Let us start by discussing the lowest level, then working our way upwards towards the higher levels, of love. The first level of love is any love that we have acquired from outside of ourselves. This is an external, superficial kind of love. This kind of love, from the time we are born, is in a fallen, unspiritual state. Our neshamah (soul) is clothed by a guf (body) and a nefesh habehaimis (animal level of the soul), and therefore when we are born, naturally, our power to love usually becomes focused on that which is materialistic, worldly, and transient.
In the process, our love for Hashem becomes covered and hidden, almost entirely. In the absence of loving Hashem, our power of love is channeled elsewhere, and we end up loving other things. The Torah says “Love Hashem with all your heart with all your soul”,[3] but it becomes very difficult to love Hashem with all your heart when there are other things that we love very much.
Chazal explain that part of loving Hashem is to nullify any extraneous “loves” that one has on this world. Practically speaking, a person needs to become aware of all the different things that he loves on this world, and then he should try to go about slowly uprooting them. Generally speaking, the sefarim hakedoshim explain two different ways to do this: either by directly revealing love for Hashem, which will make the other loves fall away, or by slowly disconnecting from the other things we love, so that our soul becomes opened more to love for Hashem.
We can awaken love for Hashem using any of the levels that were explained in the previous chapters: Awakening a love for Hashem through actions, thoughts, emotions, speech, etc. Our main work is to uproot the other loves, thus, part of loving Hashem is to learn how to disconnect from other loves that deter us from love for Hashem.
But we need to understand that there are two reasons why we should uproot other loves: To disconnect from the physical world and connect more to the spiritual world, and to reveal more love for Hashem. Here we not dealing with the first reason (connecting to the spiritual), because that is not the main discussion here. Here we are dealing with the second reason: Because uprooting other loves that we have will expose us to more love for Hashem, the mitzvah of ahavas Hashem.
Thus, we need to gain more love for Hashem by uprooting our other loves and revealing more love for Him, and mainly by uprooting our other loves.
Example of Nullifying Love Acquired from the Outside
In order to accomplish this practically, we can use the advice of Reb Yeruchem Levovitz, that a person should practice for three times a day going against his will. One should do this at the level he is capable of, with conscious awareness that one is trying to get rid of the worldly desire and because he wants to love Hashem more. If a person just does it robotically and without any conscious thought and without knowing what he is trying to accomplish with this, he will fail and it will only cause his body to rebel and his physical urges will increase even more.
As an example, when eating, one should try to leave over some food he desires to eat, and he should do so with the awareness that he is separating from this desire, because he loves Hashem more than the food.
Many people don’t succeed when they try to do this, because they just practice it mechanically as if it is some obligation upon them, without the conscious awareness that they are trying to gain love of Hashem. It is not enough to just leave over some food on the plate with no thought or awareness. One needs to be conscious of the fact that he is (1) Ridding himself of the physical desire to eat the remaining food, and (2) One is giving up this desire out of love for Hashem, because one loves Hashem more than the food.
With the more one does this, one gradually can reach a place in the soul where he is disgusted with the worldly desire and he becomes divested of his external loves. To the degree that one removes his material desires and loves, one reveals the inner, spiritual love behind it, which is the soul’s love for Hashem. The first step in acquiring love for Hashem, then, is to divest our material loves.
