The Logic of Love
If love in the Western world has a founding text, that text is Hebrew.
Simon May, Love: A History
One text in the Torah is famous above all others, the phrase from this parasha: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). This, said R. Avika, is “the great principle” of the Torah.1Genesis Rabba 24:7.
The rule of justice is common in moral codes. The first moral judgement a child tends to make is, “It’s not fair.” Justice as fairness is common. What is distinctly uncommon is the idea, born in Judaism and adopted by Christianity, that love is the central virtue of the moral life.
It is remarkable how rarely this simple truth has been acknowledged. For many centuries, Christians taught that the God of the Old Testament was a God of law and retribution while the God of the New Testament was a God of love and forgiveness, despite the fact that Christians believed Him to be the same God. Whenever “Love your neighbour” is mentioned in the New Testament, it is always explicitly as a quotation from the Torah. Yet to this day, if you look up or encounter the quote, “Love your neighbour as yourself,” more often than not, you will find it attributed to the New Testament.
More perversely still, there was often criticism of “priestly legalism” despite the fact that the command to love your neighbour appears in the most quintessentially priestly text of all, Leviticus 19. It is precisely Torat Kohanim that tells us to love our neighbour. Indeed priestly consciousness is suffused with love. Vayikra, the Hebrew name of the book of Leviticus, means, as we pointed out in the introduction, “to call, beckon, or summon in love.” Whenever God is mentioned in the context of sacrifice, the supreme priestly act, He is always described with the four-letter name, Hashem, that signals middat raḥamim, love and compassion.
Simon May is therefore accurate when he writes:
The widespread belief that the Hebrew Bible is all about vengeance and an eye for an eye, while the Gospels supposedly invent love as an unconditional and universal value, must therefore count as one of the most extraordinary misunderstandings in all of Western history. For the Hebrew Bible is the source not just of the two love commandments but of a larger moral vision inspired by wonder for love’s power.2Simon May, Love: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011), 19.
Indeed, Leviticus 19 teaches us a third love also, in addition to that of God and our neighbour: “If a stranger dwells with you in your land, you shall not mistreat him. The stranger who dwells among you shall be to you as one born among you, and you shall love him as yourself; for you were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God” (Lev. 19:33–34). It is easy to love your neighbour as yourself because throughout most of history, your neighbours were often like yourself, in culture, class, nationality, and ethnicity. The challenge is to love the stranger, the one who is not like you.
But the Torah’s approach to love goes deeper than this, as we can see if we look not just at the famous phrase but at the context in which it is set:
Do not hate your brother in your heart. You must admonish your neighbour,
And not bear sin because of him.
Do not take revenge
nor bear a grudge against the children of your people.
You must love your neighbour as yourself.
I am the Lord. (Lev. 19:17–18)
The Torah does not begin with the command to love. Instead it starts with the hard case: what to do with a neighbour, or brother, whom you dislike, even hate? He may have harmed you, offended you, insulted you. He may have acted in a way that you deeply believe is wrong. Your hatred, let us say, is not irrational. What to do in such a case? To command blandly that you must stifle your feelings is naïve. It is also unlikely to be effective in the long run. Freud coined the phrase “the return of the repressed,” to signal that feelings we consciously hide or deny have a way of returning in full and destructive force.
Hence phrase two: “You must admonish your neighbour.” Instead of silencing your feelings, you have to verbalise them. You have to confront the person openly and honestly. Here is how Maimonides puts it in his law code:
When one person sins against another, the latter should not hate him and remain silent. As it is said about the wicked: “And Absalom spoke to Amnon neither good nor evil, although Absalom hated Amnon.” Rather, he is commanded to speak to him and to say to him, “Why did you do such-and-such to me? Why did you sin against me in such-and-such a matter?” As it is said, “You must surely admonish your neighbour.” If he repents and requests forgiveness from him, he must forgive and not be cruel.3Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Deot 6:6.
