Talmudic debates are also values-clarification exercises. One example is a debate about a line from this week’s Torah reading: “You shall love yourself as your neighbor” (Leviticus 19:18). In Genesis Rabbah 24:7, Ben Azzai states, “This is the book of the lineage of Adam” (Genesis 5:1) is the most important Torah principle, while Rabbi Akiva counters with our “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Rabbi Tanhuma’s final word supports Ben Azzai when he says, “God made him in the likeness of God,” (Genesis 5:1) completing the biblical sentence Ben Azzai quoted.
Layer and nuance lie within Rabbi Akiva’s verse. “Ve’ahavta lere’acha kamocha ani A-donay” means “and you shall love yourself as your neighbor, I am God.” The “and” connects the verse to what is written before, where we are told not to be hateful, vengeful or to hold a grudge; such acts can destroy relationships, communities and societies. To counter those destructive behaviors, we are commanded to love our neighbor. Commenting on the God clause, Ibn Ezra says, “I, a single God, have created all of you,” echoing Tanhuma and Ben Azzai.
All of this raises many questions. How can we be commanded to love someone, and God for that matter? Harav Baruch Gigi, in his lesson “Loving God (I): How Can There Be a Command to Love?” teaches one way to understand this is to read it not as talking about love as passionate affection, but love manifested through action. In Or Hadash, Rabbi Reuven Hammer remarks about our verse, “Thus the ultimate test of a religious person is not specific observances, but the influence that these observances have upon that person’s actions toward others.” One way we can express love for our neighbor, according to Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz, is to tell them good news (Shnei Luchot Habrit, Shaar HaOtiyot).
Our yardstick for that love, we are told, is “yourself.” In The Art of People, Dave Kerpen questions the premise of treating others based on our understanding of the world. He states, “We all grow up learning about the simplicity and power of the Golden Rule: ‘Do unto others as you would want done to you.’ It’s a splendid concept except for one thing: Everyone is different, and the truth is that in many cases what you’d want done to you is different from what your partner, employee, customer, investor, wife or child would want done to him or her.” Kerpen advocates the Platinum Rule: “Do unto others as they would want done to them.”
IN HUMANKIND: A Hopeful History, Rutger Bregman makes the argument that compassion, not empathy, should be our compass: “Unlike empathy, compassion doesn’t sap our energy... because compassion is simultaneously more controlled, remote and constructive. It’s not about sharing another person’s distress, but it does help you recognize it and then act.”
Finally, how do we understand the word neighbor? In the Bible, a neighbor is someone with whom we share a reciprocal responsibility, usually within the framework of a shared identity and geographic location. In writing about John Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss, Richard Sugarman points out, “it is illuminating to view our lives in terms of the people, places and practices to which we become attached. For example, the most intense experiences of joy, affection and mourning are expressed in relation to those who are closest to us.” In that light, we can view loving our neighbor as ourselves as being less prescriptive and more descriptive; we nurture those relationships closest to us because they are so essential to our lives and our well-being.
Having said that, Judaism recognizes that our gaze beyond ourselves is not limited to this perception of “neighbor.” Later in this week’s Torah portion, we are told to love the foreign stranger within our midst like ourselves (Leviticus 19:34), and in the Shulhan Aruch, Joseph Karo writes that tzedakah (charity) must be given to all. (Yoreh De’ah 251:1) During Sukkot, 70 bulls were offered in the Temple in Jerusalem to invoke God’s blessing on the nations of the world; only after that, on Shmini Atzeret, was a sacrifice made for the nation of Israel. (Talmud Sukkah 55b)
In this excursus, “neighbor” is understood as someone to whom we feel a responsibility. The intensity of responsibility is greatest in the most adjacent concentric circles of our lives. This past COVID year has made us aware that those circles further from us are closer than we think, making even more true the words of Rabbi Joachim Prinz, “Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept.”
In that spirit, conflict resolution theorist and activist Elise Boulding talks about “building a global civic culture.” As our climate unravels, it may be time to expand those concentric circles out from an anthropocentric to a biocentric orientation. Scores of teachings within Judaism can maximize our understanding of our relationship to this world. God calls the totality of creation, sentient and insentient, “very good.” Related, the upcoming Shmita (Sabbatical) year reminds us that both land and humans need rest.
The kabbalists of Safed added this kavanah (intentionality) to their morning prayers: “For the sake of the union of the Blessed Holy One with the Shechinah, I stand here, ready in body and mind, to take upon myself the mitzvah, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself,’ and by this merit I open up my mouth.”
As we rise and face the reality of pandemics, the climate and other challenges, we should understand our neighbor as kol ha’olam kulo – the whole, entire world.
The writer is rabbi emeritus of the Israel Congregation, Manchester Center, Vermont, and a faculty member of the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Bennington College.