Love, Love, Love!

Hey there, my name is Rabbi Jodi Gordon, and I am pumped to be joined by Rabbi Jen Gubitz as we welcome you to the OMFG podcast, Jewish wisdom for unprecedented times.

Hey, Gubitz. Hey, friend. OMFG, what a fabulous 4-letter word. Those 4 letters really do the trick. From OMFG, why is my Netflix stuck on 72% loading? To "OMFG, all the candy is half price at CVS!" As rabbis, we have come to know that when the stories of our lives meet the stories of Jewish tradition, transformation, growth, something awesome occurs.

Jen and I are experts in the letters J and G, the perfect Zoom mullet, cold brew coffee, Anne Taylor Loft, and the Mass Pike. And we want to bring you into our conversations that express our love for Judaism and make it relevant in the world. As we mine Jewish wisdom for strength and resilience in these unprecedented times with a dose of humor. Because as Linda Ellerbee says, laughter in the face of reality is probably the finest sound there is.

This week we're talking about another 4-letter word: love. Because Valentine's Day. Love is complex and ever simple. Love is heartbreak and joy. But to warm us up, let's play Valentine's Day word association. Jodi, what's your favorite Valentine's Day candy? Go!

Conversation hearts.

Reese's Pieces with red packaging.

Oh, is that a thing? Oh, I really like the pink and silver Valentine's Kisses.

I like whatever candy is in Valentine's Day packaging on February 15th.

Oh, yes. Yes, the real holiday when it's all 50% off. I would also make an annual vote for my once-a-year dose of Red Hots. I do really like that cinnamon chewy stuff.

Red Hots. I love it. Ugh, Valentine's Day is so sweet.

So Jen, hold on a second though. Let's just pause to ask the obvious question. What about Valentine's Day is Jewish exactly?

The truth is, is that Judaism has its own day of love, Tu B'Av. But that's in the summer, and it shows up, love that is, in Shir HaShirim, the love poetry in the writings of Torah. But since our world is being drenched in Valentine's Day gear right now, how could we not talk about it, even if it's, you know, named after a saint? Really, Judaism has a lot to say about love. It shows up in a lot of different ways in Jewish tradition, in prayer, and beyond. And ultimately, the best example of love in Judaism is covenant, or brit. In Torah, we get story after story of God's covenant with the Jewish people, that rainbow that God sends to Noah, and then the promises, the covenants, the contracts that God creates with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and their subsequent children, promising them progeny and land. Then to Moses, then to the Israelites being led from Egypt. It's all part of a covenant of mutuality, of care, of love, and of protection. And it becomes the metaphor in Jewish tradition moving forward. That we reenact each week at Shabbat and even at a wedding.

Now, I love a good metaphor. So I'm going to go ahead and say that the covenant between God and the people in Torah is one amazing way to understand how Judaism thinks and talks about love in all of its forms. Because basically, God and the Jewish people are, I don't know, besties, lovers. The covenant, as it appears throughout Torah and the Writings is mutual, sort of. I do think it's worth saying that there is a dimension too in these covenants of sort of shared fealty that, that do have some sort of imbalance to them. The covenant isn't exactly 50/50 equal partnership, but that covenanted relationship between God and the people does seem to be a springboard for other human relationships throughout Tanakh. Relationships between lovers and parents and children, and perhaps my favorite, between friends. There are some great examples of really deep and loving friendships throughout our tradition: David and Jonathan, my personal favorite Ruth and Naomi.

So Jodi, let's talk about friendship to celebrate Valentine's Day.

So a couple of months ago, my sister-in-law wrote one of those Instagram sort of birthday tributes that I think many of us are wont to do these days. To her best friend. And in it, she said something like, "I know that not all great love stories are romantic because this friendship has been one of the great love stories of my life." And I think for me, that's true, that friendships are so important. You know, it's so easy to fall into that cliché of like, "Oh, friends who are like family," or some of us who talk about friends as chosen family. But there is something about friendship and, and really loving and deep and intimate friendships that I think are sort of hardwired into our tradition. You know, when we study in a beit midrash, in a house of study, if we are doing Torah study, we often talk about staring in chavruta, that amazing Hebrew word, which means studying in pairs. That word chavruta comes right out of the same word that we get for friendship. It's built on the concept of friendship. And so I think there is something where, and you know, this, maybe this is just me, but I think of some of my most important friendships as like my life chavrutas. I mean, Jen, you're one of my life chavrutas.

Likewise, it's great to have life chaverutes that you didn't marry.

