Attention as an Expression of Love

In his daily word of inspiration this morning, Rabbi David Wolpe drew from French philosopher Simone Weil who, he said, “got it exactly right: Attention is a form of love.”

Weil, whom Albert Camus described as “the only great spirit of our times,” wrote beautifully about the art of attention, calling it “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

Is there a better time than today to contemplate the human ideal of paying attention?

We’re living, as Wolpe said, “in an age of distraction, when so many things pull us away from one another and even from seeing the world.”

The simple act of focusing our attention on one thing — a person, an idea, a flower, a sign of pain — now competes with the multitude of distractions that come at us by the minute.

It is precisely because it has become so difficult that we must go out of our way to donate our attention. There is a dark side, of course, to paying attention, as, for example, when it is used in an obsessive way or to judge and attack.

It is precisely because it has become so difficult that we must go out of our way to donate our attention.

But when the act of attention is seen as a generous act of receiving, of empathy, of understanding, it ennobles the moment. It turns it, as Wolpe says, into “an expression of love.”

If today’s ultra-modern world of constant distraction compels us to pay greater attention to the very act of attention, an ancient tradition provides the ideal “app” to practice the art.

It’s called Shabbat, and it starts at sundown tonight.

Shabbat Shalom.