If you don’t maintain your equilibrium, your love can become destructive, says RABBI EZEKIEL ISAAC MALEKAR
Can you describe love? Love is to accept, adopt or recognise. Love is to reject, disown or repudiate whatever leads to hatred. The word includes parental love and the affection between partners or siblings and friends. Love should make you happy, joyous, harmonious and not miserable. The relation of God to his people is conceived as a union marked by love on the one side and demanding a corresponding love on the other. This reciprocal love of God and the people is expressed in categories of familial or social unity. Also, we should not forget our love for our country; there is a Sanskrit shloka that says, ‘Janani janmabhumischa, swargadapi gariyasi — the mother who has given birth to us, and the country where you are born, are greater than heaven’. According to a saying in Talmud, ‘When love was strong,we could have made our bed on the blade of a sword.
Now that our love has grown weak, a bed of 60 cubits is not large enough for us.’The Commandment‘Love thy neighbour as thyself ’prohibits unfair dealing and defrauding of the defenseless and even forbids bearing of a grudge. We all know that when we love somebody, it is just enough to be with them;we and they do not have to say anything.When we come home from a hard day’s work and we see our family, it makes us feel good just to see them. Many of those who live alone know especially that there is nothing more depressing than coming home to an empty house. Just being in the presence of someone you love is enough. You do not really have to do anything. God tells us that saying “I love you” and “I care for you” conveys a message that God is always with us and he loves us. We live in six dimensions of north, east, south, west, up and down, but there is a seventh dimension also in the world, the spiritual dimension. In physical dimension, we have to create material goods and prepare our food, but in the spiritual dimension, we have to create positive atmosphere in our homes and in all our relationship in order to have full spirituality. Love is positive.However, love can also be a destructive force.Love is not always a positive force.We read about people who have even killed their spouses and even their own children because their lover did not want them and they did not want to lose their lover. In life,we need ‘luck’ and many times our luck changes, but we must always maintain our equilibrium. We cannot take out our frustrations on our spouse or our children, because we had a bad day or a business deal fell through. But we do so often because it is so easy to vent our frustration at home.After all, who else can we take our frustrations out on? But we must understand that it is only someone who loves you and cares for you will put up with your behaviour. Be careful how you treat your children. There should be no child abuse. There should be no parent abuse because we find today that some older people are being mistreated by their children and they live in pathetic conditions. Two things differentiate destructive love from true love: Listening and sacrifice.
We must listen to the people we love. Krishna also very carefully listened to Arjuna, and his discourse in the Bhagwad Gita begins only from chapter 2 and goes on till chapter 18. When a mother loves her child, she gets up at night and feeds him every three hours.True love demands sacrifice, mutual sacrifice, happiness and joy.Also, if only one spouse is willing to sacrifice for the other, while the other is not willing to do any sacrifice in response, it is not true love but abuse. Let us all hope and pray that all of us will only love and project positive love so that we become truly worthy of God’s love.
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