SPIRIT

K

edoshim contains the two great love
commands of the Torah. The first is,
“Love your neighbor as yourself. I am
the Lord” (Lev. 19:18). Rabbi Akiva called this
“the great principle of the Torah.
” The second
is no less challenging: “The stranger living
among you must be treated as
your native-born. Love him as
yourself, for you were strangers
in Egypt. I am the Lord your
God” (Lev. 19:34).
These are extraordinary
commands. Many civilizations
contain variants of the Golden
Rule: “Do unto others as you
would have them do to you,
” or in the neg-
ative form attributed to Hillel (sometimes
called the Silver Rule), “What is hateful to
you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the
whole Torah. The rest is commentary; go and
learn.
” But these are rules of reciprocity, not
love. We observe them because bad things
will happen to us if we don’t. They are the
basic ground-rules of life in a group.
Love is something altogether different and
more demanding. That makes these two

commandments a revolution in the moral
life. Judaism was the first civilization to put
love at the heart of morality. As Harry Redner
puts it in Ethical Life, “Morality is the ethic of
love. The initial and most basic principle of
morality is clearly stated in the Torah: Thou
shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.
” He adds:
“The biblical ‘love of one’s neighbor’ is a very
special form of love, a unique development
of the Judaic religion and unlike any to be
encountered outside it.
”
Much has been written about these com-
mands. Who exactly is meant by “your neigh-
bor”? Who by “the stranger”? And what is
it to love someone else as oneself? I want to
ask a different question. Why is it specifically
here, in Kedoshim, in a chapter dedicated to
the concept of holiness, that the command
appears?
Nowhere else in all Tanach are we com-
manded to love our neighbor. And only in
one other place (Deut. 10:19) are we com-
manded to love the stranger. (The Sages
famously said that the Torah commands us
36 times to love the stranger, but that is not
quite accurate. Thirty-four of those com-

mands have to do with not oppressing or
afflicting the stranger and making sure that
he or she has the same legal rights as the
native born. These are commands of justice
rather than love).
And why does the command to love your
neighbor as yourself appear in a chapter con-
taining such laws as, “Do not mate different
kinds of animals. Do not plant your field
with two kinds of seed. Do not wear clothing
woven of two kinds of material?” These are
chukim, decrees, usually thought of as com-
mands that have no reason, at any rate none
that we can understand. What have they to
do with the self-evidently moral commands
of the love of neighbor and stranger? Is the
chapter simply an assemblage of disconnect-
ed commands, or is there a single unifying
strand to it?
The answer goes deep. Almost every
ethical system ever devised has sought to
reduce the moral life to a single principle or
perspective. Some connect it to reason, oth-
ers to emotion, yet others to consequences:
Do whatever creates the greatest happiness
for the greatest number. Judaism is different.

Rabbi Lord
Jonathan
Sacks

38 | APRIL 28 • 2022

A WORD OF TORAH

Made with Love

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