowledge HaShem’s involvement when things aren’t working out well for us. This can lead to lashing out at HaShem in criticism; angrily proclaiming that he’s running the world badly, often without even realising that that’s what we’re saying.
This unresolved criticism of HaShem can lead to contempt for him, with the mindset of “If you don’t do things the way I want them, then I’m not doing things the way you want them”. Again, this is often without realising that that’s what we’re saying. Our yetzer ha’rah loves this state because it is a perfect environment for our yetzer ha’rah to run rampant and unchecked within us.
And then when our yetzer ha’rah causes us to behave in ways we don’t want to and know we shouldn’t, rather than feeling guilty and pensive we get defensive and justify our actions with reasoning such as “Well I’m in this bad situation anyway” or “if only I had this good thing I deserve, I wouldn’t need to do this”.
And finally, we stonewall ourselves away from HaShem since things aren’t going our way, furthermore, we’re being angrily critical and now we’re behaving with contempt and defensiveness. Consequently, we just shut down and ignore our relationship with HaShem until it’s once again convenient for us.
The situation above may seem very different compared to the bids for attention described previously, but they both have one thing in common: and that is that in both cases the underlying error being made is not taking the other into account.
When we ignore a bid for attention, and when we criticise from anger, we’re only thinking about ourselves and what we can gain from the relationship instead of trying to make the relationship as loving as possible.
Now, it’s true that HaShem does expect us to act like we run the world, but he also expects us to have biachon as well. We would never criticise HaShem from anger if we had bitachon that everything that HaShem does for us is good and out of pure love. And there’s no way we would ever miss out on a bid for connection if we understood how much love and care it was given.
So at the end of the day, we can learn how to relate to HaShem from romantic relationships, and from our relationship with HaShem, we can learn how to relate to others, such as one’s spouse. The key to success in one is the same as the other: always trying to think about the other and taking the other into account. If we do that, we’ll never miss a bid for attention, won’t criticise from anger, and instead all we’d be doing is deepening the connection in the relationship and bringing out more and more love.
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