How to Love God: Nine Ways to Awaken the Heart and Keep the Fire Alive

One of the Torah’s commandments is to love God. The Torah and the commentaries describe this mitzvah in poetic and moving terms — calling us to be filled with love for the Creator. Shir HaShirim itself is one long allegory of this divine love. Thankfully, it’s a mutual relationship: God loves us, chose us at Mount Sinai, and every day we declare that love in the Shema: “Hear O Israel, Hashem is One” — Echad, whose numerical value equals ahavah (love). We end the blessing before Shema by saying, “Who chooses His people Israel with love.”

There’s a basic question the commentators ask: How can love be commanded? You can command actions, but not emotions. We cannot force the heart to love. So how does the Torah obligate us to feel something?

The Mitzvah That Seems Impossible

The Or Sameach (Laws of Torah Study) explains that every mitzvah in the Torah must be attainable by everyone — even the simplest person. The Torah never commands what’s impossible. It therefore doesn’t explicitly command us to “be humble” or “be patient", but only to perform deeds that express those qualities.

If so, the command to “love God” must also be something we can actually do. The question is: how?

Climbing Toward Love: Nine Paths from the Sages

The commentaries teach that there are many levels of love for God, and not everyone can reach the highest ones right away. However, any sincere effort to awaken that love — to nurture it through thought, prayer, or action, already fulfills the mitzvah. Following are nine practical ways our sages give us to cultivate that love:

1. Contemplate the wonders of creation – Rambam (Yesodei HaTorah 2).

2. Study Torah deeply – Rambam in Sefer HaMitzvot, and Chafetz Chaim in Shem Olam.

3. Reflect on God’s kindness toward you – Sefer Mitzvot Gadol and Chovot HaLevavot.

4. Pray for the merit to love God – as in Ahavah Rabbah: “Unite our hearts to love and fear Your Name.”

5. Learn from human love, such as between husband and wife — a metaphor for divine love (Rambam, Hilchot Teshuvah 10).

6. Remember that God loves you first, and desires your closeness (Sfat Emet, Devarim 5661–5663).

7. Share your pain and struggles with God, as you would with a close friend — without repression, with honesty and faith (Mesilat Yesharim, ch. 19).

8. Recognize your own goodness — not as pride, but as gratitude and awareness. See the good within yourself as a reflection of divine goodness (Likutei Halachot, Laws of Morning Blessings).

9. Detach from shallow pleasures and honor-seeking, which numb the heart to true love (Biur Halachah, siman 1, citing Sefer HaChinuch).

Try working with one at a time — each is a rung on the ladder toward genuine love of God.

When Love Becomes Distant

How often do we really feel that love? Life fills up with worries, losses, endless responsibilities. The heart feels numb; the words of Shema can sound like poetry from another world.

Those who returned to faith — ba’alei teshuvah, have a gift. Our first connection with God wasn’t through obligation, but through raw, passionate, inexplicable love. Something deep awoke inside us. We felt seen, chosen, alive. That love gave us the strength to change everything — to leave behind comfort, habits, identities, and walk into a new world that didn’t always understand us.

We became, as the Zohar says, “lovesick for God.”

The Struggle of the Returnees

The world often doesn’t understand us — not the secular one we left behind, nor even the religious one we joined. Our enthusiasm can seem strange or exaggerated. Even our own children sometimes call us “overexcited ba’alei teshuvah.”

But that fire, that early love, was real. It was a miracle. A divine spark meant to give us strength for the long road ahead.

Over time, the passion fades. Life sets in. Routine replaces revelation. That’s natural — not a failure. The challenge is to transform passion into endurance — to keep love alive inside the structure of halachah and ordinary days.

Not Every Self-Sacrifice Is Holy

The Torah tells of the ma’apilim — Israelites who tried to enter the Land after being told not to. Their intentions were good; they wanted to do God’s will, but they disobeyed His current command. Their mistake teaches us that even self-sacrifice must have boundaries.

Love and zeal are holy only when anchored in wisdom and halachah. Otherwise, we risk harming ourselves or others in the name of devotion.

We need to study, to know what’s essential and what’s a stringency, to understand balance — between faith and effort, between inspiration and responsibility, between heaven and home.

Balancing Heaven and Earth

It would be nice to live as spiritual freelancers — teaching Torah, inspiring others, telling miracle stories — without bills, diapers, school bureaucracy, or daily frustrations. But that’s not real life.
True spiritual growth happens within ordinary life — marriage, children, work, community, and struggle.

That’s where divine love must live — not in the clouds, but in dishes, deadlines, and disagreements.

The Real Test of Love

Over the years, life’s trials wear us down. We face exhaustion, disillusionment, and inner drought. But none of this means we’ve failed. It’s the natural rhythm of a relationship. Love evolves.

The task is to reignite it — again and again. To go back to the nine tools above: pray, reflect, express gratitude, talk honestly with God, and remember the fire that started it all.

For those who were born into observance, love of God can be a sweet extra. For us, who found our way back, it’s our lifeline.
Without that love, everything collapses.

Don’t give up, and don’t let routine bury the passion. Work for it. Seek it. Speak to God. Study His world and His word. Awaken the love.