Judaism Without Love

“Judaism is incomprehensible without love. How else would God have stayed faithful to a people that so often abandoned Him? How often would a people have stayed loyal to a God who seemed sometimes to have abandoned them? There is a passion, an intensity, a fervour to the books of the Bible explicable in no other terms… There is not the slightest suggestion anywhere in Tanach that love is easy, calm, idyllic. Yet it is never less than passionate.”

Ceremony & Celebration, pp. 240-241