AND THOU SHALT LOVE THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF

                           AND THOU SHALT LOVE  THY NEIGHBOR AS THYSELF
                                                            Rabbi David L Kline

    Judaism is About Love, by Shai Held, Farar, Straus, 2024 is a magisterial treatment of the subject. Rabbi Held roots the study in classic Jewish sources and seemingly every philosophic and psychological writer to the present. Starting with God’s love, proceeding with family and community, ending with love of the loving God, he methodically examines concepts and their implications. One chapter analyzes Leviticus 19:18b, the title of this essay, my major interest, the essential condition of peaceful existence. I write to offer a critical difference in understanding the  key word רֵעֲךָ/re’acha, commonly rendered “thy neighbor.” The neighbor in this verse, I shall argue, refers to our co human residents of Earth whom we might think of as competitors, as enemies, even as evil but we are to love them. The preponderance of Jewish commentaries see “neighbor” as fellow Israelite, fellow Jew. The limitation is clearly justifiable in context but I shall attempt to show that the mitsvah concerns more than in-group relations.
    To begin with, Rabbi Aqiva, in the second century BCE, cites the line as “a great principle in Torah.”)Sifra, Kedoshim, Chapter 4 12) Isaac Luria, the Ari,in the 16th century, set the principle foremost, inserting it prior to morning prayers in the sidur: “Hareini m’qabel alay et mitzvat haborey, v’ahavta l’re’acha k’mocha.” “I hereby accept the Creator’s mitsvah. . .” (The words have been set to meditative music by Gabriel Meyer Halevy) To love ones neighbor is arguably the rudimentary divine commandment, closely related to Hillel’s one line summation: “What is hateful to thee, do it not to your comrade; this is the entire Torah, the rest is its commentary.”(Shabbat 31a:6)
    The Hebrew statement, thanks to its fusional forms, comes in but three words: 
“וְאָֽהַבְתָּ֥ לְרֵעֲךָ֖ כָּמ֑וֹךָ / v’ahavta l’re’acha kamocha.” “V’ahavta, and thou shalt love” is the common verb “love.” Active voice–English adds emphatic, insistent “shall,”– imperfect tense (can be either future or present ongoing); second person, masculine, singular. This form frequently stands in lieu of imperative (cf: Ten Commandments). The opening “v,” “and” links to the first part of the verse: “Thou shalt not take vengeance and not bear grudge against the children of thy people.” Our line is clearly a mitsvah, a commandment to love: people in this case, God, in the second line of the Sh’ma (Deuteronomy 6:5). If love is a feeling, an emotion, can it be commanded? Apparently so, particularly when we think of an obligatory, mutual relationship. Note, however, the preponderance of classic commentators understand the term as loving behavior: benefiting, supporting, respecting the other.
    The third word, kamocha, also suggests more than one meaning. The simple meaning l learned from my mother was “love your neighbor like you love yourself.” Self love in this case was a matter of healthy self regard. self image. If you hated yourself, you weren’t going to be able to love another person. If you wanted good for yourself you should want good for the other person. But, 70 years ago, in a class with the great Shimon Ravidovitz, I heard him say: “Love your neighbor who is like you.” I recall the room, the teacher, and the jolt of thought. You should love your neighbor because he, like you, is a human being. It took a while for me to overcome shock and skepticism and I have been wondering about this verse for lo these many years.
    The word “neighbor” determines the meaning and significance of the line. In Hebrew, the person who dwells next door to you is your שָׁכֵן/shachen. That’s not the word in our verse. We are commanded to love our רֵעַ/re’a, who may or may not be our shachen. The leading lexicon, BDB, defines re’a as 1. friend and “2. in weaker sense, fellow, fellow-citizen even another person, with whom one stands in recipr. relations.” The word is common enough for examples to fill an entire column in the dictionary. It occurs twice more in Lev 19, Q’doshim, verse 13: “Thou shalt not violate thy neighbor,” and verse 16: “not stand idly by the blood of thy neighbor.” (I heard Eli Wiesel hold this phrase to be, in light of the Holocaust, the most important line in Torah.)
    In the Tower of Bavel story, residents of the plain said, one to his neighbor, let’s bake bricks…”(Gen 11:3). Mishpatim, decrees capital punishment for a man who intentionally kills his neighbor. (Ex 21:15) Shmuel berates King Shaul, telling him that Yahh will take the kingdom and give it to his neighbor, meaning Davìd, his rival. (1 Sam 15:28)
    Here’s what Shai Held says about who is my neighbor:
    In context, the Bible seems clearly to be mandating that Israelites love their fellow Israelites–or, in a more contemporary idion, that Jews love their fellow Jews. Let’s look closely at the verses: “”You shall not hate your kinsfolk in your heart. Reprove your kinsman but incur no guilt because of him. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against your countrymen [but] love your neighbor as yourself.” The concern of these verses is with relationships among “kinsfolk” (achim) “kinsmen” (amitim) and countrymen (benei am). All three of these terms refer unambiguously to members of one’s people, fellow participants in Israel’s covenant with God.  It stands to reason that the fourth term, “neighbor” (rei’a) does too. So the contextual meaning of the verse Is: “Love your fellow Israelite (or Jew) as yourself. (ibid p128)
    The reasoning is straight forward and the commandment to love works in the sense that one learns by practice, starting first with family and gradually the community and ultimately the distant. The word “neighbor” does not translate the Hebrew original but we see that re’a has a wide range of usages from “friend” to “murder victim” to “rival” and more. “Neighbor” serves as a placeholder for the desired recipient of our love.
