Five of the Most Jewish Ways to Say 'I Love You'
The most powerful Jewish expressions of love often never use the words “I love you.”
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This is a guest essay by Vanessa Berg, who writes about Judaism and Israel.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
There is a popular idea that every person has a “love language” — a particular way of giving and receiving love that speaks most deeply to the person across from us.
Some people need words of affirmation. Others feel loved through acts of service, gifts, quality time, or physical touch. The theory is simple: Love is not only something we feel. It is something we must learn to communicate in a language the other person perceives as loving.
It seems to me that the same is true within Jewish life.
Jews talk constantly about loving Judaism, loving Israel, loving the Jewish People, and loving our families — but love that remains abstract eventually becomes meaningless.
It is easy to say that we care about the Jewish future. It is much harder to show that love in ways another Jew can actually feel.
Judaism has always understood this. Jewish love is rarely confined to emotion. It is expressed through words, rituals, responsibilities, sacrifices, meals, arguments, celebrations, mourning, and time. It is not merely declared. It is practiced.
Long before anyone coined the phrase “love languages,” Jews had already developed our own.
Words of Affirmation: The Language of Blessing
The Jewish version of words of affirmation is not simply praise. It is blessing.
Jewish life begins with words.
God creates the world through speech. The Torah is transmitted through words. Jewish parents welcome Shabbat by placing their hands on their children’s heads and blessing them. We celebrate marriages with seven blessings, comfort mourners with carefully chosen words, and toast moments of joy by saying l’chaim — to life.
Words matter because Judaism understands that speech does more than describe reality. Speech helps create it.
A child who is repeatedly told that they are a burden begins to see themselves as one. A child who is told that they carry the strength of generations begins to stand differently. A Jew who hears nothing but criticism of Judaism may eventually experience Jewishness as an embarrassment. A Jew who is taught that they inherited one of humanity’s most extraordinary civilizations may begin to treat that inheritance with pride.
This does not mean flattering people dishonestly. Jewish affirmation is not empty praise. It is the practice of recognizing something true and refusing to leave it unsaid.
Tell your children what you admire about them. Tell your parents what they gave you. Tell your spouse what you appreciate before resentment makes appreciation harder. Tell the Jewish educator, rabbi, volunteer, donor, soldier, artist, writer, or community leader that their work matters. Tell fellow Jews that you are glad they are here.
The Jewish world is often very good at criticism. We can identify every institutional failure, ideological contradiction, communal weakness, and historical mistake. We have turned disagreement into an intellectual art form.
But criticism alone cannot sustain a people. Jews also need to hear that we are valued. We need to hear that our efforts count, that our presence matters, and that we belong even when we are still learning. A community that only tells Jews what we are doing wrong should not be surprised when we stop showing up.
Sometimes the most Jewish words we can say are also the simplest: I am proud of you. I believe in you. You are part of us.
Acts of Service: The Language of Chesed
In Judaism, love is a verb. The Torah does not merely command us to feel compassion for the vulnerable. It commands us to feed the hungry, visit the sick, comfort the mourner, welcome the stranger, support the poor, and care for those who cannot care for themselves.
This is chesed: loving-kindness expressed through action. Anyone can feel sympathy. Chesed begins when sympathy becomes inconvenient.
It is bringing food to a family after a birth. It is sitting beside someone at a hospital. It is driving an elderly relative to an appointment. It is helping a new immigrant navigate paperwork. It is calling the person everyone assumes someone else has called.
It is also the unseen work that keeps Jewish life alive.
Someone arrives early to set up the chairs. Someone stays late to clean the room. Someone teaches children Hebrew after working all day. Someone prepares the food, organizes the fundraiser, checks on the widow, visits the cemetery, guards the synagogue, or makes sure a struggling family can celebrate Passover with dignity.
These acts rarely go viral. They do not always receive recognition. But they are the infrastructure of Jewish continuity.
We sometimes imagine that Jewish survival depends primarily on great leaders, historic speeches, military victories, or dramatic moments of courage. Those things matter, but Jewish life is more often sustained by ordinary people performing small acts of service over and over again.
A grandmother cooks. A father drives. A friend listens. A neighbor shows up. A volunteer says, “I’ll handle it.” This is how Jews tell one another: You are not alone.
The Jewish People have survived not because every Jew agreed, but because, at critical moments, enough Jews were willing to carry one another.