You know, and I think that the pandemic has been a reminder, actually, like so much to your point, Jen, you know, specifically the ones we didn't marry, that this whole pandemic experience has been a crucial reminder about how important friendship is. You know, those real deep soul knowings of another person who is specifically not your life partner or spouse.

One of the ways that I've loved friendship throughout this past year is by using my love language, which is sending gifts. Well, you have received, Jodi, 3 packages of Double Stuf Oreos. And you told me actually something really beautiful about what you did with my love language gift for you, which was—

which was that I lovingly re-gifted one of those boxes of Double Stuf family-sized Oreos, because even though I have a family who loves Double Stuf Oreos, we did not need 3 family-size packs. And so I gave it to a friend as his birthday present. You and I do share that love language. And that is an amazing way of sort of pushing friendships forward, right? Of, of sort of dropping something into someone's lap that sort of speaks into the moment of like, maybe this was something you need. Maybe you knew you needed it and weren't going to get it for yourself, or maybe you didn't know you needed it. Now here it is. But can you talk a little bit more about love languages and how you've seen them work out in friendships?

So love languages are these ways that we express and show our love and care for other people. And we don't all have the same. It's part of communication. Sometimes you can send a lot of gifts to someone, and if they prefer words of affirmation, your gifts actually don't land with the same amount of joy that I'm sure Double Stuf Oreos brought you. One of the ways that friendships have been really supportive for me in this past year have actually manifested through text message groups. So Jodi, you and I have a group of friends that we text with repeatedly. I have a group of friends that I text with, one of whom I'm very close with, have never actually met her in person. We became Zoom friends through work and then have found other shared interests and issues going on in our lives. My family has a group text that my brother is always trying to unsubscribe from, but that's not how family works. The other friendship lifeline for me has been Gchat. I have built many a relationship over Conversations on Gchat and Facebook Messenger. And I think for me, the reason is because ultimately, I'm an introvert, and I like to communicate in ways that I can think through what I want to say, and writing is really the way. So between texting ridiculous images of things that we find around town, or costumes that your kids are wearing, or weird things my dog is doing, or of course, weird things that we find in Torah, to our classmates, has been really nourishing and really made me laugh a ton.

I also have a number of group texts going, and they have been more active than ever during this time of pandemic.

And I—

it's interesting what you say about, for you, the, the written word serving a certain function as an introvert, because I think we have all been forced into like a much more introverted lifestyle in the past year, which is where when I think about, you know, who do I celebrate on February 14th and I love my husband. He's a vegan. I'll find him some dark chocolate that he can eat. Right. But when I think about like some of those friendship relationships that have really sustained me this year, it's because they like invite us out of our homes, right? They are and have been our connection to this outside world. And, you know, as a love language, right, some of that regular communication, right, that chance to approximate what it would be like to hang out by having that sort of stream of conscious, like ongoing conversation with people that happens to unfold the way it does these days in text or over Gchat, I think for a lot of people, I know for me, has been really sustaining.

It's this way of being seen and heard that we otherwise can't experience. At the beginning of the pandemic, we were like, let's Zoom with everyone we've ever known in our lives. That lost its effect eventually, but I'm finding this time where we can't do as much as we would like, really to also be able to reconnect to some college friends, reconnect to some friends from camp.

You know, I think about all of these different relationships and Jen, you and I share many of these same categories. For me, it's my college friends, it's my camp friends, it's, you know, friends I met along the way working in various places and, you know, going to school in various places. But I think back to where I started with that amazing line that my sister-in-law wished her best friend on her birthday. Not all great love stories are romantic, but the idea that friendship could be proof of a great love story, I find so affirming. Like, I think about the way that Valentine's Day, you know, garners eye rolls and rightfully so, where it, where it hangs its hat on you know, only romantic love and sort of the commodification of showing it with, you know, all sorts of ridiculous things that you can buy at Walgreens.

And roses, dozens and dozens of roses.

Dozens and dozens of roses. But I, I do think that some of the greatest love stories of my life are friendships, right? Our friendships that started when I was a teenager and here, you know, 25, you know, 30 years later for some of my, my oldest friends, Like, that's an amazing love story. And so, you know, it's not just like lifelong besties that we are celebrating when I think we— when we talk about friendship and how deeply ingrained it is in our lives, but also the vast array of friend-like relationships that help us build a whole life. And I think you were doing a little bit of reading about that this week, about sort of what it looks like right now, especially in pandemic times, to think— to sort of like look at the landscape of people who normally would make up your life, and how those friendships are faring.

