How Can We Be Commanded to Love?

Love is drawn only through faith, a form of attachment and dveikus to Hashem. When a person does even one mitzvah with both love and faith, he is attached to the root of all faith, and it is as if he had fulfilled all 613 commandments. The Torah and its commandments all emanate from Hashem’s very essence, which is true unity, so by fulfilling one mitzvah completely and with love, a person takes hold of all the others through that unity. He has then fulfilled the whole of His unity, one complete partzuf, so to speak. (A partzuf is a kabbalistic construct of the Arizal in which the sefiros form complete sets of ten.) The hardest part of the commandment to love Hashem is that we are commanded to feel something that seems beyond our control. How can we be commanded to feel love? Rav Yaakov Yosef answers that through attachment and connection to the Torah and the path of Hashem, a person’s heart fills with love for Hashem on its own. The same is true of joy, for he then rejoices in loving Hashem.