What does the Torah say about love?

When love is the thing on your mind

Maybe it's a first date you keep replaying. Maybe it's a relationship that's gone quiet, or the 1 a.m. scroll through someone's photos, or that feeling of being lonely in a room full of people.

The Bible has a lot to say about all of this, and it's less stiff than you'd think. It starts with loneliness and ends up with some of the most intense love poetry ever written.

Why does the Bible say it's not good to be alone?

In the opening chapters of the Torah, the Five Books of Moses, God keeps looking at what's been made and calling it good. Then comes the first thing that isn't good: a human being on his own.

The Hebrew phrase for the partner God makes is ezer kenegdo. Ezer means help, but it's not a sidekick word, since the Bible also uses it for God helping people. Kenegdo means "opposite him," like someone facing you across a table.

So the Torah's first picture of love isn't someone who orbits you. It's someone who looks you in the eye, and sometimes pushes back.

Can seven years really feel like a few days?

Jacob, one of the founding fathers of the Jewish people, falls hard for Rachel. When her father, Laban, asks what he wants as wages, Jacob names her. The price: seven years of work.

Then the Torah gives one of its rare looks inside someone's head. The seven years felt like a few days to him, because of how much he loved her.

You'd expect the opposite, since waiting for someone you want usually makes time drag. The verse says love did the reverse. When you know what you're building toward, the waiting stops feeling like waiting. (The wedding night goes badly wrong, but that's another story.)

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"Love is as strong as death": where does that come from?

There's a whole book of the Bible that's love poetry: Song of Songs, a back-and-forth between two lovers who can't stop thinking about each other. Near the end, one of them says: put me on your heart like a seal.

A seal was the stamp people used as their signature, often worn on a cord or a ring so it never left them. Asking to be someone's seal means: make me part of who you are, not something you take off at night.

Then comes the line everyone quotes, that love is as strong as death. The next verse adds that floods can't put it out. That's not a greeting-card idea of love. It's love as a force you don't fully control.

The most famous love line in the Bible isn't about romance

"Wherever you go, I'll go" gets read at weddings all the time. In the Bible, a widow says it to her mother-in-law.

Ruth, a woman from the neighboring nation of Moab, loses her husband. Her mother-in-law, Naomi, has lost her husband and both sons, and she tells Ruth to go home and start over. Ruth refuses and ties her whole life to Naomi's: her people, her God, even where she'll be buried.

The Bible's biggest promise of love is about staying when things are at their worst, not chemistry when things are easy. It worked out, too. Ruth became the great-grandmother of King David.

How to put this into practice this week

Think of your own ezer kenegdo (a partner, a sibling, a best friend) and text them one specific way they've pushed you that made you better.

If you're waiting on love, or on one particular person, try Jacob's move: put your attention on what you're building now instead of counting days.

If someone you love is going through something hard, be their Ruth for one evening. Show up, don't try to fix it, just stay.