Yeah, so what we've been talking about a lot is really the friendships that are deep ties, right? They go way back. And there was an article in The Atlantic by Andrea Muhle, who talks about weak ties and how weak ties are actually really important to us. And Andrea, in her writing, she refers to Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter, who coined in 1973 this term weak ties. Which refers to acquaintances, people you see less frequently, and sometimes strangers with whom you share some sort of familiarity. For me, when I lived in New York City, these were the people who I rode the subway with at the same time on my way to school, who were also always running late, it seems, or maybe they were on time. It's the same people who were grabbing a coffee at the same time from this barista named Martin. It's also the same people that you might small talk with while you're warming up your food in the microwave at work or at school. And according to Buell's article, weak ties include some folks you've never met but share something in common with, which for me is like the people who I always see at Indigo Girls concerts taking over the men's bathroom or at Club Paseem for certain folk music shows. We eventually meet maybe while waiting in line, but otherwise we don't know anything about one another except that we have, dare I say, the same excellent taste in music. And so while these people may not be friends per se, it would be fair to say that we're friendly. And it's what Granovetter calls an outer circle, which is vital to our social health. So Andrea Muehl in her article talks a little bit more about Granovetter's research that led him to conclude something that we're really missing right now, which is casual friends and acquaintances and how important they are to our well-being. He initially found that the majority of people who were maybe looking for a new job actually found their position through social connections with people on the periphery of their lives, not close relations. So weak ties is really a critical element that I think no one makes a Valentine for, right? Hallmark has not yet made that card. Hallmark, I had the idea first. You owe me royalties. So Valentine's Day shout out to all my weak ties— I mean friends out there. Love ya.

I would also add a Valentine's shout out along those lines as we wrap up this segment on friendship to not just the weak ties, not just the acquaintances, and not just our best friends, but to all of the work wives and husbands in the world and work spouses and all sorts of wonderful people who, when you think about it, in the before times and now maybe still on Zoom, are people who we spend so much time with. And those relationships can be incredibly nourishing and incredibly filled with love. Right? Because when you share a shared goal and you have a shared passion, I think there's always the potential for really incredible relationships to come out of there. And sometimes they never leave your office. So one more Valentine's shout out to all of those workplace relationships.

I wonder if someone's going to make conversation hearts this year that say, you're muted.

I hope so. I mean, it feels like an opportunity.

I should really go into like the Valentine's Day card and candy industry.

That feels like a nice segue to talk about one of the most consistently touted texts about love in the Hebrew Bible. Right there, smack dab in the middle of Torah, in the middle of Leviticus, we read, "Ahavta lerei'echa kamocha," you shall love your neighbor as yourself. We've probably all heard this before. And it's one of those amazing texts that it's sort of an easy thing to refer to when we're trying to talk about, you know, what justice might look like or what community might look like. But what does love your neighbor as yourself have to actually do with love?

These days, our neighbors have become really essential parts of our lives. And we sometimes order food together, or when we have something that we don't want to use, like a vegetable that comes in a delivery, I will text my upstairs neighbor and say like, "On the back steps, there's a treat for you," and sometimes it's a cabbage. But that is loving your neighbor as yourself.

I don't know if Torah ever imagined cabbage as a gesture of love, but I hear what you're saying. I mean, and I'd be really happy to be your neighbor and to receive cabbages. But I think you're right, Jen. You know, this— the idea of neighbor, especially if you live in a city, And even if you don't, it had become a much more abstract concept, I think, in a lot of our modern lives, right? That, that sort of easy question that you could ask rhetorically as part of a sermon on, you know, how connected are you in your community is like, do you really know your neighbors? And now many of us more than ever before, like, really know our neighbors. But there's this question of who is our neighbor? Is it literally the people whose house is on either side of my house? Is it only and literally the people who live upstairs from you in your apartment. And that is where I think about something I learned as part of an American Jewish World Service trip a long, long time ago, and this idea of the universe of obligation. So this is a great thought exercise to figure out who your neighbor is. So you put yourself in the middle of a circle, and then the next ring around you is maybe your immediate family, right? Whoever maybe you live with, you know, quite literally in your house. And then around that, if you were doing this in terms of geography only, not just social relationships, you know, you would have the people who quite literally live next door to you, upstairs from you. And then you would zoom out from that and say, oh, it's everyone in my neighborhood. It's everyone in my town. It's everyone in my city. It's everyone in my state. Your universe of obligation, it gets a little bit weaker the further out you go. But even as those ties weaken, like they're still connected. And I think about that universe of obligation of, you know, it's not so many steps past my literal neighbor to get to my figurative neighbor. And am I any less obligated to them? And so I think that there is this embedded teaching in this idea of love your neighbor as yourself, that we're all connected and you are going to be better off if you think of everyone as your neighbor.

