Thomas Merton, in New Seeds of Contemplation, put it this way:
“For God’s love is like a river springing up in the depth of the Divine Substance and flowing endlessly through His creation.”
Read quickly, it sounds like the sentence most of us were handed before we could ask what it meant—devotional language, one more variation on “God loves you.” Read closely, Merton has already said something else. He didn’t describe a feeling. He described a river.
The word we inherited
Most of us don’t read closely on the first pass, because the word “love” itself carries a shape, and the shape is human. Deuteronomy 7:7–8 tells Israel that:
It was not because you are the most numerous of peoples that GOD grew attached to you and chose you—indeed, you are the smallest of peoples—but it was because GOD favored you and kept the oath made to your fathers.
Note that even this rendering is negotiating how anthropomorphic the verb should sound—“grew attached to” and “favored” where an older English ear expects “loved.” The hedge is itself evidence of the underlying point: translators inherit the same problem. A covenantal claim, corporate before it is personal, yet carrying the same affective weight it would carry between two people. Jeremiah 31:3 goes further, in language that reads as addressed to an individual rather than a nation’s contract:
Eternal love I conceived for you then; therefore I continue My grace to you.
The Song of Songs stakes its entire structure on this collapse, traditionally understood as a metaphor for the loving relationship between G-d and the people of Israel and offered to Jewish and Christian readers alike as an allegory of divine love written in the register of desire—lovers seeking, missing, finding. And the First Epistle of John (4:8, NKJV) dispenses with metaphor altogether:
He who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
Not that G-d loves—that love is what G-d is, a predicate turned into an identity.
Four witnesses, centuries apart in places, all reaching for the same word. That convergence is not an accident of translation. It is evidence that deserves to be taken seriously rather than explained away.
Why we reach for the human shape
The reach for that word is not carelessness. It is closer to necessity. A mind can only hold what it can figure to itself, and a mind built to understand persons through relationship will inevitably reach for relational language when it tries to comprehend something outside every category it owns. This is not projection in the pejorative sense. It is translation, undertaken in good faith, by minds with no better instrument available.
Stand in sunlight and say the sun is warm. No one objects that nuclear fusion has no intention of warming anyone in particular. The sentence isn’t false because the sun lacks a subjective wish to comfort you—it describes something entirely real, reported faithfully from the only place a person can stand to report it: the receiving end. Anthropomorphic language about G-d works the same way. It buys legibility, not relation. The relation was never in question. What was in question was whether a finite mind could hold it in any shape at all—and “love” was the shape that fit the hand reaching for it.
Why the emotive reading breaks down
But the fit is imperfect, and the traditions that hand down “G-d loves you” are the same traditions that deny G-d can love the way the sentence implies. Maimonides is uncompromising on this point. In Mishneh Torah, Foundations of the Torah 1:11–12, he lists what cannot be attributed to G-d in the same breath as incorporeality—no anger and no laughter, no joy and no sadness—and grounds the claim in G-d’s own words through Malachi: I, the LORD, have not changed. Scripture’s emotional language about G-d, he concludes, is the Torah speaking in the language of man. An emotion, by definition, describes a change in the one who feels it—arousal, then subsidence. A G-d subject to that motion would not be the immutable G-d the same chapter insists upon a paragraph earlier. Both claims cannot be sentences about G-d’s interior life. One of them has to be describing something else.
Maimonides supplies the resolution himself, in the Guide for the Perplexed, I:54. Scripture’s language of mercy, he argues, names G-d for the action rather than the feeling—the way tenderness in a human being produces mercy, so mercy is attributed to G-d wherever the corresponding action appears, without requiring that G-d possess the tenderness that would produce it in us. Rambam had already made this same move, eight centuries early—relocating the predicate from what G-d feels to what the action, seen from below, resembles.
Diffusivum sui—the good gives itself
If not feeling, then what? The scholastic tradition offers a formula worth borrowing here even outside its native system. Aquinas, drawing on Dionysius’s Divine Names, states in the Summa Theologiae I, Q.5, Art.4 that the good is by its nature self-diffusive—bonum est diffusivum sui. Goodness does not decide to share itself, the way a generous agent chooses kindness among other options. It gives by nature, the way light radiates without willing to illuminate anything in particular. Aquinas returns to the same principle in the De Veritate, Q.21, Art.1, tying the good’s diffusiveness directly to its perfection: the more complete a thing’s goodness, the more it communicates itself outward. Extend the principle one step further and outflow stops looking like an act of will at all—it is simply what unbounded goodness does, the way burning is what fire does.
The terms have now changed: from an emotional subject choosing to love an object, to a source that pours outward as a condition of what it is.
