I hear a lot of people say they believe that love is god.  So I started to think about it.  What if god was love?  If I believe that god created the universe, then I am saying that nothing but love created the universe.  Now, this sounds great at first.  Until I started looking around at the world, and seeing how amazing it is, started to feel grateful to be able to see.  And to walk around.  And to have a world to be amazed at.  And I realized that gratitude is not love.  Gratitude does not come from love (though I could see how love could evolve out of gratitude).  Now, if god is love, then how could god create gratitude?  After all, you can’t create something that is not a part of you, that you have no understanding of.  This led me to wonder what other attributes exist in the world that are unrelated to love.   Some of the attributes I discovered were:  strength, humility, drive or persistence, intelligence, and wisdom.  If these do not come from love, and god is love, then how do they exist in this world?  Now I could say that these things created the world with god, but I started by saying that love (which we assumed god to be) created the world.  Therefore, the only conclusion I can find is that these attributes, as well as love, have to be part of god.  And therefore, god has to be more than love.

Now if any of you who are reading this, disagree, and can show me how god can still be nothing but love, or can show me an error in my logic, I would be delighted to have you add your comments.  Even if this post makes you consider that god might not just be love, write that and let me know.  Or add any other attributes that you have discovered, that are not related to love, besides the ones I mentioned above.

Thanks, and may your days be full of blessings and filled with wonder.

About the Author

Shmuel Shalom Cohen spent 10 years studying Torah in Jerusalem. Six years ago, he started Conscious Torah to help Jews connect to their tradition in ways they didn’t think possible. Shmuel also started, and is the executive directory of Jewish Events Willamette-valley, a non-profit whose mission is to build Jewish community, pride, and learning. In his free time, Shmuel likes walks in nature, playing music, writing poetry, and time with good friends.