Some would say love your neighbor as yourself sounds a little bit like the Golden Rule, and it really plays out in a lot of other faith traditions. One version of this teaching is recognize that your neighbor feels as you do and keep in mind your own dislikes. So perhaps I should reconsider giving my neighbor the cabbage. Hinduism talks about it this way: those acts that you consider good when done to you, do those to others and none else. A hadith teaching from Islam says, none of you truly believes until he wishes for his brother what he wishes for himself. Taoism says, "Regard your neighbor's gain as your own gain and your neighbor's loss as your own loss." And finally, Sikhism says this, "Precious like jewels are the minds of all. To hurt them is not good at all. If thou desirest thy beloved, then hurt thou not anyone's heart." It reminds me of that chain of connection that you described in The Universe of Obligation, that's threaded throughout all religious traditions, not just Judaism, that actually says, even though those are weaker ties on the furthest of the circle, right? Like, I don't know the people around the world. In some way, I'm still actually responsible for them.

Well, it also, you know, if you're into sort of picturing how it plays out, it also, it creates that sort of chain of paying it forward, right? Like that great movie from the '90s with Helen Hunt, right? That if I can love my literal neighbor as I love myself, my neighbor has another neighbor on the other side of their house. And so if they have received that love, right, and we're being— I'm being really literal here— then they might be even more inclined and better situated to then love their next neighbor as themselves. That neighbor receives love and feels that strengthening and that ability to pass it on. And so there is this way in which I think whether we think about it as sort of paying it forward or as really seeing ourselves as interconnected, then I do think that, you know, this, this Torah text really does have to do with a certain way of putting love in the world.

The question I have about this text, love your neighbor as yourself, is what does it mean to love yourself? How does Judaism want us to love ourselves? Is that self-care? Is that the bath bombs and face masks? Love your neighbor as your face mask on your face care self?

So there's two parts of the phrase, and we've talked a little bit about the neighbor piece, but there's that, that first part, like, or the first and third part, right? Ahavta lerei'acha kamocha, the love your neighbor as yourself. So is this also kind of a surreptitious reminder of how we are meant to treat ourselves? Is this a text also about self-love? And right now Valentine's Day is giving us a really easy sort of straw man to punch against, right? But let's just say you're sitting there and you are feeling a little lonely, which wouldn't be unusual right now and you're feeling like, wow, like I'm not getting any roses or conversation hearts from Walgreens this year. You know, where does self-love come in? You know, and for some people it's affirmations. I think this does go again beyond the self-care that you and I often joke about that has to be better than, than face masks and bath bombs. But I guess, Jen, like what kind of self-love do you do? Do you have anything that you do that you feel like really counts as great self-love?

Such a great question. I have to Google my mind. For me, self-love is probably reducing self-judgment and doing the best I can and being okay with it and accepting whatever I write, accepting however I look, accepting whatever I cook, accepting— just offering self-acceptance, which I think I'm a— I'm actually a pretty big critic. I have an inner critic of both myself and of others, and my inner critic of others, I think, is quieter when I'm more accepting of myself. And so there's a direct correlation there. It really, it makes a lot of sense to me, love your neighbor as yourself, because I can find a lot of ways to have negative thoughts about other people, especially if my own sense of self feels reduced or diminished.

That makes a lot of sense. I think I'm still figuring out how self-care and self-love are related. So I think they're related and not the same. You know, I'll say, so right now, as we record, I am on day 7, something like that, of a mini sabbatical from my work. And so on the first day of my mini sabbatical, I opened an iPhone note and I made a list of sabbatical goals. And they were inspired by a meme that I have seen posted and reshared, you know, once every couple of months during this pandemic. Which is something like, like, you need water and sunlight. You're basically a houseplant with more complicated emotions. And I realized that those are actually some of the things I haven't been doing to take care of myself. And so my goals for this month are literally to drink more water, to move my body for 30 minutes a day, to get outside except for when it's sleeting. I really hate sleet. And so where self-love comes in, and this is what you just inspired, is, you know, I think I've met my goals like 5 out of 7 days so far. And on the days that I don't, right, how easy that voice is to creep in and be like, ugh, you're so lazy, or, ugh, you know, your goals aren't even that big. You couldn't even do those. And so I think there is some sort of balance around sort of celebrating and enjoying who you are, where you are, when you are there, even as you aim and strive and set goals and try to do more.