Shefa and the mashpia—the flow and its structure
Kabbalistic vocabulary gives this outflow a name and a grammar. Shefa is the emanation flowing from the concealed root of all things through the sefirot into creation. At the level of the source, that giving is constant. Chabad thought makes the constancy behind that picture explicit. As Shaar HaYichud VeHaEmunah, Chapter One teaches, in the name of the Baal Shem Tov, the Divine life-force which created a particular creature must constantly be vested within it, incessantly creating and vivifying it anew—for were that flow to depart even for an instant, all the heavens would become naught and absolute nothingness, exactly as before their creation. The claim is not merely that the source doesn’t vary. It is that existence itself is contingent on the flow never once pausing.
What varies is downstream: manifestation and reception within the created order, which classical Kabbalah treats as genuinely responsive to human action—itaruta d’letata, the arousal from below that draws forth arousal from above; unifications effected through mitzvot; channels that open or narrow. This is not a claim that Kabbalah teaches an unmoved, unresponsive system throughout. The claim is finer and, for present purposes, more useful: that the variability we experience needn’t imply variability in the source itself.
The relation this outflow establishes has its own terms—mashpia, the one who bestows or causes to flow, and mekabel, the one positioned to receive. “G-d loves you,” read through this grammar, becomes something closer to G-d is mashpia toward you—an act sustained rather than a verdict felt.
This should not collapse into a cosmic plumbing system with no one on either end of the pipe. The mashpia does not become the mekabel by flowing toward it, any more than the sun becomes the field it warms. Shefa is not identity. It is relation sustained without interruption.
What blocks reception
If the source never wavers, why does the flow so rarely feel present? Because the obstruction, when it happens, sits at the receiving end. Klipot—the term Kabbalah uses for what obscures divine light—is a considerably richer concept across different Kabbalistic systems than any single image can carry. For the distinction at hand, the useful piece of it is this: obstruction restricts what a vessel can hold or channel, not what the source continues to give. The image is a hose pinched near its own outlet rather than at the spigot—the pressure behind the pinch is unchanged, but the pinch is real, and what exits genuinely narrows to a trickle. Nothing shuts the flow off entirely. Nothing has to. A trickle is enough to strand a person who needed the current.
Merton, writing from inside an entirely different apparatus, arrives at a strikingly similar structure. He describes the river of God’s will as a stream no one can escape—present, total, indifferent to whether it is welcomed. Those who ride it find life simple. Those who resist it outright are not spared the current; they are overwhelmed by the flood which no power can resist. But most of us occupy neither extreme. We are not carried, and we are rarely drowned. We wash up on some sandbar—not where we belong, surviving, but not well, dry and stranded within sight of the water that was always moving.
Bittul—clearing the static, not earning the flow
Kabbalistic practice names the work of clearing that obstruction bittul—usually rendered “self-nullification,” though the phrase risks the wrong picture. Bittul is not the erasure of the self in some general sense, and it is emphatically not a transaction. Chabad thought develops this precisely through the image of the Patriarchs as the Divine Chariot: throughout their lives, Lessons in Tanya teaches, they did not cease even momentarily from binding their mind and soul to the Master of the universe, and this constant awareness of G-d’s unity is what is meant by the term “chariot”—a vehicle submissive to the will of its pilot. A chariot does not generate the will it carries. It only remains perfectly aligned with a will already present. Bittul does not cause the flow to increase. It removes what was narrowing your share of a flow that was reduced to a trickle at your end, never at the source.
This distinction has to be held with some discipline, because the mind reaches instinctively for the transactional version: G-d’s giving is constant, therefore I must purify myself, therefore purification makes me worthy, therefore now I receive. That sequence rebuilds the very toll booth just dismantled. Bittul does not qualify anyone for anything. It only clears the obstruction the vessel itself was generating. The pinch was always local. The pressure behind it was never conditional.
From the receiving end
None of this made “love” the wrong word. It made it a report rather than a claim—evidence not of what G-d felt toward any of us, but of what a widened channel has always felt like from inside a will capable of narrowing it. Every psalm, every Deuteronomic covenant, every line Merton wrote about the river running through the depth of the Divine Substance, was written from exactly one vantage point: the mekabel’s. There was never another vantage available to any of them.
We anthropomorphized because a mind can only reach with the hand it has. We practiced bittul because obstruction accumulates and has to be cleared. We prayed, and turned, and tried, believing all the while that the trying was closing a distance. The bond was never absent. The intellectual and spiritual labor of a lifetime does not build a bridge across some gap—it only lets the one standing on the near bank finally notice the current was never elsewhere.
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