A young man came home from shul one Shabbos feeling perturbed.

He greeted his wife, who was expecting their first child. While she’d had some experience with babies and small children, he had very little. And from what he’d just seen at the shul kiddush, he wasn’t all that sure he was looking forward to it.

“You should have seen those kids,” he grumped. “My friend and I were trying to have a conversation during the kiddush, but his kids didn’t let us get a word in edgewise. Either they were coming over to nudge their father about wanting something more to eat, or else they were climbing the walls, and he had to chase after them.” He sat down on the couch, looking pessimistic. “Is that what I have to look forward to?”

“But kids are wonderful!” his wife enthused. “They’re so cute!”

“Except when they’re not,” the husband said. What he’d just witnessed at the kiddush did not, in his humble opinion, come anywhere near the definition of “cute.”

“You’ll see,” his wife said with a wisdom beyond her years. “Just wait till you have one of your own…”

At that point, he had to take her word for it. But the pessimism didn’t go away.

Months passed, and the wife finally gave birth. The first time the young man laid eyes on his newborn child, he was blown away by the strength of his love. He hadn’t expected to feel that way. But now that the feeling had got hold of him, he knew it would never let go. This was his child. It belonged to him, to care for and to nurture and to teach. And he loved that vulnerable little baby with all his heart and soul.

Let’s fast forward a few years. The adored baby is now an active child. There will certainly be times when that beloved child will annoy his father. Even annoy him enormously. Times when the little-boy cuteness will be nothing but a memory, and the present-day irritation he causes a frequent factor in his father’s life.

Now he can understand at last why the other fathers at the shul kiddush smiled at their kids even when said kids were rampaging like wild animals at feeding time. How they had the patience to guide and provide for their youngsters even when those youngsters looked far short of lovable to outside eyes.

The memory of a parent’s overwhelming early love for his child will, even if only subconsciously, continue to inform his every interaction with that child. When times are rough, it will give the parent the strength to climb up to higher ground from which he can peer more clearly into the heart of his offspring. It will inspire him to keep on believing in his child long after others have given up. Because love like that is not easily forgotten.

Poured Concrete

In a different but similar way, a young couple getting married ideally establishes a strong foundation for the future during the early days of their relationship. We stand under the chuppah beside a relative stranger. The job then becomes to create a bond that will last.

The much talked of Shanah Rishonah, the first twelve months of marriage, is more than just something to laugh ruefully about in later years. It basically sets the tone for those later years. The focused attention and shared experiences of those early months together are meant to be the building blocks for the relationship the two of you will go on to build through the coming years.

The attachments that develop and grows during that early period is irreplaceable. Plenty of obstacles and problems will hurtle down the road at that couple as they trudge together through life. There will be times when smiles are in poor supply and understanding is in great demand. Times when the responsibilities that each has shouldered will carry them away from each other, and times when shared suffering will bring them very close. There will undoubtedly also be times when they’ll get on each other’s nerves. Times when they may wonder (hopefully not out loud), “Remind me why I married you again?”

But ideally, the underlying bond is still there. It takes a lot of determined hammering to shatter such a bond. Long neglect or mistreatment is certainly capable of erasing the memories of that early time of mutual discovery and growing caring. Absent such an extreme tragedy, though, most couples spend their whole life walking on a solid foundation. A foundation made of the poured concrete of their shared beginning.

From Wilderness to Wichita

In the Torah, Hashem often refers to the love He has for us because we followed Him into the wilderness in the earliest moments of our nationhood. Fresh from slavery in Mitzrayim, we might have been forgiven for wanting nothing more than peace and security. Instead, we plunged into a hostile desert where we faced heat, thirst, and enemy attacks. All because Hakadosh Boruch Hu asked us to.

Hashem doesn’t take that long-ago acquiescence for granted. We can see this from the many positive references He makes to those early days. Just as He expects us to remember and appreciate His many kindnesses to us, starting in Mitzrayim and continuing on through the millennia, He, too, recalls our early kindness in following Him into uncertainty.

When a child has outgrown his early adorableness, his antics may cause his parents occasional heartache. But while others may view the child in a negative light, a parent carries an inner torch of his own by which to see him. Sometimes, when the objective world has rejected a child, it’s only his parents’ subjective, loving hearts that hold fast to the knowledge that there’s someone worthwhile inside.

As a people, our story is much the same. In so many ways, large and small, we have strayed from and betrayed our covenant with Hakadosh Boruch Hu. From the most trivial nonsense to the most egregious of sins, we’ve disappointed and, yes, disgusted Him over course of our history together.

Yet, for all that, He has promised to never stop loving us. A love forged in fire at the very start of a relationship has the power to hold the ship of the relationship firmly at anchor, even in the most storm-tossed sea. Just as a parent holds tight to his love for his child and a middle-aged couple remembers the bond born in their youth, Hashem keeps the fire of His love for us burning bright. Because a love like that is eternal.

We’ve come a long way from that first epoch in the wilderness. We’ve scattered to the four corners of the globe, tasted every alien culture, experimented with every ideology and stepped off the good road to explore every tempting byway. But whether we live in Bnei Brak or Botswana, Wales or Wichita, we are descended from the Avos, the Shevotim, and the Bnei Yisroel who were fortunate enough to win Hashem’s love at the very outset of the journey.

And, in consequence, we’ve been fortunate enough to reap the reward of that first, early love down all the ages, to this very day.