I Googled it, Jodi. What's the difference between self-care and self-love? And I found a website called hellorelish.com. I love relish. So this is— I love relish so much that I'm going to consider this to be truth with a capital T. And here's what hellorelish.com says. While self-care and self-love sound similar and are often conflated, the two things are actually fairly different. And both are important to keep track of and seek out. Self-care means taking care of yourself physically and mentally, while self-love means showing kindness to yourself. Showing kindness, offering acceptance, taking time to love and acknowledge what you're good at and what you love doing. Shout out to relish.com. I'm going to send you a conversation heart that says, I love relish.

I think that's actually a nice way of thinking about it. And it, and it also helps ask a question, which I have been thinking about for the past few minutes of what happens when loving your neighbor is hard. Because actually you just said it with the inner critic, right? How easy it is to criticize ourselves and how easy it is to, to sort of fall down on the job of self-love. But what happens when loving our neighbors don't come easily for good reason? Let's say for good reason. And that's where I go back to what you taught at the very beginning, which is that there is something about love in the Jewish tradition that you cannot separate from covenant. And, you know, for people who have been married a really long time, and I don't even necessarily count myself there yet, we just celebrated 15 years together, 10 years married, and so I'm going to say people who have been together 20 years, that, right, that there is a difference between love and mutual responsibility. You know, it's hard to have one without the other, but it's possible. And I think that might be an answer to the question of, like, difficult neighbors. Like, what happens when the people who we are in covenant with by virtue of shared existence, by proximity, by geography, by shared property, when it's— when loving them is hard, what are we still obligated to do? And I think that's a helpful way of, I don't know, thinking about how we might fix this world of ours that could use a little fixing right now, is like, how can we lean on mutual responsibility even if and when something that feels like love isn't quite there?

And I feel like that's actually been one of our challenges, is that not everyone in our world actually feels a sense of covenant and mutual responsibility to one another. And so for us these days, that manifests as wearing like 10 masks out to protect other people or getting vaccinated for our own health, but also to protect the health of others. And also hoping that if we continue to behave in a way that shows mutual responsibility and care for other people, that perhaps that is what gets paid forward. That someone who doesn't necessarily believe that or live in that way realizes that we are connected and, and is inspired to actually move forward in their own lives, acknowledging that they're not the only one in the world who exists. To wrap up this episode, we want to give a shout out to all of our Valentines, all of those close ties and even those weak ties, the people that we know super well since forever and the people that we've just gotten to know maybe even in the last few weeks. So I want to give a shout out to anyone I've sent a text message to ever in my life. Thank you for being there.

I'm going to add a special Valentine's Day shout out to the pinned group texts once I did the iOS update. So to the Brandeis '02, to the Yentas, to the Camp Girls, to my brother, I mean, these are some of the greatest loves of my life. And so a huge OMFG. I hope we get to have a real hug in person and not just text for the rest of our lives.

I want to give a shout out to Google Duo because my 7-year-old niece has figured out how to send video messages. So thank you to all of the technology that has helped us stay in touch with all of our Valentines. Shout out to all the neighbors that I don't even know in JP on this Facebook Facebook group called Jamaica Complain, where we just complain and then support each other. Shout out to you. And shout out to the people in Everything Free JP, where we sometimes give away half jars of pickles or half a bottle of wine. Shout out to you, neighbor.

Shout out to my way down the street neighbor who I definitely didn't know, who left a handwritten note in my mailbox a few weeks ago to tell me she really appreciated my lawn sign, and she felt like it was a special wink wink nod that we're all in this liberal pursuit of, you know, small things like racial justice and basic human rights together. So shout out to all of the neighbors near and far. And on that note, I think our special Valentine's Day wish for all of you of how you might turn some of that love back out into the world, even at a distance, brings me right back to that first great love story between God and Abraham and that amazing moment where they make a covenant and God makes promises. And then the very first thing that God really asks of Abraham is to be a blessing. And so from us to you at the OMFG podcast, We hope that the week ahead will give you lots of opportunities to be a blessing to all of those people you love near and far. And if you find really good conversation hearts for the moment, we highly recommend sending them.

This week's episode of the OMFG podcast was recorded by us, but let's talk about Leslie Gubitz, who spends way more time editing the podcast than it takes us to record it. Shout out to the letter F, which stands for friend. We can't wait to have our friend and colleague Rabbi Leah Berkowitz join us for the next episode of the OMFG podcast. XOXOXO. My favorite F word is friends.