And here in a similar vein is Nahmanides:
It seems to me that the correct interpretation is that the expression “you shall surely remonstrate” is to be understood in the same way as [in the phrase], “And Abraham remonstrated with Abimelech.” The verse is thus saying: “Do not hate your brother in your heart when he does something to you against your will, but instead you should remonstrate with him, saying, “Why did you do this to me?” and you will not bear sin because of him by covering up your hatred in your heart and not telling him, for when you remonstrate with him, he will justify himself before you [so that you will have no cause to hate him] or he will regret his action and admit his sin, and you will forgive him.”4Nahmanides, Commentary to Leviticus 19:17.
Maimonides’ example of why remonstration is necessary is the story (II Sam. 13) of how Amnon, one of King David’s children, raped his half-sister Tamar. When Absalom, Tamar’s brother, hears about the episode, his reaction seems on the face of it irenic, serene:
Her brother Absalom said to her, “Has that Amnon, your brother, been with you? Be quiet, now my sister; he is your brother. Don’t take this thing to heart.” And Tamar lived in her brother Absalom’s house, a desolate woman. When King David heard all this, he was furious. Absalom never said a word to Amnon, neither good nor bad.
Appearances, however, deceive. Absalom was anything but forgiving. He waited for two years, then invited Amnon to a festive meal at sheep-shearing time. He gave instructions to his men: “Listen! When Amnon is in high spirits from drinking wine and I say to you, ‘Strike Amnon down,’ then kill him.” And so it happened. Absalom’s silence was not the silence of forgiveness but of hate – the hate of which Pierre de LaClos spoke in Les Liaisons Dangereuses when he wrote the famous line: “Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
Nahmanides gives the opposite example, of a case in which remonstration succeeded. Abraham had dug a well. The servants of Abimelech king of Gerar had seized possession of it. We then read: “Abraham rebuked Abimelech because of a well of water which Abimelech’s servants had seized. And Abimelech said, ‘I do not know who has done this thing; you did not tell me, nor had I heard of it until today’” (Gen. 21:25–26). The two men then made a covenant to avoid such events in the future.
The key example, though, is neither of these, but rather the story of Joseph and his brothers:
Now Israel loved Joseph more than any of his other sons, because he had been born to him in his old age, and he made a richly ornamented robe for him. When his brothers saw that their father loved him more than any of them, they hated him and could not speak a kind word to him [velo yakhlu dabro leshalom, literally, “they could not speak with him to peace”]. (Gen. 37:3–4)
On this, Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz (c. 1690–1764) comments: “Had they been able to sit together as a group, they would have spoken to one another and remonstrated with each other, and would eventually have made their peace with one another.”5Tiferet Yehonatan, Commentary to Genesis 37:4.
The tragedy of conflict is that it prevents people from talking together and listening to one another. A failure to communicate is often the prelude to revenge.
The inner logic of the two verses in this parasha is therefore this: Love your neighbour as yourself. But not all neighbours are loveable. There are those who, out of envy or malice, have done you harm. I do not command you to live as if you were angels, without any of the emotions natural to human beings. I do, however, forbid you to hate. That is why, when someone does you wrong, you must confront the wrongdoer. You must tell him of your feelings of hurt and distress. It may be that you misunderstood him. Or it may be that he genuinely meant to do you harm, but now, faced with the reality of the injury he has done you, he may sincerely repent of what he did. If, however, you fail to talk it through, there is a real possibility that you will bear a grudge and in the fullness of time, come to take revenge – as did Absalom.
What is impressive about the Torah is that it both articulates the highest of ideals, and at the same time speaks to us as human beings. If we were angels it would be easy to love one another. But we are not. An ethic that commands us to love our enemies, without any hint as to how we are to achieve this, is unliveable. Instead, the Torah sets out a realistic programme. By being honest with one another, talking things through, we may be able to achieve reconciliation – not always, to be sure, but often. How much distress and even bloodshed might be spared if humanity heeded this simple command.