Spring is the perfect time to learn to love. When the world wakes up and blooms after a long winter, turning our gardens and neighborhoods pastel shades of pink and green, it’s hard to not feel our hearts blooming, too. But this year, echoing our (zoom) seders of just last week, is different than all other years. Learning to love looks different from inside our houses and apartments than it does in parks, in coffee shops, in classrooms. Love, so often shown with a hug or a brunch date, is now shifted to the domains of virtual happy hours or simultaneously making a recipe with a friend, or doing a yoga class, miles apart. Our isolation has us longing for a revival of Facebook pokes, both for the nostalgia (chain Instagram challenges, anyone?) and the physical contact.

Our distance from one another is rooted in love, and in learning to love. “Stay home, save lives” is echoed across platforms, from politicians’ PSAs to Pinterest quote boards. To resume life as normal is hateful to one’s neighbor, and we all know what Hillel says about that. Oh, the irony; learning to embrace loneliness as a means of loving and protecting one another. 

Even more than loving our neighbor (which is so important, don’t get us wrong), the Torah reminds us to love the stranger nearly 37 times.  “Our neighbor is one we love because he is like ourselves. The stranger is one we are taught to love precisely because he is not like ourselves.”   Loving the stranger is a reminder of our common humanity, despite our individual differences. Over the next few weeks, many of us will find ourselves practicing new forms of love, all to support our neighbors, our strangers, our friends in between. 

The New York Times publishes a column called “Modern Love” which shares the love stories of people across the globe. Some are romantic love, others platonic love; others still, tell stories of divorce, of heartbreak, of longing. But all revolve around the central theme of love, and what that looks like in our 21st-century world. Reading the love stories of strangers is peculiarly intimate, a window into the lives of others, yet simultaneously reassuring in its commonality. The love of strangers makes us weep, makes us smile, and gives us joy, uniting us in our experience of that most fundamental of emotions – love – throughout space, time, and being.
(Avocet’s pick for favorite Modern Love)  (Rachel’s pick for favorite Modern Love)

“Learning to love” isn’t just about romance, nor is it solely a celebration. Learning to love looks like struggling with the complexities of a place you hold dear, both because and in spite of your love for it. Learning to love can mean acceptance and appreciation of difference or contradiction, even within your own family. And learning to love can be a criticism, a way to hold that which we love accountable to do and be better. In times of distress, how can we use love as a way to perceive the world (and ourselves) through gentler eyes?  

Our work from this past year is a labor of love, and we consider each piece published its own love letter. Love teaches us to explore the better parts of ourselves. It sounds scary, yes. Daunting, probably. But we promise that in the end, the best way we can be is through love and being loved. 

Love,

Rachel + Avocet