Receiving Gifts: The Language of Meaningful Giving
Modern culture often treats gifts as consumer products. Judaism treats giving as a moral and relational act. A Jewish gift does not have to be expensive. It has to carry meaning. It may be a mezuzah for a new home, candlesticks for a wedding, a siddur passed from one generation to another, a book chosen for a curious child, or a piece of jewelry carrying a Hebrew letter or family history.
The object matters because of what it represents.
This is also why Jewish giving extends beyond presents exchanged between people. We give tzedakah. We contribute to synagogues, schools, hospitals, rescue organizations, cultural institutions, and families in need. We plant trees, sponsor meals, fund scholarships, and dedicate books in someone’s memory.
Even the Hebrew concept of tzedakah reveals something important. It is usually translated as charity, but its root is connected to justice or righteousness. Giving is not simply an optional expression of generosity. It is part of our responsibility to one another.
Still, the emotional meaning of a gift should not be dismissed. A thoughtful gift says: I noticed you. I remembered what matters to you. I chose something with you in mind.
That may be why some of the most powerful Jewish gifts are inherited rather than purchased. A grandfather’s Kiddush cup may have little financial value, but enormous emotional value. It carries his hands, his voice, his Shabbat table, and the memory of everyone who once answered “Amen.”
Jewish objects become containers for Jewish love. Yet the greatest Jewish gift may be what one generation hands to the next: a usable identity. Not guilt, not fear, not merely the instruction to remain Jewish because our enemies tried to destroy us — but a real inheritance that includes stories, music, humor, wisdom, confidence, rituals, friendships, and a sense that being Jewish adds something beautiful to life.
We should not hand our children Judaism like a fragile antique they are terrified to break. We should give it to them as something alive: something they can use, question, expand, and eventually make their own.
Quality Time: The Language of Sacred Time
Judaism may be the civilization that most radically transformed time into a language of love. Every week, Shabbat arrives and asks us to stop producing, purchasing, checking, or rushing toward the next task as though the purpose of life is to complete an endless list.
Shabbat creates time in which being together is itself the activity. We light candles, bless wine, eat, sing, talk, argue, laugh, rest, and remember that the people around the table are not interruptions to our lives. They are our lives.
The modern world offers constant connection and very little presence. We can communicate with hundreds of people while being emotionally available to none of them. We sit beside family members while looking at strangers through our phones. We document experiences we are barely experiencing.
Jewish time resists this.
The holidays ask us to gather. A seder cannot be reduced to information about the Exodus. It requires questions, food, storytelling, and participation. Sukkot moves us outside. Purim asks us to celebrate together. Yom Kippur forces us to confront ourselves alongside a community doing the same.
Even Jewish mourning is structured through time. We do not tell mourners to “move on.” We sit with them. We enter their home. We create a week in which the community rearranges itself around their loss. Presence is one of the purest forms of Jewish love.
This applies beyond ritual, like spending time with parents while they can still tell you their stories; asking grandparents questions before their memories disappear; taking children somewhere Jewish that does not feel like an obligation; or visiting Israel not merely as a political statement, but as a living society.
Friendship, family, community, and peoplehood cannot survive on good intentions. They require time.
Physical Touch: The Language of Embodied Presence
Judaism is not a religion that exists only in the mind. We stand, sit, bow, dance, fast, eat, light, wash, build, embrace, and place our hands upon one another in blessing. Jewish life is physical because human beings are physical.
We kiss the mezuzah. We hold the Torah. We sway while praying. We lift children onto our shoulders. We dance in circles at weddings. We place stones on graves. We tear fabric in grief. We embrace relatives we have not seen in years.
Our bodies participate in our memories. This is why Jewish love cannot survive as an idea alone. It must become embodied.
Sometimes that embodiment is literal touch: a hug, a hand held during frightening news, an arm around someone who cannot find words. Sometimes it means simply being physically present: showing up at the funeral, entering the shiva house, standing under the chuppah, volunteering, coming to the hospital, sitting in the synagogue after an attack, flying across the world because family needs you.
There are moments when no sentence is sufficient. The message is delivered by the body: I came.
Jewish history is filled with separation — exile, migration, persecution, war, and families scattered across continents. Perhaps that is why Jewish reunions can be so emotional. A people repeatedly torn apart learns the sacredness of physical closeness.
To embrace another Jew is sometimes to close a historical distance. It says that despite everything designed to divide, displace, frighten, or erase us, we have found one another again.
My husband loves to talk and argue! Sharing arguing and ensuring talk is love.
So true and so beautiful