    Tanach poetry is marked by parallelism: each line has an A part and a B part. The B part is a variation or a development of the A part. “Mi kamocha ba’elim Adonay, mi kamocha ne’edar baqodesh/Who is like you among the gods, Yahh, who is like you, glorious in qodesh?”. If the Leviticus line were poetry, the A section ending with “children of thy people” would be parallel with “neighbor” and the identical meaning would be compelling. But Leviticus is not written as poetry. Most verses in Q’doshim have an A and a B element but these elements are strung together without effort at parallelism.
    “Thy neighbor” can certainly be understood as a fellow member of the tribe. I grew up feeling most comfortable with other Jews. We are a community of trust. When we bless Rosh Chodesh we say “חֲבֵרִים כָּל יִשרָאֵל /chaverim kol Yisrael/ all Jews are friends.” Another of our teachings about all Jews: “כל ישראל ערבים זה בזה/Kol Yisrael arevim zen bazeh/All Jews are responsible for one another.” The midrash explains that this means that one Jew stumbles due to another Jew’s sin.(Sifra, Bchukotai 7:5) We are a family that holds on to our stories back to Avraham Avinu, slavery in Mistsrayim, Mount Sinai, King David. And our shared destiny, the Holocaust, the State of Israel. TheLower Eastside and making it in America. Yes we are one another’s neighbors and we should love one another. We even have a term for it: “אַהֲבַת יִשְׂרָאֵל/ahavat Yisrael,” used by a 13th century scholar in Sefer Hachinuch, to interpret the Leviticus mitsvah: “to love everyone of Yisrael with a vital love, i.e. that we should have compassion on a Jew and on his money the way that a person has compassion on himself and his own money.” (The author goes on to connect the mitsvah–number 243–to the above cited words of Hillel and Aqivah.)
    So why not leave it at that? We Jews should love one another, even though each of us may not always be all that lovable. A meaningful mitsvah. Two things call us to go further, one the word itself and the other, morality, the needs of humanity. We have seen how re’a can mean “rival” as well as “friend.” And we note that Q’doshim clearly speaks of family, of b’ney am, in several verses. It is possible and perhaps likely that the author uses re’a purposely to indicate a wider application. Neighborhood includes nearby nations or, in the 21st century, nations on the other side of our globe. The moral argument is that V’ahavta l’re’acha kamocha is more than merely the obvious in-group obligation, which would approach tautology. We are commanded to treat another who is not related to us, an outsider, an opponent, not as an enemy to be overcome but as a human being with needs and interests same as ours. We can and should be partners, mutually supportive in building the world for all of us together. That’s a radical mitsvah and one that points to change for the good. 
    Our Tanach ancestors described themselves as tough fighters, pugilistic, winning battles for survival and conquest. (Until they were defeated by overwhelming empires, Assyria and Babylonia, and this only because they had angered Yahh.) The God on their side was יְהֹוָ֖ה אִ֣ישׁ מִלְחָמָ֑ה/Adonay ish milchamah/Yahh is a man of war.”(Ex 15:3) An appropriate offering to such a god was “חרם/cherem/total destruction,” killing all men, women, and children of a defeated town. (Num 21:2f) I recently heard Franklin Graham arguing that God does indeed hear wartime prayers; just look at King David’s many victories. An enterprising gun manufacturer, Spike Tactical, offers an AR15 complete with “He teachers my hand to war” engraved on its side. (Ps 144:1) For sure, “survival of the strongest,” “peace through strength,” and warriors as heroes, all these are, as far as we know, the ways of human beings throughout history. Torah accommodates war repeatedly. But not always. V’ahavta l’re’acha kamocha intends the opposite. I think it is the most significant mitsvah for peace.
    One lesson history teaches is that domination works for but a while. One party’s might decays as other ambitious parties rise. In Tanach we see Assyrian empire defeated by Babylonian empire defeated by Persian empire, defeated by Greek empire. The Roman empire was the biggest and held for a couple of centuries. They called those brutal days Pax Romana. I did a quick Google search: “list of wars.” The result went far beyond my history courses. I recall my 14 year old self asking my scholarly mother if history was essentially a study of wars and how it was that Jews did not appear in such a history. Her answer about other aspects of chronological development did not fit what I was learning in the eighth grade. World War I was spoken of as “the war to end all wars.” The idea was if German militarism would be defeated that would be it. That seemed to make sense. But, of course, the pax lasted only two decades till WW II. For the past seven or so decades, cold war, as we used to call it, with proxy wars like Korea, Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran, to list only the ones in which the USA has fought. The State of Israel fought off its attackers for independence in 1948 and determined to maintain its security by fielding the most powerful military force in the area. It has succeeded with victories in 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2023, not to mention wars of attrition, two intifadas, and violent repression in the West Bank. 
    You and I and I suppose everyone else in the world has been conditioned to believe in the efficacy of weapons, the more lethal, the better. Nuclear being the gold standard. Every nation needs an army. When we think of diplomacy as opposed to war, we picture negotiating from strength: accept our proposal or we’ll bomb you to smithereens.
    Sounds like the definition of insanity. The whole world is crazy. Isn’t it time for a change in our thinking and behavior? What would be sanity? Are we doomed because we don’t know how to change our behavior? Let us allow ourselves an ahah moment: I have seen my neighbor as a threat and here in the Torah is a commandment that I relate to him as a person just like me.  Sure, he may be a Republican, or a Muslim, or a communist, but, one, he shares most of my needs and interests in life and, two, I don’t want to give the impression that I threaten him. What I want to do is V’ahavta l’re’acha k’mocha. What shall I say or do so as to be this neighbor’s neighbor, partner, supporter? No change is easy. The inertia in distrust, fear, hate, and war is powerful. But there is a way and it is our torah.
    It’s a political mitsvah. Here’s a thought experiment: how should I relate to a MAGA Trump supporter?