The God Squad: I love you, Betty

Rabbi Marc Gellman, Tribune Content Agency on Dec 29, 2022

I forget the rest

-- (Walt Whitman)

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you simply, without problems or pride: I love you in this way because I do not know any other way of loving but this, in which there is no I or you, so intimate that your hand upon my chest is my hand, so intimate that when I fall asleep your eyes close. -- (Pablo Neruda)

If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you. -- (A.A. Milne)

Each time you happen to me all over again. -- (Edith Wharton)

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting? -- (George Eliot)

Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be. -- (Robert Browning)

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved a girl, and her laughter was a question he wanted to spend his whole life answering. -- (Nicole Krauss)

We fell in love, despite our differences, and once we did, something rare and beautiful was created. For me, love like that has only happened once, and that’s why every minute we spent together has been seared in my memory. I’ll never forget a single moment of it. -- (Nicholas Sparks)

I carry you with me into the world, into the smell of rain & the words that dance between people & for me, it will always be this way, walking in the light, remembering being alive together. -- (Brian Andreas)

If you are not long, I will wait for you all my life. -- (Oscar Wilde)

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of our tasks; the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation. -- (Rainer Maria Rilke)

”May you have the courage of your tenderness” -- (D.H. Lawrence)

So it must be: a voyage apart in the same direction. Grapple the two vessels together, lash them side by side, and the first storm will smash them to pieces. This is marriage, in the bad weather of modern civilization. But leave the two vessels apart, to make their voyage to the same port, each according to its own skill and power, and an unseen life connects them, a magnetism which cannot be forced. And that is marriage as it will be when all this is broken down. -- (D.H. Lawrence)

(Send ALL QUESTIONS AND COMMENTS to The God Squad via email at godsquadquestion@aol.com. Rabbi Gellman is the author of several books, including “Religion for Dummies,” co-written with Fr. Tom Hartman. Also, the new God Squad podcast is now available.)