Rabbi Rachel Barenblat :
Some of us may struggle with the notion of a vengeful God Who would repay us for breaking faith in these ways. (That's certainly not my God-concept.) But what happens if we read the verse not prescriptively but descriptively? In other words: this isn't about what God will "do to us" if we turn away from the mitzvot. This is about the natural consequences of choosing to turn away from a path of holiness.
Does the idea of serving make us uncomfortable? Maybe we want to say, I'm nobody's servant -- I live for my own self! But in Torah's frame, that's an impossibility. Once we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt and God brought us out from there with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm: not so that we could be self-sufficient and serve our own needs, but so that we could enter into covenant with God and serve the Holy One.
Everyone serves something. That's a fact of human life. The question is what we will choose to serve, and how.
In Torah's understanding, either we can dedicate our lives to serving the Holy One of Blessing -- through the practice of mitzvot both ritual and ethical; through feeding the hungry and protecting the vulnerable; through cultivating gratitude for life's abundance; through working to rebuild and repair the world; through the work of teshuvah, turning ourselves around -- or we can turn our backs on all of that.
And if we turn our backs on all of that, says Torah, we will find ourselves serving a master who is cruel and uncaring. Maybe that master will be overwork. Maybe that master will be a political system that mistreats the immigrant and the refugee. Maybe that master will be whatever we use to numb ourselves to the brokenness around and within us.
In Torah's stark framing, either we can serve God or we can serve something else, and the inevitable fruits of serving something else will be disconnection and lack and facing down a slew of internal enemies.
If we can hear the words from Sinai
then love will flow from us;
and we shall serve all that is holy
with all our intellect and all our passion
and all our life.
If we can serve all that is holy,
we shall be doing all that humans can
to help the rains to flow,
the grasses to be green,
the grains to be golden like the sun,
and the rivers to be filled with life once more.
All the children of God shall eat
and there will be enough.
But if we turn from Sinai's words
and serve only what is common and profane,
making gods of our own comfort or power,
then the holiness of life will contract for us;
our world will grow inhospitable.
Let us therefore lace these words
into our passion and our intellect,
and bind them as a sign upon our hands and eyes.
Let us write them in mezuzot upon our doors,
and teach them to our children.
Let us honor the generations that came before us,
keeping the promise for those yet to be.
- (Mishkan Tefilah - An alternative reading for the weekday V'ahavtah)