from the jewish perspective, G!D Is Love, but then again G!D Is All - so, technically, G!D Is also Hate, Purple, Art, Breasts, Dinosaurs and Basket-Weaving. in a lot of ways, that's kind of the point of judaism. to restrict G!D to "positive" things like love rather involves giving the "negative" things to someone else. and we don't think that is acceptable.
if it helps, we understand that there are two "inclinations", the "good" inclination or yetzer ha-tov and the "bad" inclination or yetzer ha-ra. these are sometimes personified into angels (rather like the tiny angel/demon duo that sometimes appear over people's shoulders in tom and jerry) whose job it is to prompt you to act in accordance with them. the "good" inclination is in charge of things like obedience, giving charity, looking after people and baking cookies for the grandchildren, whereas the "bad" inclination is in charge of things like competition, sex and work.
if you look at the creation story, you'll see that G!D Says that various things are "good" - except for once, when the phrase used is "very good". the sages say that this "very good" refers to the "evil inclination" - the "yetzer ha-ra" is "very good". there's a story that one time the sages caught the evil inclination and shut it in a box, until they noticed that nobody was going to work any more and that children had stopped being born. similarly, a child is considered to have no "good" inclination - it only has a "bad" inclination, in other words, it considers only its own selfish needs, not those of others. developing consideration for the feelings and needs of others is part of the maturing process. by bar/batmitzvah you are considered to be responsible for acknowledging and acting on your "good" inclination - in other words, acting like a grown-up.
so love is all very well, but it is a human thing. from G!D's perspective, we can't possibly understand what "love" is. G!D Is the only One Who Sees, as it were, the back of the carpet.
b'shalom
bananabrain
