Rabbi's Message

In a world where hatred is all too prevalent, we are met this week with a mitzvah to love.  Not just a mitzvah, but according to the great ancient sage Rabbi Akiva, the most fundamental mitzvah of the Torah.  V’ahavta l’reyakha kamokha – “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Sounds great, but what does it actually mean?  

First, we must look at the context in which it appears.  It comes at the end of what scholars refer to as the Holiness Code, a collection of commandments that follow the Torah’s exhortation to be holy.  These include: revere your parents, help support the poor and the immigrant, be honest in business dealings, don’t take advantage of those in need, don’t profit at someone else’s expense, don’t hate.  

Our world can often feel cruel and callous, with too many uncaring and selfish people.  The Torah’s response is to provide guidance and boundaries for our behavior, which culminates with V’ahavta l’reyakha kamokha.  According to the 20th-century Israeli professor Rabbi Pinhas Peli, love here is not put forward as a slogan or lofty aspiration, but as a guideline in day-to-day living.  He says that the reason this verse comes towards the end of the Holiness Code is that love itself is not the beginning, or the immediate result, of what we do.  Rather, real love is the sum of our actions, of the practical things we do every day for others.  That is what makes love possible and real.  

There is an old Peanuts cartoon that has Linus exclaiming, “I love mankind! It’s people I can’t stand!”  It is indeed much easier to love the whole world than to love the real people, our family members, our friends, our co-workers, our actual neighbors, with whom one has to live on a daily basis.  The real challenge is not to love generally, but to act with love, specifically, meeting after meeting, day after day, person after person.  Love is impossible to measure, but concrete actions of kindness, compassion, and genuine care have real results.   The world is built not on love, but on loving actions.  That’s what makes this mitzvah the most fundamental of them all.