This week’s double Torah portion, Kedoshim/Acharei Mot, contains one of the most iconic passages in all of Scripture. It’s a phrase so compelling that the rabbis regarded it as the distillation of all of the Torah’s values: Ve’ahavta L’re’echa kamocha—classically translated as “Love your neighbor as yourself.” This is, of course, Judaism’s take on a nearly universal value expressed differently by Hillel: “Do not do onto others as you would not have them do unto you.”
But the commentators on this portion dig a little deeper. They notice that the Hebrew adds the preposition “to” with the letter Lamed—so rather than saying Love you neighbor as yourself, it literally says Love to your neighbor as yourself.
As the rabbis never pass up an opportunity to interpret even a stray letter as full of meaning, they teach that it is really not possible or fair to expect people to love each other with the same intent and commitment as they love themselves. The survival instinct to look out for ourselves is hard-wired into our being. We cannot truly identify with the self-love of another. And yet, our faith and our tradition strive to move us to another place.
To do this, the rabbis invest that lamed—loving to our neighbors as ourselves—as a call to empathy—to put ourselves in another’s place mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—to acknowledge the views and values we share that make us most human—and to grow that awareness into the action that provides for others what we want for ourselves.
In this trying time in which we live, when so many acts of selflessness and sacrifice, solidarity and singularity, have inspired and comforted us in a time of dire need, let us hope–let us pray–that our changed minds and hearts will endure long after a vaccine is found, and that the post-Covid world will be better aligned with God’s vision for us, and our ability to make real that renewed world.
Rabbi Daniel Weiner