D’var – Theme of Love God (or the Good); Love Your Neighbour
Delivered on Feb 2/25 for Interfaith Service at Rockway Mennonite Church (Kitchener)
By Norm Finkelberg
Good morning. It is a pleasure to share this Interfaith service with you. Thanks to Brice Balmer for inviting us.
The three passages that August just read (Deut:4-9, Lev:17-18 and 33-34), are the only three times that the word “Love” (V’ahavta in Hebrew) appear in the Torah. I’m going to focus on the latter two, from Lev 19, the central chapter of what’s known as the Holiness Code. It is called the Holiness Code because of the first two verses of the chapter which read:
“The Lord spoke to Moses saying: ‘Speak to the whole Israelite
community and say to them: “You shall be holy, for I, your Lord,
am holy.”
If you think about it, this is quite a startling instruction. How can we, a flawed and finite species, duplicate the holiness of an infinite, omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient being? Well, in Judaism, the answer follows immediately in the text; it is to observe the mitzvot, the commandments that God has prescribed for us in the Torah; a commandment falling somewhere between an obligation and a good deed. Indeed, this is a recurrent declaration in our prayers and benedictions; the idea that God makes us holy through God’s commandments:
“Baruch atah Adonai, Elheinu Melech ha’olam, asher kid’shanu
b’mitzvotav…”
“Blessed are You Adonai our God, Sovereign of the universe, who
sanctifies us with mitzvot…”
The mitzvot listed after the declaration to be holy as God is holy, include a mix of ethical and ritual laws. And as Rabbi Gunther Plaut has described:
“In Judaism, religion and ethics though not identical, are inseparable.”
Our prophets make clear the primacy of ethical laws. Isaiah 1:11 has God asking the rhetorical question: “Why need I all your sacrifices?”
to which God later replies: “…Cease doing evil. Learn to do good, seek justice.
Make the oppressed happy, defend the orphan,
argue the widow’s case.” (Isaiah 1:16-17)
In other words, God is sending the message that ritual laws (mitzvot that govern one’s relationship with God) are not meaningful unless accompanied by observance to ethical laws (mitzvot that govern one’s relationship to others).
Lev 19:18 (and similarly Lev 19:34), the instruction to love as yourself, both your neighbour and the stranger who resides among you, is usually regarded as the oldest written version of the so-called Golden Rule. I’d like to share with you a midrash from the Talmud that concerns Hillel the Elder, a great Jewish sage from the first century BCE. In it, Hillel presents a slightly different version of the Golden Rule:
“A gentile came before Hillel and demanded: ‘Convert me on
condition that you teach me the entire Torah while I am standing
on one foot.’ Now bear in mind that Hillel’s contemporary and
rival, Shammai, had already sent this arrogant man packing. But
Hillel was widely known for his patience. He agreed to convert the
man and said to him: ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to
another. That is the entire Torah and the rest is its interpretation.
Now go and study’”
You will notice that Hillel has changed the rule to a proscription rather than a prescription; do not do to another that which is hateful to you. Personally, I prefer this version. Similar to the Hippocratic Oath, a code of conduct for the medical profession which instructs to “First, do no harm”, I believe that Hillel’s proscriptive version of the Golden Rule is less likely to put us at risk of self-centred empathy. What is self-centred empathy? It is the tendency to think that you understand how another person feels when you are really only understanding how you would feel in their situation. We are always warned against judging someone until we’ve walked a mile in their shoes. I submit that the challenge is to find out what it is like for the other person to walk in their shoes, considering their ethnic and cultural background, their knowledge, their values and their beliefs. As the renowned psychoanalyst Alfred Adler put it: “Empathy is seeing with the eyes of another, listening with
the ears of another, and feeling with the heart of another.”
Recall the second part of Hillel’s version of the Golden Rule:
“…the rest is the interpretation of the Torah. Now go and study.”
I choose to believe that by interpretation, Hillel was not just talking about study Torah, Talmud and commentary, but that he was also urging us to study our neighbour by listening with an open heart and by walking beside them, not ahead or behind them. That is what we at Interfaith Grand River attempt to do. To engage in rewarding and sometimes contentious dialogue that challenges our assumptions about each other.
Thank you.