Rambam: Yesodei HaTorah 2:1-2

by Rabbi David

Laws of Foundations of Torah... All plagiarized from the Rambam

Law 1-2: You learn to love and fear Gd by recognizing how not important you are. I hope that makes you feel good today.

Law 1: You must love and fear H'. It's a Mitzvah. You have to do Mitzvahs. Why do you have to do Mitzvahs? Because H' said so.
Look at Devarim chapter 6, verses 5 and 13. Maybe try saying the Shema and then learning Pasuk 13 too. Gd tells you should do that too.
You have to love Gd. Why? Gd tells you. It would be good if that worked when dating somebody you liked. I tried that year's back. I said, 'You should love me, because I told you to love me.' If I would've told her, 'Gd told you to love me,' that might have worked. If she was a good Gd fearing Jew.
I fear I'll get in trouble if you don't love Him. That's where my fear comes from.

Law 2: You end up loving H’ when you realize how great He is. When you notice His great deeds and how there is no end to His greatness, you desire to know more. This is not like loving a human. When you see how much my congregants have messed up, when you see how none of them put more than a dollar in the Tzedakah box, when you see how bad Kiddish is, you do not desire to know them at all. You desire to get out of there.
You need a reason to love. With Gd, it's His Greatness that you want to connect to. With a potential spouse, it's to get your parents off your back.

You desire to know more. That is love. I think we just defined it. Years of trying to figure out what love is, I think we just figured it out. The Rambam just said it.
Through appreciation for H’s greatness you learn to love Him. This is what the shadchanim/matchmakers mean when you are not attracted to somebody and they say, ‘You will learn to love them.’ After time, you learn to admire them due to their unattractive appearance. You start to love the ugliness you married.
You know how those parents talk about their ugly kids like they're beautiful, saying stuff like 'you're beautiful'? They're lying.

Then you realize how tiny you are. A little puny man.
Fear comes through realizing how small you are. H’ said, 'Let there be a world,' and there was a world. It appeared. You requested some orange juice with your breakfast and the waiter still hasn’t brought it.
Fear of H' is different. It is a fear of love. If I fear somebody, it's because they're tyrants and I'm worried I'm going to get shot. That's not love. And that is not fear of them. That's fear of losing my life or money. I have to stop hanging out with these people. It's different with parents. They might be tyrants, who made me do homework throughout my childhood. They also made me sit down for dinner with the family. Even so, I fear them and love them because they support me, financially. It's a fear and love with Gd. That's why I say that prayer for Parnasa (a good living).

A tiny, lowly, and dark creature, standing with his flimsy, limited, wisdom before He who is of perfect knowledge.
Kind of makes you feel worse than sitting through a Shidduch pitch from a matchmaker, where they tell you how not handsome you are.
Meditate on how great H' is. Do it for a minute or two. Now think about yourself. Didn't accomplish much. Did you? H' brought the world into being. What have you done today? You stained the deck. Gd just sneezed and built a forest.
Kind of makes you think. Maybe fear Him. This isn't a competition with Gd, who decided to create the heavens and earth with a couple of words. You can't even build a Popsicle stick house right.
When you understand how puny you are, you fear Him. Until now, I never fully understood the Musar, the moral lessons, Hons and Franz were giving over.
Now you understand why you have to fight with fools to get to the potato kugel at Kiddish.

Ahh. That was a good learning session of the Rambam. I feel like a nothing. An absolute nothing, right now.
And I got rejected by a woman, even though I told her to love me. Didn’t work. As she said, ‘You’re not Gd.’ And then I told her, ‘You’re ugly.’